No. 18

To Prepare Liquid Caramel

Caramel Liquide

Liquid caramel is most necessary; it is used for coloring broths, gravies and even sauces, when their tints are found to be too light, still caramel should be used with discretion, for it is apt to give a bitter taste to the colored liquids into which it is added. Put a few spoonfuls of powdered sugar into a copper pan, stir it over a slow fire, then remove it on to a slower one to let cook until it becomes quite brown, and the smoke arising from it is whitish, this is a sign that it is thoroughly done. Take the pan from off the fire, moisten the sugar proportionately with hot water, and allow the liquid to boil while stirring, and cook till the consistence of a light syrup is obtained. Caramel should be kept in a small, well-closed bottle, having a cork perforated lengthwise, so that when the bottle is turned over, the liquid can drop out slowly without it being necessary to uncork it.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is gravy browning: burnt sugar syrup kept on hand to darken pale stocks and sauces. It takes ten minutes and keeps for months, and the only difficult part is judging when to stop.

Quantity and yield"A few spoonfuls" is deliberately vague; 1 cup (about 200 g) of sugar with roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup hot water gives a useful bottleful. Since the finished product is dosed a few drops at a time, one batch will last a long time.
The signal to stopThe hinge of the recipe is the color and the smoke. Ranhofer wants the sugar taken past golden to a deep brown, at which point faint whitish smoke rises. He gives no temperature; if you do measure, this stage falls somewhere in the region of 350-390F, but the color and smoke are the instructions he actually gives. Stop short of that and the caramel colors weakly; go past it and the bitterness he warns about overwhelms whatever you add it to.
PanA copper pan was standard in a professional batterie; a heavy stainless or tin-lined pan works identically. Avoid nonstick, which is not rated for these temperatures, and avoid thin aluminum, which scorches in patches.
Adding the waterMolten sugar at this stage meets water with a violent surge of steam. Take the pan off the heat, use hot water rather than cold, add it in stages down the side of the pan, and keep your hand and face clear. It will seize into a hard mass at first and then dissolve as you return it to the heat and stir.
"Consistence of a light syrup"Thin enough to drip freely from a cold spoon — about the body of maple syrup. If it sets too thick in the bottle, thin it with a spoonful of boiling water and reheat briefly.
Bottle and corkThe perforated cork is a period dropper. Any small bottle with a dropper or a narrow pour spout does the same job. Store at room temperature; the sugar concentration keeps it for a long time, though a cloudy or fermenting bottle should be discarded.
Using itA few drops at a time, stirred in and judged against the light. It contributes color and a trace of bitterness but no sweetness worth counting. Commercial gravy brownings such as Kitchen Bouquet are the same idea with seasonings added.

A Little History

Caramel coloring was a working necessity in nineteenth-century professional kitchens, where a consomm ed as much on its depth of color as its flavor, and where stocks made from pale veal bones and light roux could not be relied on to arrive at the right shade. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, placed this among the "Elementary Methods" of The Epicurean (1894) \a ept in reserve rather than dishes in themselves. His warning to use it with discretion is the point: burnt sugar was the fastest way to fake a long-simmered brown sauce, and the bitter edge it left was the usual tell. The same substance, industrially produced, is now among the most widely used food colorings in the world, coloring cola, soy sauce, whisky and packaged gravies.