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Coloring for Soups
To color brown, use browned flour or a little burnt sugar. Spinach leaves give a fine green color. Pound the leaves, tie them in a cloth, squeeze out all the juice and add this to the soup five minutes before serving. This is also used to
A short entry on three classic colorings rather than a dish in itself; the text breaks off mid-sentence, so the closing note on other uses is lost. All three still work, and the spinach green in particular is worth knowing.
- Heat is the enemy of the greenSpinach juice sets and turns a dull olive if it boils. Adding it five minutes before serving, off a hard boil, is the whole trick; the soup should be hot but barely trembling.
- Making the spinach greenA handful of raw leaves in a blender or food processor with a splash of water gives much the same result as pounding in a mortar. Wring it through a doubled square of muslin or a fine sieve; a few ounces of leaves will give only a small quantity of very green juice, enough to tint a modest pot of soup.
- The classic version of the same thingFrench kitchens took this further and heated the juice gently until the green protein coagulated, then strained off the solid vert d'épinards and stirred that paste into sauces. It keeps a few days refrigerated where the raw juice does not.
- Browned flourSpread plain flour in a dry pan or a shallow tray and toast it, stirring, until it is the color of a hazelnut shell. It thickens far less than raw flour, so if you are also using it to bind, allow about twice as much.
- Burnt sugarThis is caramel taken past sweetness: sugar melted and cooked until it smokes faintly and turns near-black, then let down with a little hot water and cooled. A teaspoon deepens a whole pot; more will make the soup bitter. Stand back when the water goes in, as it spits.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. Color in small additions, stirring and judging between each, since all three are far easier to add than to take out.
- Modern substitutesBottled gravy browning is largely caramel-based and does much the same job as burnt sugar. Commercial food coloring is unlikely to give the same effect in a hot savory liquid, and tends to read as artificial in a clear broth.
Coloring was a standard part of nineteenth-century soup-making because appearance was held to be part of the cook's craft: a consommé was meant to be amber, a spring soup green, a brown soup genuinely brown rather than gray. The Butterick Cook Book of 1911 came out of a pattern and fashion publisher. All three methods here are older than the book. Burnt sugar coloring appears in both English and French cookery well before 1911, and survives in commercial gravy browning; spinach green, pounded and pressed from raw leaves, appears in English and French manuals in the eighteenth century, used for coloring sauces, butters and green pea soups when the peas themselves had faded in the pot. Browned flour did double duty as thickener and tint, and some nineteenth-century books advise keeping a jar of it ready-toasted.