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Curacoa
Take a quarter of a pound of the thin rind of Seville oranges, and pour over it a pint of boiling water; when cool, add two quarts of brandy or rectified spirits of wine, and let it remain for ten or twelve days, stirring it every day. Make a clarified syrup of two pounds of finely-sifted sugar and one pint of water; add this to the brandy, etc. Line a funnel with a piece of muslin, and that with chemists' filtering paper; let the liquid pass through two or three times, till it is quite bright. This will require a little patience. Put it into small bottles, and cork it closely. Time, twelve days. Probable cost, 2s., exclusive of the brandy. Sufficient for a little more than three quarts of curacoa. Curacoa imparts an agreeable flavour to cream and to punch, and is an excellent liquor.
A maceration liqueur, not a distillation: peel steeps in spirit, syrup goes in afterwards, and the only difficult part is getting it clear. Nothing here is hard, but two of the ingredients need translating before you start.
- Rectified spirits of wineThis is near-neutral ethanol at roughly 95 per cent ABV, sold to Victorian households through chemists and not available in most places now. Brandy is the alternative the recipe itself offers; a high-proof neutral grain spirit works where it can be bought legally, and ordinary 40 per cent vodka gives a softer, less penetrating extraction.
- Thin rind onlyA quarter pound of rind means about 115 g of pared zest, which will take a good number of Seville oranges, a dozen or more depending on size and how thinly you pare. Take it with a peeler or a sharp knife and leave the white pith behind; pith contributes bitterness of the dull, chewy kind rather than the aromatic bitterness you want.
- Seville orangesThe bitter orange, in British shops for a few weeks in January and February. Out of season, dried bitter orange peel from a spice merchant (sometimes sold as curacao peel) is the closest thing; sweet orange zest alone makes something pleasant but flat.
- Clarified syrupDissolve 900 g caster sugar in 570 ml water, bring to a simmer, skim the scum that rises, and let it cool before it meets the spirit. Adding hot syrup drives off aromatics and can crack a bottle.
- Why it goes cloudyCitrus oils dissolve in strong alcohol but drop out when the syrup dilutes it, which is the haze the filtering is meant to remove. Chilling the mixed liqueur for a day first makes far more of the oil precipitate at once, so the filter has less to do.
- Filtering paperChemists' filtering paper is laboratory filter paper; a coffee filter or a doubled jelly bag does the same work more slowly. Expect each pass to take hours, and do not squeeze or press the paper.
- Strength and yieldA little over three quarts, which is about 3.4 litres. Made with brandy the finished liqueur lands somewhere around 25 per cent ABV once the syrup is in.
- KeepingSugar and alcohol at this concentration are self-preserving, so tightly corked bottles keep for years and improve for the first few months as the peel note settles. Store away from light, which fades the colour.
Curaçao takes its name from the Dutch Caribbean island, where sweet Valencia oranges planted by the Spanish are generally said to have degenerated into the local bitter laraha, a fruit too sour to eat but with intensely aromatic peel; the dried peel became an export and the basis of the Dutch liqueur trade. By the time Cassell's was compiled, curaçao was a fixture of the English sideboard, used exactly as described here / to flavour creams and punch, and also drunk as a liquor in its own right. Recipes like this one belong to a long tradition of domestic imitation of proprietary cordials: a household with access to Seville oranges in midwinter and a chemist who sold rectified spirit could make three quarts for two shillings plus the cost of the brandy, and the book's habit of quoting the price shows how squarely such things were judged against the shop-bought bottle.