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Orange Brandy
Place the thin-peeled rind of eight oranges with threefourths pint of juice in stone receptacle and pour over this a half-gallon of best French brandy. Add after four days a pound and a quarter of sugar and stir up well. Let stand again, for twenty-four hours, when strain and cork. May be used in five weeks.
DOMESTIC CURAÇOA No. I Prepare ten oranges as above but do not add juice. The dried rind will answer if the fresh is not convenient. Cover for four days with a gallon of brandy, then strain, add three pounds of sugar, and proceed as above.
DOMESTIC CURAÇOA No. 2 Take the rind of twelve oranges and pour over them a gallon of pure whisky. Proceed as above, adding a quarter to a half-pound more sugar.
PRESERVED ORANGE FLOWERS No. I Place alternate layers of orange flowers and salt in jars and screw on the covers well. There should be at least one-third the weight of the flowers in salt.
THE WILD "SOUR," OR SEVILLE ORANGE 209 PRESERVED ORANGE FLOWERS No. 2 Pack the full-blown flowers in a jar, close, but not to crush them, and when full within a half-inch of the top pour over them glycerine which has no odour (but not necessarily chemically pure). This is according to Mr. C. R. Tichborne's successful experiments. (U. S. Dispensatory).
This is a maceration, not a distillation: peel and spirit sit together, then sugar goes in. The whole thing is forgiving as long as you keep the white pith out.
- The hinge: rind only"Thin-peeled rind" means the coloured zest and nothing more. Any white pith carried over turns the finished liqueur bitter and slightly muddy, and no amount of resting will fix it. A vegetable peeler held at a shallow angle is the right tool.
- Measures in modern termsThree-fourths of a pint of juice is about 1.5 cups (355 ml), roughly the yield of eight to ten juicing oranges. A half-gallon of brandy is 64 fl oz (1.9 litres), a gallon is 3.8 litres. A pound and a quarter of sugar is about 2.75 cups granulated.
- "Stone receptacle"A glazed stoneware crock. A wide-mouth glass jar with a tight lid does the same job and lets you see the colour develop. Avoid bare metal, which reacts with the citrus acid.
- Best French brandyGrape brandy in the cognac or armagnac style, not fruit brandy or eau-de-vie. Something inexpensive but drinkable is correct here; the orange oil dominates the finished result, so a fine old bottle is wasted.
- Dissolving the sugarStirring once is not enough at this volume. Either shake or stir daily until no grit remains at the bottom, or dissolve the sugar in a little warm water first and stir the syrup in. Undissolved sugar will simply sit in the crock for the full twenty-four hours and then be strained out.
- Straining and the five weeksStrain through a fine sieve, then again through dampened muslin or a coffee filter to catch the oil haze. The five weeks of rest is real: fresh from the crock the peel tastes raw and sharp, and it rounds out considerably by the second month.
- Yield and strengthThe first recipe gives roughly 2.5 quarts (2.4 litres). Juice and sugar drop a 40 percent brandy to somewhere near 30 percent, so it drinks as a liqueur; the two Curacao versions, made without juice, come out a little stronger.
- The whisky versionRecipe No. 2 uses "pure whisky," which in this period probably meant plain unadulterated spirit rather than anything modern labelling would recognise. A young bourbon or a plain rye works; a heavily peated malt will fight the orange.
- Skip the glycerine flowersPreserved Orange Flowers No. 2 calls for glycerine "not necessarily chemically pure." Technical-grade glycerine has historically been contaminated with toxic glycols, and no household test distinguishes the grades. The salt-packed method in No. 1 is the one to use if you want preserved blossoms.
Curaçao takes its name from the Dutch Caribbean island, where oranges introduced by Spanish settlers are generally said to have degenerated in the arid soil into the small, hard, intensely aromatic bitter laraha, whose dried peel became the defining flavouring of the liqueur; Dutch firms had made it a commercial staple by the nineteenth century. "Domestic Curaçoa" here is the household answer to a bought bottle, and the note that "the dried rind will answer if the fresh is not convenient" is the practical heart of it, since dried bitter peel was sold by druggists and grocers alike. That druggist connection explains the odd company this page keeps: the preserved orange flowers, credited to the U. S. Dispensatory, belong to the pharmacy side of citrus, where orange flower water and peel tinctures were standard flavouring agents. Books of this period moved freely between the still-room and the medicine chest, and a fruit compendium was expected to cover both.