Important: Safety Warning
This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Home-Made Bitters
Take half an ounce of the yolk of fresh eggs carefully separated from the whites; half an ounce of gentian-root; one and a half drachms of orange-peel, and one pint of boiling water. Pour the water hot upon the ingredients mentioned, and let them steep in it for two hours; then strain, and bottle for use.
X. Ice Cream and Water Ices.
This is a domestic tonic in the apothecary style rather than a cocktail bitters, and its structure — raw egg yolk, water, no alcohol, no acid, bottled and kept — is what makes it unmakeable today. The notes below explain the measures and the specific failure.
- The egg yolk is the problemThe method gives no controlled temperature: boiling water is poured on and the mixture simply left to stand for two hours, so how hot the yolk actually gets, and for how long, is unknown and unmeasured. Nothing in the instructions guarantees the egg reaches a safe point.
- Then it is bottled and storedThe strained liquid is egg protein in plain water at near-neutral pH with no alcohol, no sugar concentration and no acid to inhibit growth. Bottled "for use" at room temperature over days, it is a good growth medium for bacteria rather than a preserved tincture. Commercial and traditional bitters are preserved in high-proof spirit for exactly this reason.
- If you want gentian bittersUse a current recipe built on spirit. Explaining the fault here is not the same as offering a fixed version, and we are not offering one.
- DrachmAn apothecary drachm is one-eighth of an apothecary ounce, roughly 3.9 g. One and a half drachms of orange peel is therefore about 6 g of dried peel — a small handful of strips, not a whole orange's worth.
- Half an ounce of yolkBetween about 14 g and 15.5 g depending on whether the ounce is avoirdupois or apothecary, which is roughly one egg yolk. Weighing the yolk rather than counting eggs suggests a recipe written in the dispensing manner, where quantities were given by weight.
- Gentian rootThe dried root of Gentiana lutea, still sold by herb suppliers and a common bittering agent in commercial bitters. It is intensely, persistently bitter; the quantity here is not small.
- The stray line at the end"X. Ice Cream and Water Ices" is not part of the recipe. It is the heading of the next section of the book, caught by the transcription.
Household bitters sat on the boundary between the kitchen and the medicine chest, and cookbooks of this period carried both without much comment. Gentian root has been the standard bitter tonic of European pharmacy for centuries, prescribed as a stomachic to sharpen appetite and aid digestion, and orange peel was the usual aromatic partner, adding the citrus oils that make the bitterness tolerable. The egg yolk is the odd element to modern eyes: yolk was widely used in nineteenth-century dispensing as an emulsifier, a way of carrying resinous or oily matter into a watery preparation so it would not separate in the bottle. What the recipe really records is a moment when the housewife was still expected to compound simple remedies herself.