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Cinnamon Cordial
Pour three-pennyworth of oil of cinnamon upon eight or nine large lumps of sugar, and put them into a large bottle with a quart of brandy, whisky, or gin, and half a pound of sugar boiled to a syrup, with a cupful of water. Shake all well together, and let the bottle remain in a cool place for a few days; then strain or filter the liquid until it becomes bright and clear. Bottle for use. Time to infuse, a week. Probable cost, uncertain, depending on the spirits. Sufficient for one quart of cordial.
This is a flavoured sweetened spirit of the kind Victorian households bottled by the dozen, but its active ingredient is dosed by shop price rather than by measure, and that ingredient is a concentrated essential oil rather than a spice.
- The dose cannot be recovered"Three-pennyworth" of oil of cinnamon was whatever the local chemist put in a small phial for three pence in the 1870s — a quantity that varied by shop, by year and by the strength of the oil sold. There is no defensible conversion, and the difference between a few drops and a couple of teaspoons of cinnamon bark oil in a quart bottle is the difference between a flavouring and a caustic dose.
- Cinnamon oil is not cinnamonCinnamon bark oil is roughly 60–75 per cent cinnamaldehyde and is used in modern food work at parts-per-million levels. Undiluted or over-dosed it is a mucous-membrane irritant that can blister the mouth, throat and stomach lining; cases of chemical burns from concentrated cinnamon oil are well documented in the poisons literature.
- What is sold today is not what was sold thenBottles labelled "cinnamon oil" in shops now are largely aromatherapy or fragrance grade, not food grade, and may be cassia oil, cinnamon leaf oil (high in eugenol) or an oil cut with a carrier. None of them is interchangeable with the apothecary's dispensing oil the recipe assumes.
- The sugar lumps do not dilute anythingDropping the oil onto sugar is a dispersal trick, not a safety measure — it spreads the oil so it will dissolve into the spirit instead of floating. The whole charge of oil still ends up in the quart.
- Filtering will not correct an overdoseStraining until the liquid runs bright removes suspended sugar haze and undissolved oil droplets, not dissolved cinnamaldehyde. A cordial that tastes fiercely hot after a week's infusion is not fixable by filtration or by keeping.
- Units, for reading the originalThe quart here is imperial, about 1.14 litres against the US 946 ml. Victorian loaf-sugar lumps were cut by hand and varied; a "large lump" is broadly comparable to a modern sugar cube. Half a pound of sugar with a cupful of water starts out at roughly equal weights of sugar and water, so the strength of the finished syrup depends entirely on how far it is boiled down — the recipe does not say.","why":"The 2:1-by-weight figure contradicts the recipe's own quantities: half a pound of sugar to a cupful (about 8 fl oz, roughly 8 oz) of water is about 1:1 before reduction, and the recipe gives no boiling time. The sugar-cube equivalence is also stated too firmly for hand-cut loaf sugar.
- If you want the drinkUse a current cordial or spiced-liqueur recipe that infuses whole spice and gives quantities by weight or volume. The technique in this entry — flavouring by price rather than by measure — belongs to a period when the chemist, not the cook, controlled the dose.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the domestic cordial, when a household still expected to bottle its own ratafias, noyaux and spiced spirits rather than buy them, and when the line between the kitchen and the dispensary was thin: sugar, spirit and a phial of essential oil from the chemist produced in a week what a distiller produced in a still. The oil-on-a-sugar-lump trick was familiar to confectioners and apothecaries, who used loaf sugar as a carrier for volatile oils in everything from lozenges to gripe waters, and the same gesture is still seen in the cocktail bar's sugar cube dashed with bitters. Cinnamon cordials were valued as much medicinally as socially — cinnamon water and cinnamon-flavoured spirit were long-standing carminatives given for chills and stomach complaints — which helps explain why a book of cookery prints a recipe with no serving suggestion and no fixed dose of its most powerful ingredient. The "probable cost, uncertain" is characteristic of Cassell's, which costed most of its recipes for a housekeeper working to a weekly budget and left the figure open where an ingredient's price could not be pinned down.