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Ratafia, Strong
Take two ounces of apricot and peach kernels, blanch them, and put them into a quart bottle with half an ounce of cloves, and a bit of cinnamon; fill up the bottle with French brandy. Cork the bottle well, seal it, and put it in the sun on fine days; in two months, add to the preparation three ounces of white sugar-candy dissolved in a pint of cold water. Then strain off, filter through paper, and bottle for use.
This is a cordial built on stone-fruit kernels, and that is precisely the problem: the flavouring agent here is also the toxin. The points below explain why the recipe belongs on the page as a historical document rather than in a bottle on the shelf.
- The kernels are the hazardApricot and peach kernels contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed, chewed or steeped and its own enzymes go to work. Two ounces of kernels is a substantial dose of amygdalin by any modern reckoning, and nothing in this method destroys it.
- Alcohol extracts it efficientlyA two-month brandy maceration is a good solvent system for the bitter principle; brandy is part water, and the extract passes into the liquid. This is not a case of trace contamination: the extraction is the whole point of the preparation, and the recipe directs that the result be filtered and bottled undiluted apart from the pint of sugar water.
- No way to know the strengthAmygdalin content varies enormously between cultivars, between seasons and between fruit and fruit. Domestic kitchens then and now have no means of measuring it, so there is no quantity of this infusion that can be called a known dose.
- Heat does not save it hereBlanching softens the seed coat but does not reliably deactivate the glycoside, and nothing later in the process is heated at all. The sugar syrup goes in cold and the finished cordial is filtered, not cooked.
- Bitterness is not a reliable warningCloves, cinnamon, brandy and three ounces of sugar-candy are all present in part to mask the bitter almond note. A drinker has no sensory guide to how much kernel extract is in the glass.
- What modern ratafia uses insteadModern almond and ratafia flavourings are based on benzaldehyde that is either synthetic or processed to be free of prussic acid, and commercial products are made under controls a domestic infusion has none of. If you want the flavour, use a current recipe built on those flavourings.
- Reading the originalFor context only: an imperial quart is about 1.14 litres, white sugar-candy is crystallised cane sugar, and "put it in the sun on fine days" is a gentle warm-infusion method requiring no fuel.
Ratafia was the general European name for a sweetened spirit flavoured by maceration, and from the seventeenth century onward the stone-fruit version was a well-established member of the family: cherry, apricot and peach kernels gave the bitter-almond note that defined the style, and the same note survives in amaretto, in ratafia biscuits and in the almond flavouring of a Bakewell tart. The name is often traced to the Latin rata fiat, a toast on the ratification of an agreement, though this is a traditional etymology rather than a documented one. Household books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries carried dozens of such cordials because the still-room was a domestic department in its own right, and a quart of brandy could be left in the sun to do its own work. That the danger of kernels went unremarked here is itself period evidence: the toxicity of amygdalin was understood by chemists well before such recipes were being printed, but the knowledge travelled slowly into the kitchen, and bitter almonds and fruit kernels continued to appear in domestic recipes long after the science was settled.