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Brandies and Whiskeys, Factitious
Curacoa.
Common whiskey, 5 galls; fresh orange-peel, 4 lbs.; oil of bitter almonds, oil of cassia, of each, 1 dr.; oil of lemon, 2 drs.; oil of cinnamon, 50 drops; water, 5 qts., to dissolve refined sugar, 16 lbs. tincture of cochineal, 1/2 a pt.; burnt sugar, 3 oz.; allow the above to digest for 5 days; the whole of the oils should be dissolved in a glass of alcohol, and mix well.
This is a compounder's formula rather than a domestic one — a way of turning cheap whiskey into something that could be sold as imported curaçao. One of its ingredients puts it outside anything that can be made in a kitchen today.
- Oil of bitter almondsUnrectified oil of bitter almonds, the article sold under that name in the nineteenth century, contains hydrocyanic (prussic) acid — it was a recognised poison in the same period's own dispensatories. A drachm of it, roughly 3.5 ml, distributed through five gallons of drinking liquor is not a trace flavouring, and there is no way to know the cyanide content of any given sample. This alone is reason not to attempt the formula.
- Volume of alcoholFive gallons of whiskey, five quarts of water and sixteen pounds of sugar make something on the order of seven gallons of finished liqueur. Compounding spirits at this scale may be regulated in some jurisdictions, whether or not any distilling is involved.
- What "factitious" meansThe heading is the giveaway: 'factitious' means artificial or imitation. This formula imitates an imported cordial by colouring and flavouring cheap spirit, with the essential oils doing the work that fruit and barrel time would otherwise do.
- The units, for readingA drachm (dr.) here is most likely a fluid drachm, one-eighth of a fluid ounce, about 3.7 ml. "Burnt sugar" is caramel colouring, boiled dark; "tincture of cochineal" is the crushed insect dye in alcohol, still sold as carmine.
- Tincture of cochinealA pint of red dye and three ounces of caramel in a liqueur that is traditionally clear (the familiar blue is a much later colouring) shows what was being imitated: a dark, aged-looking cordial. Cochineal is a food colour, but some people react to it, and it is declared on labels for that reason.
- If you want curaçaoUse a current recipe. Modern versions rely on dried bitter-orange peel, neutral spirit and sugar, with no essential-oil dosing by the drachm.
Curaçao takes its name from the Caribbean island where Spanish colonists' sweet-orange plantings turned bitter and hard in the dry soil, producing the laraha whose dried peel became the base of the liqueur — a story generally traced to the seventeenth century and repeated in most accounts of the drink. By the time compendia of this kind were circulating in British and American editions in the early nineteenth century, imported cordials carried heavy duties and heavier prices, and there was steady trade in imitations built from cheap grain spirit, sugar, caramel and a short list of essential oils. That is exactly what this formula supplies: not instructions for a household, but the working stock of a spirit compounder. Bitter-almond oil appears in confectionery and cordial formulas throughout the century, and its prussic-acid content was already noted in period dispensatories.