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A Nice Article for Giving a Rich Color to Gravies

A sauce made from brown sugar, butter, water, ketchup, and wine used to give gravies a rich color.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 260 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

A Nice Article for Giving a Rich Color to Gravies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the colour

  1. Combine brown sugar and water in a dish to melt the sugar.

  2. Add butter and heat on low until the sugar froths.

  3. Stir until the mixture turns black.

  4. Pour in hot water and boil gently for 30 minutes.

Finish and bottle

  1. Add ketchup and wine, then strain the mixture clear.

  2. Bottle the preparation for use.

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. Sugar + ketchuptop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 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

Brown sugar
Caramelises to a dark, bitter-sweet colouring that gives the sauce its deep brown colour.
Butter
Adds fat that helps the sugar froth and carries a rich flavour into the sauce.
Ketchup
Adds acidity and savoury depth to balance the sweetness of the caramel.
Wine
Adds acidity and aromatic flavour that rounds out the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir until the mixture turns black. Sugar darkens quickly once it passes its caramel stage, so heat must stay low and the mixture must be watched closely. Burnt sugar turns bitter and ruins the colour and taste.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, ketchup, wine):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Allspicefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, ketchup, wine. 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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