Home › The Principles of Cookery › Cinnamon, Tincture Of
Cinnamon, Tincture Of
Put three ounces of bruised cinnamon into a bottle of the best French brandy. It will be ready for use in a week. The probable cost will depend upon the quality of the brandy. Sufficient, two tea-spoonfuls may be put into a little cold water, or one tea-spoonful into a glass of wine. The latter, if beaten up with the yolk of an egg, and sweetened, is agreeable and restorative.
A flavouring tincture that doubles as a household cordial. Nothing here is difficult; the only decisions are the quantity of spice and what you do with it afterwards.
- A bottle of brandyA Victorian wine or spirit bottle held roughly 26 fluid ounces, so a standard 750 ml bottle is the right measure. "Best French brandy" means cognac or armagnac; a cheap grape brandy will show through, since nothing here masks it.
- Three ounces of cinnamonAbout 85 g, which is a lot — twenty quills or more, depending on thickness. That gives a strong, sweet tincture; halve it if you want something closer to a modern extract.
- Cinnamon or cassiaMuch of the cinnamon sold in Britain, then as now, was cassia: thick, hard, dark, and higher in coumarin. True Ceylon cinnamon is thin, pale and flakes easily. Either works; cassia gives the hotter, more familiar "cinnamon" note.
- BruisedCrack the quills with a rolling pin or the flat of a knife rather than grinding them. Powder will not settle and leaves the tincture permanently cloudy and gritty.
- The week, and afterShake it once a day. At a week it is usable, but the flavour goes on deepening for a month or more; strain through muslin when it tastes right, or the spice will keep throwing sediment.
- Yield and keepingYou get most of your 750 ml back. At around 40 per cent alcohol it will keep for years in a stoppered bottle away from light.
- Kitchen useTwo teaspoons behaves like a cinnamon extract in custards, apple dishes, poached fruit and mulled wine, with the advantage that the alcohol carries the flavour further than ground spice stirred in at the end.
- The egg-and-wine versionThat last suggestion beats a raw yolk into wine and drinks it. Raw shell eggs carry a salmonella risk that alcohol does not remove; if you want to try it, use pasteurised yolk.
Tinctures like this one sat exactly on the line between the kitchen shelf and the medicine cupboard, which is why a cookery dictionary gives one at all. Tinctura Cinnamomi was a standard preparation of the nineteenth-century pharmacopoeias, valued as a carminative and astringent — the sort of thing given for wind, griping or a disordered stomach — and the household version simply skipped the chemist. The closing note that yolk, sugar and spiced wine make something "restorative" belongs to the same tradition as caudle and egg flip, drinks given to invalids and nursing mothers when nourishment was measured in eggs and brandy rather than calories. As a flavouring, alcohol extraction was the practical way to capture a spice before commercial essences were reliable.