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How to Clarify Brown Sugar
boil and rise to the top of the pan, throw in a little of the water to prevent the sugar running over.
You must let the sugar rise three times before commencing to skim it, each time cooling the mixture by the cold water just spoken of. The fourth time the sugar rises, skim it completely, and drop the cold water gently in as occasion may require, continuing to take the scum* off (which is rather white), until no more comes upon the surface. The sugar must now be strained through a fine sieve-one made of cloth, or a flannel bag will do.
In order to make clarified sugar extra white, you must be careful to get the very best loaf-sugar. Break it up, as in the previous case, and add water in about the same proportion, viz., a pint to every two pounds, or two pounds and a half. Beat up well a couple of eggs (supposing ten pounds of engar are being clarified) and add some ivoryblack, about a pound; see that the ivory black is thoroughly mixed into the water. The mixture should now be made as hot as possible, but without being allowed to boil. If symptoms of boiling and rising appear, instantly add a drop of cold water. Having thoroughly melted the mixture, strain as before through a fine cloth, or flannel strainer. The syrup need not be heated any more, but it will have to be strained three or four times, until it is extra fine and clear. (See "How to make Syrups.") On Clarifying Brown or Moist Sugar.
Here, again, take care the pan is large enough to allow the syrup to rise without immediately boiling over.
Brown sugar does not require so much water as loaf. A quart will be sufficient for five or six pounds of moist * The scum need not be thrown away; after a quantity is collected. it can be clarified. sugar. Thoroughly beat up one egg (the yolk had better be omitted, as it will only rise with the scum, and be skimmed off), and, as must be observed in the case of loaf-sugar, mix the egg in with the water before pouring it on the sugar. Now, get about one pound of charcoal (that made out of hedge wood, or small branches, is the best); beat it very fine, and stir it into the sugar. As it boils, skim it, as in the previous case, and add cold water to prevent it running over. Now commence straining it through a pocket-shaped strainer of cloth. First of all it is quite black, but the straining must be proceeded with until the mixture is quite clear. If you pour some of the syrup into a glass, you will soon see if it is perfectly clear and fine, if it is not, you must keep on straining.
This is a refiner's procedure rather than a cook's: it turns raw loaf or moist sugar into the clear, colourless syrup that cordials and liqueurs are built on. Two of its three clarifying agents have no place in a modern kitchen, so the page is worth reading for what it tells you about nineteenth-century sugar, not for following.
- Why not to make itThe method calls for a pound of ivory black and a pound of homemade wood charcoal to be stirred directly into hot syrup. Ivory black sold today is an artists' pigment made from calcined bone, supplied with no food-grade guarantee and no assurance about what else it contains; charcoal beaten from hedge wood or branches is equally unspecified, and wood ash and combustion residues come with it. Neither belongs in something you will drink.
- The bone-char pointBone char is still used in cane sugar refining, which is why some vegans avoid white sugar. But that is a controlled industrial column process with the char fully removed and the product tested, not a pound of pigment stirred into a pan and strained through flannel until the syrup stops running black.
- What the eggs are doingThe egg white is the one sound part of the technique: albumen coagulates as the syrup heats and traps suspended matter, carrying it to the surface as scum. This is the same principle as clearing a consommé with egg white, and it is why the recipe tells you to omit the yolk, whose fat and colour are only a nuisance.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar came as a hard cone that had to be broken up and, for fine work, pounded — hence "break it up, as in the previous case." It was still faintly off-white and carried molasses and mineral residue, which is the whole reason this chapter exists. Modern granulated and caster sugar are already 99.9 percent sucrose and dissolve to a clear syrup with no clarification at all.
- Moist sugar"Brown or moist" sugar meant unrefined or partly refined sugar still wet with molasses, not the soft light-brown sugar of today, which is refined white sugar with molasses added back.
- The proportionsFor loaf sugar, a pint of water to two or two and a half pounds; for moist sugar, a quart to five or six pounds. Both come out somewhere around 2:1 sugar to water by weight — thicker than the 1:1 simple syrup often used today — worth bearing in mind when reading the syrup and cordial recipes this page cross-refers to.
- StrainingThe "pocket-shaped strainer of cloth" is essentially a jelly bag: a long conical flannel or twill sleeve hung from a frame, so the syrup passes slowly through a deep bed of cloth. The glass test at the end — pour a little off and look through it — is the recipe's own way of judging clarity by eye.
- If you want clear syrupUse a current simple syrup recipe. Nothing in this page needs to be reproduced to get a colourless, brilliant syrup from modern sugar.
Sugar reached the nineteenth-century household in a state modern cooks never see: a hard cone of loaf sugar to be nipped apart with iron sugar shears, or a damp, molasses-smelling brown mass sold loose from the grocer's barrel. The confectioner's toolkit for clarifying it — egg white to raise a scum, animal or vegetable charcoal to strip colour, repeated straining through flannel — was simply the refinery's toolkit at domestic scale. Bone char, generally traced to the early 1800s as a decolourising agent in European sugar houses, is the ancestor of the process still used on much cane sugar today. Where cordials and liqueurs are concerned the stakes are plain: they are mostly spirit, sugar and flavouring, and any tint or cloud in the syrup shows through the finished bottle, where a brilliant ruby or a clear green was half the selling point. By the end of the century, cheap centrifugal-refined granulated sugar had made the whole operation unnecessary.