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Rose Coloring
Mix together one-fourth ounce each of powdered alum and cream tartar, one ounce powdered cochineal, four ounces loaf-sugar, and
This is a preparation for a liquid red food coloring, not a frosting itself; period cook books kept such colorings among the frosting directions because tinted icing was the main use. The text as printed here breaks off mid-sentence, so treat it as a formula to understand rather than one to follow step by step.
- The recipe is incompleteThe entry ends at "and," and what followed is lost; in comparable preparations the remaining ingredient is water, boiled with the rest and then strained, but no quantity can be recovered here. Without it the concentration is guesswork, so measure any coloring you make by eye against a test batch of icing.
- CochinealPowdered cochineal is the dried body of the scale insect Dactylopius coccus, the source of the modern colorant carmine or E120. It is still sold, usually as carmine powder or liquid, but it is not vegan and is a recognized allergen for a small number of people.
- Alum and cream of tartarThese are not flavorings. The alum acts as a mordant and the acid of the cream of tartar shifts cochineal from purplish-crimson toward a clearer scarlet. A quarter ounce of each is roughly two teaspoons, depending on how finely ground it is; in the finished coloring, used by the drop, the amount reaching any one serving is trivial.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken or grated as needed. Four ounces of ordinary granulated sugar, by weight rather than volume, is the equivalent; it is there to body the syrup and help it keep.
- StrainingThe colour extracts into the liquid but the ground insect residue does not dissolve. Strain through fine muslin or a coffee filter, or the icing will carry visible dark specks.
- StrengthThis is meant as a concentrate, though without the missing quantity of water its strength cannot be pinned down. Add it a drop at a time at the very end, since the added liquid loosens a stiff royal or boiled icing.
- KeepingA dilute sugar syrup can mold. Bottle it, refrigerate it, and discard it at the first sign of cloudiness or film.
Cochineal reached European kitchens from Spanish America in the sixteenth century and for three hundred years was the finest red available to dyers, painters, and confectioners alike. Recipes like this one, with alum and an acid to fix and brighten the shade, were borrowed more or less directly from the dyer's trade, and they appear in American household books right through the nineteenth century because a cook who wanted pink frosting had no bottled substitute to buy. The Dixie Cook Book was compiled in the 1880s, just as coal-tar aniline dyes were beginning to displace cochineal for food use — a substitution that went largely unregulated until the pure food laws of the early twentieth century, after which carmine survived as one of the few older colorants still permitted.