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Green
(Coloring for Desserts.) Red coloring may be made with cranberries, and yellow, with saffron. Clean and scald and drain and pound a quart of spinach. Press through a sieve, add 1/4 as much sugar, and boil it with the juice, 1/2 an hour.
A three-in-one note on vegetable dyes for sweets: cranberry for red, saffron for yellow, and a boiled spinach syrup for green. The spinach method is the only one given in full, and it is the one that needs the most translation.
- The hinge: heat kills the greenChlorophyll turns from bright green to olive-brown when held hot and acidic, and half an hour of boiling will do exactly that. Confectioners' manuals describe a different method: press the juice, warm it only until the green solids curdle out, then skim them off and stir them cold into icing or cream. If you want a strong green from spinach, work fast and keep the heat low and brief.
- A quart of spinachA dry quart of raw leaves, loosely packed, is only a few ounces. Scalded and pounded it collapses to very little, so expect a few tablespoons of coloring from the whole quart.
- "1/4 as much sugar"Genuinely ambiguous. It most likely means a quarter the volume of the pressed pulp and juice, which gives a thin syrup rather than a preserve; it is not a quarter the weight of the original raw leaves.
- Pound and pressA mortar and a hair sieve are what the writer had. A blender and a fine mesh strainer lined with muslin do the same job faster, and squeezing the cloth gets far more juice than pressing with a spoon.
- Cranberry redCook the berries with a splash of water until they burst, then strain. The color is pink to rose rather than true red, and it is acidic enough to shift toward blue-pink in an alkaline batter raised with baking soda.
- Saffron yellowSteep a small pinch of threads in a tablespoon of hot water or milk for twenty minutes. Saffron carries a distinct flavor as well as color, which is fine in cakes and custards and intrusive in a delicate cream.
- Flavor and quantityBoiled spinach syrup tastes of spinach. Use it a teaspoon at a time in something assertive, such as a pistachio or almond cream, and stop before the vegetal note shows. Modern spinach powder or matcha gives similar color with less liquid.
- YieldNone is stated. A quart of leaves handled this way makes only a small quantity of colored syrup.
Before synthetic dyes were common in domestic kitchens, cooks colored their sweets from the garden and the spice box, and the trio here is the standard one: spinach for green, cranberry or cochineal for red, saffron for yellow. Spinach green was long a professional confectioner's staple, made by pressing juice from the raw leaves and gently heating it so the green matter coagulated and could be lifted off as a paste. The recipe also sits at the edge of a change. Commercial coal-tar colors were spreading fast, and complaints about what was being added to shop-bought candy and jelly were loud enough that food coloring became one of the concerns behind pure food legislation.