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Miss Parloa
Melt sugar as for Caramel Custard, add water, and boil ten minutes; cool before serving.
What survives here is a fragment: a caramel syrup, cross-referenced to the book's Caramel Custard for the sugar-melting method, with a stray "2 cups milk" that belongs to the neighbouring recipe rather than to this one. Treated as a syrup, it works, but you have to supply the proportions.
- The missing quantitiesNo amount of sugar or water is given on this page. A workable reconstruction is 1 cup granulated sugar melted dry, then 1 cup boiling water added, though the book's own proportion is not recoverable from what survives here. The "2 cups milk" looks like a line orphaned from the recipe printed above or below.
- "Melt sugar as for Caramel Custard"The cross-referenced recipe is not on this page, but the instruction almost certainly means dry caramel: sugar alone in a heavy pan over moderate heat until it liquefies and darkens. No water at this stage. Take it off just short of the shade you want, since it keeps darkening in the hot pan.
- Add the water off the heatMelted sugar sits well above the boiling point of water. Adding cold water sends up a violent burst of steam and spatter and can seize the caramel into a solid lump. Use boiling or very hot water, pour it down the side of the pan, stand back, and return to the heat to redissolve any hardened sugar.
- The ten minutesSince no quantities are given, the finished consistency is guesswork; ten minutes' boiling will reduce a small quantity of syrup considerably, and a shorter boil of three or four minutes gives something more pourable.
- Cool before servingHot sugar syrup is deceptively slow to cool and clings to the skin. It also thickens noticeably as it drops to room temperature, so judge the final texture cold, not in the pan.
- What to do with itA cup of sugar and a cup of water yields roughly a cup of syrup. It keeps in a covered jar in the refrigerator and is used to flavour and colour custards, blancmanges, ice creams and frostings.
Maria Parloa (1843-1909) ran a cooking school in Boston from the late 1870s and was among the first instructors at the Boston Cooking School, the institution Fannie Farmer would later direct; her Miss Parloa's New Cook Book was among the better-selling American domestic manuals of its day. Caramel of this sort -- sugar burnt dry, then dissolved in water and boiled down -- was a common nineteenth-century way to get both a brown colour and a faintly bitter depth into pale desserts, at a time when bottled flavouring extracts were costly and adulteration was a recognised complaint. The fragmentary state of the text here shows how a cross-referenced recipe can survive as method without its proportions.