No. 37

Vegetable Colors

Couleurs Vegetales

Spinach green is frequently used for coloring purees, soups, butters, sauces and sugar. It is the healthiest coloring matter, and if possible use no other. Spinach green is prepared with very green, fresh spinach, well washed, pounded in a mortar and when well reduced to a paste, extract all the juice through a coarse cloth, and place this in an untinned copper sugar pan, and heat it till it decomposes, then pour it over a fine sieve so the pulp or coloring matter remains on top; the strained liquid is colorless and useless. For yellow, use a decoction of saffron or dandelion flowers; for red, employed for coloring bisques, orchanet dissolved in butter is used. The roucou annotto also gives a yellowish red and is much used. Vegetable colors, and clarified carmine, Breton Landrin, are those mostly employed. Breton Landrin green is beautiful for coloring sugar cooked to crack, as it is not detrimental to its transparency.

Colorings: Carmine and Cochineal Red.—Take two ounces of No. 42 carmine, broken in pieces; wet with a little cold water; crush in a small mortar and dilute with a little twenty-five degree syrup. Besides this, boil two quarts of syrup also to twenty-five degrees, mix in the carmine, boil up once, strain through a napkin and leave to cool, then add a few coffeespoonfuls of liquid ammonia and pour into bottles.

For Red Cochineal.—Finely pound five ounces of fine cochineal; place it in a copper pan and moisten with a quart of water, adding three ounces of cream of tartar, three ounces of alum and six ounces of sugar; set the pan on the fire and let the liquid reduce to half; now put in two gills of spirit of wine; boil up once, strain throngh a napkin and pour into bottles.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's page is really four procedures at once: a spinach green, a survey of the dyestuffs a nineteenth-century pastry kitchen kept on the shelf, and two liquid colorings built on carmine and cochineal. Several of the steps depend on materials and practices that have no place in a modern kitchen, so the notes below are for reading the text rather than following it.

The untinned copper is the problemBare copper was used in this period to green vegetable matter: copper ions form stable green complexes with chlorophyll, which is also the reaction that puts copper into the food. Ranhofer does not say why he calls for an untinned pan, but the practice was already being questioned by food chemists in his lifetime, and the green owes as much to the metal as to the spinach.
Liquid ammoniaThe few coffeespoonfuls of ammonia added to the carmine syrup keep the pigment in solution and set its shade; carminic acid moves from orange-red in acid towards red and then purple as alkalinity rises. Household or laboratory ammonia is not a food ingredient, and there is no domestic way to judge either its purity or the amount left in the bottle.
Alum and spirit of wineThree ounces of alum in a quart is a mordant dose, well beyond any culinary use of alum, and it stays in the finished bottle. The two gills of spirit of wine — a gill is half a cup, so about a cup of high-proof neutral alcohol — acts as the preservative for a colouring meant to keep for months on a shelf.
Orchanet, roucou and Breton LandrinOrchanet is alkanet root (Alkanna tinctoria), whose red dye is fat-soluble, hence dissolving it in butter; it contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids and is no longer regarded as a food colour. Roucou is annatto, still in use. Breton Landrin appears to be a proprietary name for prepared colourings bought in by confectioners; nothing more about the firm can be established from the text. Copper- and arsenic-based greens were a known scandal of the confectionery trade in this period, which is part of why trade names mattered.
Cochineal and carmineThese two are the survivors. Cochineal is the dried body of a scale insect farmed on prickly pear; carmine is its aluminium lake, the pigment precipitated out and dried. Both remain permitted food colours today, sold ready-made, and no one now extracts them at home.
Twenty-five degree syrupDegrees on a saccharometer, almost certainly the Baumé scale, not temperature. Twenty-five Baumé is a syrup of roughly equal weights of sugar and water, of the sort a pastry kitchen would keep made up in quantity.
Sugar cooked to crackCrack is the sugar stage at roughly 290-310F, used for clear pulled and blown sugar work; Ranhofer's point is that a colouring which clouds the sugar ruins the transparency the craft depends on.
What to use insteadFor a green purée or butter, blanched spinach or parsley pounded and pressed gives colour without any pan chemistry; for reds and yellows, current commercial food colourings are the sensible route. Use a modern recipe rather than adapting this one.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summary of thirty-odd years running the kitchen at Delmonico's, and this entry sits in his Elementary Methods among the colorings and standing preparations a large brigade made once and drew on all week. Coloured food was not a garnish question but a structural part of grande cuisine: bisques were expected to be pink, chaud-froids and glazed sugar work were built around fixed shades, and a kitchen of this size kept its dyes bottled alongside its glazes. Ranhofer's opening line — that spinach green is the healthiest coloring matter and should be used in preference to any other where possible — belongs to a moment when the trade knew that many of the brilliant confectioners' greens and yellows on sale were built on copper and arsenic compounds. That he then reaches for an untinned copper pan to fix his spinach shows how far the practice of the period ran ahead of, or behind, its own understanding.