No. 172

Sugars of Different Colors, and Icing Sugar

Sucres de Differentes Couleurs et Sucre a glace Impalpable

For Pink, have powdered sugar from which icing sugar has been sifted, spread it on a baking-sheet covered with white paper, lay the tin on top of a very moderate fire, and pour into it sufficient carmine to give it the necessary color; mix and rub it slowly between the hands until the moisture contained in the carmine be entirely evaporated, then sift it through a sixteen mesh sieve.

For Yellow.—Prepare the sugar the same as for the pink, using Breton vegetal yellow.

For Orange.—The same as the pink, coloring with Breton vegetal orange, or yellow and red mixed to imitate orange.

Lilac and Violet.—The same as the pink, coloring it with red and ultramarine blue, or else with Breton vegetal lilac or violet.

Blue--Breton vegetal blue and ultramarine blue.

Green--Breton vegetal green, or else spinach green or watercress green.

Icing Sugar.—There are very few cities where powdered sugar is unobtainable, also icing sugar (confectionery sugar), but in case it has to be prepared at home the following remarks will be found useful. Pound some lump sugar to the finest powder, pass it through an ordinary sieve, then through an icing sieve called a drum; this latter includes two sieves, one for passing ordinary sugar and another much finer for passing the icing sugar, meaning exceedingly fine powdered sugar almost impalpable.

← No. 171 To Cook Sugar Elementary Methods No. 173 Band Tart →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Two separate operations sit under one heading: grinding your own confectioners' sugar, which is harmless, and tinting it with a list of nineteenth-century colorants, several of which have no place in food today. The colouring instructions are the reason this page carries a warning.

Ultramarine blueUltramarine is a mineral pigment (historically ground lapis lazuli, later the synthetic sodium aluminium silicate sold as laundry blue). It is not a permitted food colour in the United States or the EU, and the laundry and artists' grades sold in Ranhofer's day carried no purity standard at all. It appears here in the blue, the lilac and the violet.
"Breton vegetal" coloursThese appear to have been proprietary colouring preparations sold under the Breton name. What was in any given tin is not documented in the book, and nineteenth-century "vegetal" branding was not a guarantee of plant origin or of freedom from metallic mordants. There is no way to reproduce them and no way to verify what you would be eating.
CarmineCarmine itself survives as a permitted colour (cochineal extract, E120), but it is a known allergen for a small number of people. The recipe's instruction to drive off "the moisture contained in the carmine" implies a liquid carmine; period liquid carmines were commonly made up with ammonia or alcohol, and that base is what would be evaporating over the fire. Modern certified colours should be used instead, following a current recipe.
Spinach and watercress greenThe one colour on the list that is genuinely food. Chlorophyll pressed from blanched spinach or watercress was a common confectioner's green before synthetic dyes, and it fades badly with heat and light, which is likely part of why the trade dropped it.
Rubbing colour into warm sugarThe technique is sound and still used: the sugar sits over gentle heat only to drive off the moisture the liquid colour carries in, so the grains dry loose rather than caking. "A very moderate fire" means barely warm; sugar can scorch and yellow before it visibly melts.
Sixteen mesh sieveSixteen wires to the inch, roughly 1 mm openings. Coarse by icing-sugar standards, but this is a sanding sugar for decoration, meant to catch the light, not a powder.
The drum sieveA tamis — a shallow hoop with a mesh stretched across it. Ranhofer's has two grades, and the finer one produces what he calls "impalpable" sugar: fine enough that it feels smooth rather than gritty between the fingers.
Home-ground icing sugarCommercial confectioners' sugar usually contains a few percent cornstarch as an anti-caking agent; pounded lump sugar has none, so it cakes readily in a humid kitchen. Ranhofer's own remark that powdered and icing sugar are rarely hard to buy still holds.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summary of some thirty years running the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and its "Elementary Methods" chapter reads as a working manual for a professional pastry brigade, though the book explicitly addresses the private household as well as hotels and clubs. Coloured sanding sugars belonged to the era of the elaborate pi i ce mont e and the dressed dessert table, where sugar was tinted, moulded and spun into architecture. The colour list is a snapshot of a moment before regulation: the United States had no general control over food dyes until the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and the coal-tar and mineral pigments that reached confectioners' shelves in the 1890s ranged from harmless to actively poisonous. That Ranhofer specifies ultramarine and a brand name in the same breath as spinach juice shows how little distinction the trade drew at the time between a vegetable extract and a pigment out of a paint box.