Category: Pastry

I experienced a (minor) flood of interest in my offhand reference to “ketchup pistachio cake” in the post just below. Are you pulling our legs, Joe? Actually no, though I’ve never actually seen a recipe for it, just a picture in a book called The Gallery of Regrettable Food by James Lileks. It looks to me like a combination of Heinz ketchup cake (oh yes, that still exists and it looks eerily like this week’s project, no?) and a green-tinted pistachio frosting (almost certainly something like this right here, made with instant pudding mix and Cool Whip). Ye who may be interested, knock yourselves out. I’ll look the other way.

It’s under such headings that recipes for red velvet cake have been spread for decades. You’ve come across similar stories I think. A customer sits down at an expensive restaurant or in a famous hotel dining room. He/she likes the (INSERT FOOD ITEM) so much that he/she asks for the recipe. The waiter is happy to oblige. He returns moments later with the recipe, hand written by chef. Then the shock comes: the bill. On it is a “recipe surcharge” for (INSERT LARGE AMOUNT OF MONEY). Incensed, particularly because the recipe’s secret turns out to be nothing more than (INSERT SIMPLE TRICK), the customer pays the exorbitant bill, vowing to shout the secret to the four winds and punish (INSERT ESTABLISHMENT) forever. And here is the super-secret recipe!

Unknown. However it seems that it’s been around in one form or another since the about the 1930’s. In those days it was something of a regional specialty, being closely tied to the State of Texas, especially the City of Austin and most especially the Adams Extract Company. Adams manufactured food colorings, and one of the company’s favorite promotion techniques was to give away copies of recipes that used colors — lots and lots of colors. They spread around quite a few copies of their red velvet cake over time.

His name is William Henry Perkin. I bring him up because reader Antuanete wants to know what precisely coal tar dyes are and how they’re made. I confess that the specific chemistry of synthetic dyes is mostly beyond me. What I do know is that the world’s first synthetic dye was a kitchen accident. It happened in 1856 when Perkin, then an apprentice to the legendary German chemist A.W. Hoffman, attempted to create synthetic quinine (an expensive tree bark extract that was a critical malaria medicine) over his Easter vacation. He combined aniline, a by-product of the coke-making process, with potash and sulfuric acid. The goo he made was not even a little bit like quinine, but when Perkin combined it with alcohol, a sort of purple was the result.

So how did food colors come to be the most rigorously safety-tested ingredients in the world? Abuse, of course. Up to now I’ve written mostly about where safe colorings and dyes have come from. Unsafe colorings and dyes were once far more numerous, and far more widely used.

Fraud perpetrated by food makers — especially millers — goes back millennia. However it took the Industrial Revolution to really elevate the practice to an art. That was the time (the late 1700’s) when industrial workers began congregating in cities in earnest, attracted there by high-paying jobs. Removed from their farms, they were forced to hire out various aspects of their food preparation to others. These “others” ranged from bread bakers who might “step on” their flour with cheap additives like chalk dust or bone meal, to dairymen who’d frequently “correct” spoiled milk by adding lye to it.

With the controversy that sometimes surrounds food colorings, it’s easy to get lulled into the assumption that coloring food is a recent phenomenon. In fact it’s been practiced for millennia, especially among the Romans and Greeks who were renown for their manufacture of caramel color. Caramel color? Isn’t that what they put in soft drinks? Why yes it is, but as any ancient Roman will tell you, it can be used to color sauces, breads and beer too.

The process of making caramel color is fairly straightforward. All you need to make some is a little sugar and a little heat. Of course the ancients didn’t have much crystalline sugar lying around, but there was plenty of honey, which works every bit as well (actually even better). You simply heat it until the simple sugar molecules start to break apart, about 340 degrees, at which point it begins to cease being sugar and starts to become, well…nobody is quite sure what. But it looks good and it tastes good. What more do you need to know?

Yellow No. 5 has also seen it’s share of controversy, not so much because it’s ever done anything much to anyone (most countries outside of Norway consider it safe, and “sensitivity” complaints against it are about on par with other coal tar dyes) but because it became the most widely used food coloring after Red No. 2 was de-listed due to public pressure. Once that happened, Yellow No. 5 was simply the next color on the target list. However no serious complaints — only urban legends — have ever sprung up around it.