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Caramel
1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon water 1 cup boiling water Melt the sugar with the tablespoon of water over the fire and stir until it becomes a dark brown; add the boiling water; boin for one minute; bottle and use to color sauces, soups, custards, etc. • •
This is browning liquid, not a dessert caramel — the sugar is deliberately taken past sweetness to bitterness so that a few drops will darken a gravy or a consommé without changing its flavor.
- Take it further than feels rightThe hinge of the recipe is color, not taste. Stop at amber and the syrup will sweeten whatever it touches; the recipe's "dark brown" carries it past sweetness toward bitterness, so that a few drops give depth of color without noticeably sweetening the dish.
- The tablespoon of waterIt only wets the sugar so it melts evenly at the start and boils off within the first minute. A heavy saucepan matters more than the water — thin pans scorch the sugar in patches before the rest has melted.
- StirringStirring is safe here because the syrup is being burned rather than crystallized into candy, but drag any grains from the sides back into the melt so they do not sit and blacken separately.
- Adding the boiling waterThis is the dangerous moment. Molten sugar sits well above 300F and a cup of water hitting it will erupt in steam and spitting syrup. Pour it down the side of the pan, keep your hand and face back, and expect some of the sugar to harden before it redissolves over heat.
- "Boin for one minute"A typesetter's error for boil. One minute of simmering is enough to dissolve the seized sugar back into a smooth, pourable syrup.
- Yield and useRoughly a cup or more of thin dark syrup. Use it a half-teaspoon at a time, stirred into a soup, gravy or brown sauce off the heat, and judge by eye.
- Bottling and keepingFill a clean bottle while the syrup is still hot and cap it once cool. The sugar concentration helps it keep for a good while in a cool cupboard, though it can eventually mold and is worth checking; if it thickens, warm the bottle in hot water before pouring.
Burnt-sugar coloring was standard equipment in professional and ambitious domestic kitchens well before Mrs. Fryer's day, and nineteenth-century manuals often carry a version of it under names like caramel, browning, or blackjack. Before commercial gravy browning came in bottles, a cook who wanted a rich mahogany sauce or a properly dark consommé either browned enough flour and bones to get there honestly or reached for a bottle of this. Poultry and game were among the usual reasons to want it: pale birds and their pale pan juices, since a roast fowl's gravy tends to come out the color of weak tea. The same principle survives industrially as caramel color, still one of the most widely used food colorants in the world.