Important: Safety Warning
This page contains a formula or preparation using substances now known to be dangerously toxic, such as arsenic, mercury, lead, or cyanide compounds. Exposure to these substances can cause severe poisoning, permanent injury, or death.
In addition, this page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
In addition, this page presents medical treatment from an era before modern medicine. The remedies described are ineffective against the conditions named, and some of the ingredients or doses are harmful. Do not use them to treat any illness; consult a qualified medical professional.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › The Principles of Cookery › Seidlitz Water, Bottled
Seidlitz Water, Bottled
Take a sufficient number of soda-water bottles, and fill them with clear water; then add the following ingredients, and cork and wire the bottles immediately. Two drachms of Rochelle salts, thirty-five grains of bicarbonate of soda, and eleven drops of sulphuric acid.
This is an aerated purgative water, not a cordial, and it belongs to the era when a chemist's shop and a kitchen shared a shelf. It cannot be prepared today as printed, and the reasons are worth setting out precisely.
- The sulphuric acidEleven drops of sulphuric acid is the whole mechanism here: it attacks the bicarbonate to throw off carbon dioxide and charge the bottle. Sulphuric acid is a corrosive industrial chemical, not a food acid, and commercial acid of the period could carry lead, arsenic and other contaminants; the "dilute acid" of the old pharmacopoeia was a specific dispensed preparation with no modern domestic equivalent. Nothing sold under that name now is fit to swallow.
- The pressurised bottleCorking and wiring a bottle in which gas is actively being generated makes a small pressure vessel with no relief and no measured headspace. Nineteenth-century soda bottles were thick and heavy for exactly this reason, and burst bottles were a recognised cause of eye and hand injuries in aerated-water works.
- Rochelle saltsSodium potassium tartrate, once a household aperient. The point of the drink was a brisk laxative dose, not refreshment, and two drachms per bottle is a medicinal quantity. Anyone wanting sparkling water should not start here.
- Drachms and grainsAn apothecaries' drachm is 60 grains, about 3.9 g, so two drachms is roughly 7.8 g; thirty-five grains of bicarbonate is about 2.3 g. The volume of the "soda-water bottle" is never stated, which leaves the concentration genuinely undefined.
- Seidlitz powder, the surviving relativeThe same salts were sold dry in blue and white papers to be mixed in a tumbler at the moment of drinking, using tartaric acid rather than sulphuric. That is the form that persisted into the twentieth century.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe or a commercial mineral water. There is no adjustment to the quantities above that makes this preparation appropriate to attempt.
Seidlitz water takes its name from Sedlec (Seidlitz) in Bohemia, whose spring was famous for magnesium sulphate-rich purgative water, and the name was borrowed in Britain for effervescing salts that imitated the effect. By the time Cassell's was compiled, "Seidlitz powder" was a familiar item of the domestic medicine chest, and cookery dictionaries of the period often carried a section of aerated waters, tonics and invalid drinks alongside the soups and sauces. The recipe's appearance here says less about Victorian taste in beverages than about how little separated the still-room from the dispensary. Its inclusion under "The Principles of Cookery" is a reminder that carbonation was understood chiefly as a chemical trick before it was understood as a pleasure.