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Ratafia, Curacoa
Infuse one ounce of the zest or peel of bitter almonds cut as thin as possible, a pound and a half of sugar, and a little pinch of Brazil-wood in two quarts of good brandy. At the end of two days filter it, and put it into bottles.
This is an infused cordial rather than a distilled one, but two of its four ingredients are not usable in a modern kitchen, and the recipe as printed cannot be followed safely.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed, wetted or steeped. Their sale for eating is restricted or prohibited in the United States and tightly controlled elsewhere, and an ounce of material infused into two quarts of spirit and drunk by the glass is not a trivial exposure. There is no home method for judging the level.
- "Zest or peel of bitter almonds"The phrasing is confused even by the standards of the period. Curaçao is properly made from the dried peel of a bitter orange, and this entry appears to have collapsed two neighbouring formulas — the almond ratafia and the orange curaçao — into one. That ambiguity is itself a reason not to attempt it.
- Brazil-woodBrazil-wood was a red dyewood used to colour cordials and confectionery in the nineteenth century. It is not a permitted food colouring today and is sold as a textile and craft dye, often with no food-grade handling at any point in the supply chain.
- Quantities and vesselsTwo quarts of brandy to a pound and a half of sugar gives a very sweet cordial by modern taste; ratafias of this kind were generally drunk in small quantities rather than by the tumbler. "Filter" here means straining through flannel or filtering paper into a clean bottle, not any modern purification.
- If you want the drinkUse a current commercial curaçao, or a present-day recipe built on sweet or bitter orange peel and food-grade colouring. Nothing about this entry should be adapted.
Ratafia was the broad eighteenth- and nineteenth-century term for a sweetened cordial made by steeping fruit, kernels or peel in brandy rather than distilling them — a household technique that needed no still and no licence, which is much of why it filled so many pages of domestic cookery books. Almond-scented ratafias were prized precisely for the bitter-almond note, the same flavour that gave the small ratafia biscuit its name. Curaçao, by contrast, is traced to the dried peel of the bitter laraha orange grown on the Dutch Caribbean island of that name, and was already a commercial article when this book was compiled; its appearance here, welded onto an almond formula, is a good illustration of how loosely liqueur recipes circulated between books before anyone thought to check them.