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Caramel for Soups and Sauces
Stir a cup of granulated sugar over the fire in a baking-pan that is not valued for its brightness, until it is very near burning. While smoking, pour into it a cup of cold water and stir for five minutes, or until the sugar is melted. When cool, cork in a bottle and keep in a cool, dark place for browning consommé, sauces, gravies and bouillon.
This is blackjack — burnt-sugar colouring, the professional kitchen's way of darkening a pale consommé or gravy without adding sweetness. It is easy, but the moment the water goes in is the one to respect.
- The hinge: stand back when the water goes inSugar at the smoking point is around 350-390F, and cold water hitting it will erupt in steam and spatter molten sugar. Use a long-handled pan, hold the water at arm's length, add it in a slow stream with your face and forearms clear, and expect the mass to seize into a hard lump before it redissolves.
- "Very near burning" means nearly blackFor colouring rather than flavour, the sugar must go well past the amber of a dessert caramel to a dark mahogany-to-black that smokes and smells acrid. Stopped at amber it will sweeten the soup and barely tint it. Cook it too far past and it turns bitter enough to taste in the finished dish.
- Use a saucepan, not a baking-panThe instruction to use a pan "not valued for its brightness" probably reflects a kitchen of tin-lined and enamelled ware that scorches permanently, though the recipe does not say so. A heavy stainless or tinned-copper saucepan works better than a sheet pan, gives you depth for the spatter, and cleans up by simmering with water.
- The five minutes of stirringThat time is for dissolving the hardened sugar back into the water over low heat, not for further cooking. Keep the pan on gentle heat and stir until the syrup is uniform and pourable, roughly the thickness of thin molasses.
- Yield and dosageA cup of sugar and a cup of water give roughly a cup or so of dark syrup. A teaspoon will visibly deepen a quart of stock; add it drop by drop at the end of cooking and judge by eye, since the colour is much stronger than it looks in the bottle.
- StorageThe syrup is a strong sugar solution and keeps for months in a corked or screw-top bottle in a cool dark cupboard. If it crystallises at the neck, warm the bottle in hot water. Refrigeration is unnecessary and makes it thick and slow to pour.
- Modern substituteCommercial gravy browning and the "caramel colour" sold for baking do the same job, though industrial caramel colours are not always simply burnt sugar. Homemade blackjack has nothing in it but sugar and water.
Burnt-sugar colouring belongs to the professional stockpot tradition that American household books absorbed from French cookery in the late nineteenth century. A consomm"e was judged first on clarity and second on colour, and a pale one -- from young veal bones, or from carcasses that had not been browned properly -- was considered a fault; caramel corrected it without sweetening, since heavily burnt sugar has lost most of its sweetening power. The Butterick book was published by the pattern company for the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its dress patterns. The same preparation, under the names blackjack, gravy browning or caramel colour, went on to darken commercial soups, sauces and soft drinks well into the industrial era.