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Another (Take of oil of peppermint lb)
Take of oil of peppermint, 1 lb.; water, a sufficient quantity. Draw off 30 galls.
This is stimulant and carminative, and covers disagreeable flavors. Portugal and Angel Waters.
Take 1 pt. of orange-flower water; 1 pt. of rosewater; and 1/2 pt. of myrtle-water to these put a 4 oz. of distilled spirit of musk, and an ounce of spirit of ambergris. Shake the whole well together, and the process will be finished.
Rose-water.
Take of the leaves of fresh damask-roses with the heels cut off, 6 lbs.; water, as much as to prevent burning. Distill off a gallon. The distilled water should be drawn from dried herbs, because the fresh cannot be got at all times in the year.
Whenever the fresh are used the weights must be increased; but whether the fresh or dry are made use of, it is left to the judgment of the operator to vary the weight, according as the plants are in greater or less perfection, owing to the season in which they grew, or were collected.
Small Snail Water.
Take of balm, mint, hart's tongue, ground ivy; flowers of the dead nettle, mallow-flowers, elderflowers, each a handful; snails freed from their shells, and whites of eggs, each 4 oz.; nutmegs, à oz.; milk, 1 gall. Distill in a water-bath to dryness. Strawberry Water. cient quantity. Draw off 2½ galls.; this water is Take of the bruised fruit, 20 lbs.; water a suffivery fragrant. Common Distilled Water. the first 1/2 gall. and draw off 4 galls., which keep Take of water, 10 galls. Distill. Throw away in glass or stoneware. Distilled water is used in making medicine preparations when the salts contained in common water would decompose them.
A run of distilled waters from the perfumery-and-apothecary end of the book: two of them (peppermint and rose) are still kitchen ingredients, one is a perfume, and one is a medicinal preparation that no longer has any place in a kitchen. The scale alone puts the page beyond domestic use.
- Why not to attempt itPortugal and Angel Waters call for spirit of musk and spirit of ambergris. Natural musk comes from musk deer, protected under CITES, and ambergris is sperm whale product whose possession and sale is prohibited in the United States under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Neither can be lawfully bought or used.
- Small Snail WaterA gallon of milk distilled with shelled snails and raw egg white, made as a period remedy rather than as food. Wild snails can carry parasites, including rat lungworm (Angiostrongylus cantonensis), and the recipe gives no purging step; what is collected here is the distillate, so the hazard lies chiefly in handling and preparing the raw material.
- ScaleOne pound of peppermint oil drawn off into 30 gallons, and 10 gallons of water distilled to yield 4, are commercial apothecary quantities.
- What the waters actually wereThese are steam distillates, not infusions: aromatic plant material and water heated so the volatile oils come over with the vapour. The result is a clear, intensely scented water used a spoonful at a time in cookery, medicine or perfumery.
- Rose and orange-flower water todayBoth are sold as food-grade flavourings and are what a modern recipe means when it asks for them. Damask rose (Rosa damascena) is still the perfume rose of commerce; the "heels" the book tells you to cut off are the white bases of the petals, which are bitter.
- Distilled waterThe reason for throwing away the first gallon is that the earliest fraction carries over the most volatile impurities. The whole exercise is redundant now — distilled and deionised water are sold by the gallon, and the salts the book worries about are absent from both.
- A water-bath"Distill in a water-bath" means the still sits in hot water rather than over direct heat, so the charge cannot get hotter than boiling water and the milk and plant matter do not scorch. The same principle as a bain-marie.
Distilled waters sat on the boundary between the still-room and the dispensary, and this arrangement shows it: a carminative peppermint water for settling the stomach, a perfumer's blend of musk and ambergris, a culinary rose-water, and a snail water of the kind English recipe books had been copying since the seventeenth century as a remedy for consumption and weak children. Many substantial households with gardens kept a still, and the lady of the house or her housekeeper produced the cordial waters, the medicines and the scents from the same apparatus. The names are less certain than they look: "Portugal water" is usually connected with the oranges of Portuguese trade, and "angel water" with a Portuguese água de anjos, but both derivations are traditional rather than documented. By the time books of this kind were compiled in the early nineteenth century, the trade was passing to commercial druggists, which may be part of why the quantities here run to gallons rather than pints.