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Roux, Browning, and Glaze (For Sauces)
Browning for Sauces.
Put a few lumps of sugar in a stewpan and place it on the fire till melted and of a dark colour; then take it off the fire and add a cupful of broth or water to it; or, to save the stewpan, you may burn the sugar in a large iron spoon. A very little of this will colour sauce, without spoiling its flavour. Browning for Soups.
The gravy under the dripping in drip - pan is most valuable for many things, being in fact the essence of the meat. It is the best thing for browning, i.e., colouring soups, &c. Another browning is made as follows: Slice an onion and put it into a pot with 2 ozs.
This is a colouring agent rather than a dish: burnt sugar caramel for tinting pale sauces and soups a deeper brown. The page breaks off mid-sentence in the original, so the third method is incomplete.
- The hinge: how dark is darkMelt the sugar dry over moderate heat and take it to a deep mahogany, just at the point where it smells nutty and faintly bitter — roughly 350-360F. Stopping short gives sweetness and no colour; going past it gives acrid black that will taint the sauce it is meant to tint.
- Adding the liquidMolten sugar is far hotter than boiling water, and a cupful of broth poured in will erupt in steam and spit caramel. Take the pan well off the heat, stand back, and add the liquid in a thin stream; the caramel will seize into a lump and then redissolve as you reheat it gently.
- The iron spoonBurning the sugar in a large iron spoon was a way to spare a good stewpan from a coating of set caramel. A heavy stainless or cast-iron pan works as well, and hardened caramel dissolves out with a soak in boiling water rather than scraping.
- Quantity and strengthThe recipe specifies only "a few lumps of sugar" to a cupful of broth or water, so no strength can be calculated from it. Lady Clark's point that "a very little" colours without spoiling the flavour is the whole test: if you can taste it, you have used too much.
- Keeping itNo storage is mentioned, but a caramel syrup made with water rather than broth keeps for months in a corked bottle in the cupboard. Made with broth it is a perishable stock and belongs in the fridge for a few days only.
- The dripping-pan gravyThe dark juices that settle beneath the fat in a roasting tin are meat glaze in all but name, and they are indeed the best browning for soup. Skim off the fat, and treat what remains as you would any meat stock — chill it promptly and use it within two or three days, or reduce it hard to a glaze and freeze it.
- The truncated third methodThe recipe ends at "2 ozs." with no ingredient named. In comparable Victorian browning recipes the onion is fried slowly in about 2 oz of butter or dripping until very dark, then moistened and strained; treat the missing quantity as unknown rather than guessing at it.
- Modern equivalentsBottled gravy browning is the same thing, caramel and salt in water. A teaspoon of dark soy or a spoon of reduced meat glaze does the job with more to say for itself flavour-wise.
Colouring was a serious concern in a nineteenth-century kitchen because a great many sauces were built on veal stock and flour and came out obstinately grey. Cooks kept a bottle of "browning" or "caramel" to hand, and commercial versions — Parisian essence, browning for gravies — were sold by grocers. Lady Clark of Tillypronie collected her notes over decades from professional cooks, family, and friends in Britain and France, and this page has the character of working shorthand rather than a finished recipe: three methods jotted one after another, the last left unfinished. Lady Clark died in 1897, and the collection was edited and published posthumously in 1909. The preference for the dark gravy under the dripping over any manufactured colouring is characteristic of the book and of the great-house kitchens it draws on, where a roast was produced daily and its residue was never thrown away.