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Ratafia D'Angelique
Take a salt-spoonful of angelica-seeds, four ounces of angelica stalks, one ounce of blanched bitter almonds bruised, and six quarts of brandy or proof spirit. Digest for ten days, then filter. Add a quart of water and three pounds and a half of white sugar. Mix well, and after a fortnight decant the clear portion through a piece of clean flannel.
This is a domestic cordial of the type made all over nineteenth-century Europe, but it turns on an ingredient that is no longer sold for eating or drinking, and for good reason.
- The bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the almond's own enzymes convert to hydrogen cyanide as soon as the kernels are bruised and wetted. An ounce of bruised bitter almonds represents roughly a dozen or more kernels' worth of glycoside going straight into a cold spirit infusion, where nothing is heated or driven off.
- Cold infusion does not remove itThis method digests, filters and decants at room temperature. Everything liberated by the bruising stays in the finished bottle, then sits for a further fortnight.
- No margin in the quantityThe recipe gives no upper bound on kernel strength, and bitter almond potency varies widely between batches, so the amount present in any given glass cannot be predicted with confidence.
- Sale is restrictedBitter almonds cannot legally be sold for food use in the United States and are controlled in many other jurisdictions. Sweet almonds are not a substitute for the flavour intended here; commercial bitter almond extract is prepared so that the toxin is removed, which is precisely what this method does not do.
- Angelica itselfGarden angelica stalks and seeds are ordinary flavouring material and not the concern. The plant is easily confused in the wild with hemlock and water hemlock, however, so cultivated stems from a known source are the only sensible ones.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe for an angelica liqueur from a modern source rather than adapting this one.
Ratafia was the general European name for a sweetened spirit flavoured by cold infusion rather than distillation, and by the eighteenth century it was made from a wide range of fruits, flowers and nuts, among them the kernel note of peach, cherry or bitter almond stones. Angelica, Angelica archangelica, was one of the great cordial plants of northern Europe, grown for its thick aromatic stalks, candied in Niort; its root goes into Chartreuse and gin botanical blends, and its old reputation as a plague preventative is traditional rather than documented. Cassell's places this among the compounded liqueurs a well-run household might once have made from a barrel of proof spirit. The move away from bruised bitter kernels toward distilled extracts and synthetic benzaldehyde over the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries is exactly what makes a recipe like this a historical document rather than a working one.