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Home › Food Facts You Should Know › Viscogen or Sucrate of Lime
Viscogen or Sucrate of Lime
5 cups water
½ cup sugar
3/10 cup milk of lime
Mix thoroughly, put into jars or bottles and allow to stand 24 hours before using. This will keep indefinitely and is very useful to have on hand when whipped cream is served often or in the making of ice-creams.
HOW TO THICKEN WITH FLOUR OR CORN-STARCH This is one of the most important things for a good cook to know. If the cook can tell how much flour or corn-starch to use to make sauces or pastes of any desired thickness and knows how to mix and cook these sauces and pastes to make them smooth, velvety and fine in flavor, he or she has learned one of the hardest cooking lessons and is in possession of information that will help in making a great variety of dishes.
With each cup of liquid:
½ teaspoon corn-starch
½ tablespoon flour or
{ may be used in making thin
Makes a very thin sauce, which cream soups.
1 tablespoon flour or
Makes a thin sauce, which may
1 teaspoon corn-starch be used in making cream soups of average thickness.
Makes a medium sauce, which may be used for creamed meats
2 tablespoons flour or or vegetables, scalloped dishes,
2 teaspoons corn-starch gravies or other sauces where a medium thickness is desired. It has about the thickness of heavy cream.
Makes a thick sauce, which may be used for creamed meats or vegetables, scalloped dishes,
3 tablespoons flour or gravies or sauces where a thick
1 tablespoon corn-starch sauce is desired. A sauce containing this amount of flour has considerable body and spreads rather than runs.
Makes a paste when cold. This sauce may be used in making
5 tablespoons flour or mixtures for croquettes, souf- 5 teaspoons corn-starch flés, blanc-manges and similar puddings.
If a sauce is too thick, it can be thinned without trouble by adding more liquid. If a sauce is too thin it must be thickened by adding more of the thickening agent and by recooking it. A starchy sauce or a cream soup is always thinner when hot than when cold. Even the amount of cooling which occurs in transferring a starchy sauce, gravy or soup from the cooking utensil to the serving dish perceptibly thickens it. This must be taken into account in making creamed dishes of various kinds. When the Liquid Used Is Milk, use a little more milk or a little less starch than for a water sauce, because milk already contains about 12 per cent. solids.
When the Liquid Used Is Acid, as vinegar, a fruit-juice or tomatoes, the hot acid acts on the starch and gradually changes it, just as dry heat does, to dextrin. Dextrin has not the thickening power of starch. Therefore, when an acid liquid is to be thickened, more of the thickening agent may be needed, and the time for cooking may be shortened. No statement can be made as to exact differences because acids differ greatly in strength. When the Flour Is Browned, the dry heat changes part of the starch to dextrin and the flour may lose a considerable part of its thickening power. Either more browned flour must be used than uncooked flour or browned flour may be used for color and uncooked flour for thickening.
Corn-starch Requires Longer Cooking Than Flour, as a quickly cooked corn-starch mixture always has a raw taste.
The page runs two unrelated things together: a formula for viscogen, a lime-and-sugar cream thickener that has no place in a modern kitchen, and a genuinely useful reference table for thickening with flour or corn-starch. The notes below separate them.
- Milk of lime is the problemMilk of lime is a suspension of calcium hydroxide in water — a strong alkali with a pH near 12.4, the same class of caustic as the lye the book's own warning mentions. Sugar does convert part of it into soluble calcium sucrate, but the recipe specifies no strength for the lime, no upper limit on residual free alkali, and no test for either.
- The dose is unmeasurable"3/10 cup milk of lime" describes a volume of an unstandardised slurry, not a quantity of calcium hydroxide. Depending on how much lime was slaked into the water, the same measure could deliver a few hundred milligrams or several grams of caustic per batch. There is no way to reconstruct the intended concentration from the text.
- Period lime was not food gradeCommercial burnt lime of the era was not made to any food specification and could carry heavy-metal or other contamination from the limestone and the kiln fuel. Food-grade calcium hydroxide is a defined modern specification and is not what a household would have slaked at home.
- There is nothing to fixViscogen existed to make thin, unstandardised dairy cream whip. Cream sold as heavy cream now carries at least 36 per cent butterfat (plain whipping cream may be nearer 30) and whips on its own; well-chilled bowl, beaters and cream do the rest. If a recipe of this period calls for viscogen, ignore it.
- The thickening table still worksThe flour and corn-starch ratios are sound and match current practice: 1 tablespoon flour per cup of liquid for a thin sauce, 2 for a medium (bechamel weight), 3 for thick, 5 for a croquette or souffle base. Corn-starch runs at roughly a third the quantity of flour.
- "Longer cooking" for corn-starchCorn-starch thickens fast and then needs another minute or two at a bare simmer to lose its raw, chalky taste, which is the point the page is making.
- Acid and browned flourBoth cautions hold. Acid hydrolyses starch, so tomato or vinegar sauces need more thickener and less simmering; browned flour has lost thickening power to dextrinisation, so noticeably more of it is needed — the page itself declines to put a figure on it.
- Blanc-mangeBlanc-mange, one of the uses listed for the heaviest ratio, is a moulded milk pudding set here with corn-starch. It sets as it cools, so judge the consistency cold, not hot — as the page itself notes.
Viscogen belongs to the period between the rise of the commercial dairy and the arrival of enforced compositional standards. Cream reached households at whatever fat content the separator and the middleman had left it, and thin cream will not hold air; sucrate of lime — sugar dissolved with milk of lime — raised the viscosity enough that it would. Lime-and-sugar reactions were already familiar from beet-sugar refining, in which lime is used to precipitate impurities from the juice. Its appearance in a household manual of this kind shows how much of the standardising work later done by the dairy and by regulation was once expected of the cook. The same page's patient table of thickening ratios makes the point differently: this was a book teaching principles to cooks who could not rely on any ingredient arriving in a predictable state.