Important: Safety Warning
This page contains a formula or preparation using substances now known to be dangerously toxic, such as arsenic, mercury, lead, or cyanide compounds. Exposure to these substances can cause severe poisoning, permanent injury, or death.
In addition, this page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Beer of Sulphuric Acid
Take of dilute sulphuric acid and concentrated infusion of orange-peel, each twelve drachms; syrup of orange-peel, five fluid ounces. This quantity is added to two imperial gallons of water. A large wineglassful is taken for a draught, mixed with more or less water according to taste. This beer is entirely harmless, even if taken in considerable quantities, and is refreshing in hot weather.
This is a pharmacist's formula that wandered into a cookbook, and it is the one page in the beverage chapter that should stay on the page. The units and ingredients are worth explaining, but only so the scale of the problem is clear.
- The acid is the whole problem"Dilute sulphuric acid" is not a flavouring but a pharmacopoeial reagent, on the order of 10 percent sulphuric acid, sold for compounding medicines. Twelve drachms of it in two gallons of water gives a drink acidic enough to erode tooth enamel with repeated use, and the preparation as bottled is irritant to skin, eyes and mucous membrane before it is ever diluted.
- No concentration is specifiedThe recipe assumes the reader owns a bottle labelled to a pharmacopoeial standard. Anything sold today as sulphuric acid — battery acid, drain cleaner — is far stronger and may carry contaminants never intended for ingestion. There is no way to read this formula safely from a modern shelf.
- "Entirely harmless" was wrong even thenAcid drinks of this kind were already suspected of damaging teeth and irritating the stomach. The book's cheerfulness reflects a period confidence about dosing, not evidence.
- Drachms and fluid ouncesA fluid drachm is one eighth of a fluid ounce, so twelve drachms is an ounce and a half; five fluid ounces of syrup is a little over half a cup. The two imperial gallons are about 9.1 litres, not the 7.6 of two US gallons — worth knowing when reading other recipes in this section.
- What the orange-peel was doingConcentrated infusion of orange-peel and syrup of orange-peel are both old dispensary preparations, the first a strong bitter extract in dilute alcohol, the second a sweetened flavouring. They exist here to mask the acid, which tells you plainly how the drink tasted without them.
- If you want the effectThe refreshment being sought is sharp, aromatic and cold. Use a current recipe for a citrus or vinegar-based shrub; nothing in this formula needs recovering.
Mineral-acid drinks belong to the long overlap between the chemist's shop and the kitchen, when the same household manual might give you a pudding, a furniture polish and a tonic. Dilute sulphuric acid was a standard pharmacopoeial preparation through the nineteenth century, prescribed as an astringent and a supposed corrective in hot weather and in fevers. The orange-peel infusion and syrup are lifted straight from dispensary practice, which is a good clue that a formula like this reached the cookbook by way of a druggist's recipe book rather than a cook's. Its survival into a domestic compilation says less about what people were actually drinking by then than about how freely such books copied older material forward without re-examining it.