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Coloring for Stock

A method to color stock using flour, butter, bread, sugar, water, and optional spinach.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Coloring for Stock

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Combine flour and butter in equal parts in a frying pan and brown them while stirring constantly to prevent burning.

  2. Add the browned mixture to the soup.

Toast the bread

  1. Toast a slice of bread until very brown, then simmer it in the soup for 10 minutes to darken the color.

Make the caramel

  1. Melt sugar with water in a frying pan and stir until dark brown.

  2. Add boiling water to the caramel, stir for 10 minutes, then cool and bottle for use.

Make the spinach coloring

  1. Pound uncooked spinach with a few drops of water.

  2. Squeeze the spinach juice through a cloth and heat until curdy.

  3. Strain the curd through a sieve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Flour + spinachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Bread + spinachtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Browns with butter to form a dark roux that thickens and colors the stock.
Butter
Fat that is browned with the flour, adding color and a toasty flavor.
Sugar
Caramelizes when melted and browned, producing a dark brown coloring.
Bread
Toasted until very brown, then simmered to release color into the soup.
Spinach
Pounded and strained to yield green juice and curd used as a natural coloring.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and butter while browning. Flour and butter can scorch quickly over direct heat. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly, so the mixture browns to a uniform color rather than burning and turning bitter.

Swap the spinach

The recipe marks spinach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, bread, sugar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, bread, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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