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Colouring for Soups or Gravies

A brown coloring agent made from sugar, water, and butter, used to color soups or gravies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Colouring for Soups or Gravies

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the coloring

  1. Combine the sugar, water, and butter in a small saucepan over low heat.

  2. Stir with a wooden spoon until the mixture turns a bright brown.

  3. Add 2 cups of water, bring to a boil, and skim off any foam.

Bottle and use

  1. Once cooled, bottle and cork the mixture tightly.

  2. Add to soup or gravy as needed to achieve the desired color.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Lump sugar
Caramelizes under heat to give the liquid its brown color and a slightly bitter, toasted flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring the sugar to bright brown. Sugar darkens quickly once it caramelizes. Going past the target colour makes the mixture bitter and burnt-tasting, so the browning should be stopped at the right shade.

“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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