Home › Distillation › Chalybeate Waters
Chalybeate Waters
Simple Chalybeate Water.
Water freed from air by boiling, 1 pt.; sulphate of iron, gr.
Aerated Chalybeate Water.
Sulphate of iron, 1 gr.; carbonate of soda, 4 grs.; water deprived of air, and charged with carbonic acid gas, 1 pt. Dr. Pereira recommends 10 grs. each of sulphate of iron and bicarbonate of soda to be taken in a bottle of ordinary soda water. This is equivalent to 4 grs. of carbonate of iron.
Brighton Chalybeate.
Sulphate of iron, common salt, chloride of calcium, of each 2 grs.; carbonate of soda, 3 grs.; carbonated water, 1 pt.
Bussang, Forges, Provins, And other similar waters, may be imitated by dissolving from to of a gr. of sulphate of iron, 2 or 3 gr. of carbonate of soda, 1 gr. of sulphate of magnesia, and 1 of common salt, in a pint of aerated water.
Mont d'Or Water.
Bicarbonate of soda, 70 grs.; sulphate of iron, gr.; common salt, 12 grs.; sulphate of soda, gr.; chloride of calcium, 4 grs.; chloride of magnesium, 2 grs.; aerated water, 1 pt. Passy Water.
Sulphate of iron, 2 grs.; chloride of sodium, 3 grs.; carbonate of soda, 4 grs.; chloride of magnesium, 2 grs.; aerated water, 1 pt. Pyrmont Water.
Sulphate of magnesia, 20 grs.; chloride of magnesium, 4 grs.; common salt, 2 grs.; bicarbonate of soda, 16 grs.; sulphate of iron, 2 grs.; Carrara water, 1 pt.
Portable Lemonade.
Take of tartaric acid, 1/2 oz. loaf sugar, 3 oz. ; essence of lemon, 1/2 dr. Powder the tartaric acid and the sugar very fine, in a marble or wedgewood mortar (observe never to use a metal one),
This is not cookery but dispensing chemistry: a set of formulas for counterfeiting famous European spa waters by dissolving measured grains of salts in aerated water. The page cannot be followed today, and several of the reasons are worth spelling out.
- The quantities are missingLook at the entries and you will see gaps where fractions once stood: "sulphate of iron, gr." in the simple chalybeate, "sulphate of iron, gr." and "sulphate of soda, gr." at Mont d'Or, "from to of a gr." at Bussang. The vulgar fractions dropped out in transcription, so the doses are simply unknown. A formula with no dose is not a formula.
- Grains and pintsAn apothecaries' grain is 64.8 mg; there are 437.5 grains to the ounce avoirdupois. If the pint intended is the imperial pint of 20 fluid ounces, Mont d'Or's 70 grains of bicarbonate is roughly 4.5 g in about 570 ml; on a 16-fluid-ounce pint the same salt would sit in about 470 ml.
- Iron in quantityDr. Pereira's suggestion of 10 grains of ferrous sulphate in a bottle of soda water is about 650 mg of the salt, near 130 mg of elemental iron in one drink -- far more than a dietary intake and more than a single modern supplement dose. Iron is the specific hazard here: acute iron poisoning is a real and well-documented emergency, particularly in children, for whom a brightly bottled fizzy drink is exactly the wrong vehicle.
- Not food-grade chemicalsSulphate of iron, chloride of calcium, chloride of magnesium, sulphate of magnesia and sulphate of soda were bought from a druggist against pharmacopoeial standards that no longer govern what is sold under those names. Modern industrial ferrous sulphate and calcium chloride carry no assurance of purity for ingestion, and nineteenth-century supplies could not be relied on to be free of contaminants such as arsenic and lead.
- "Water deprived of air" and "Carrara water"Boiling drove off dissolved oxygen so the iron would stay in the ferrous state rather than throwing a rusty precipitate. Carrara water was a proprietary aerated water of the period, charged with carbonate of lime; it has no modern equivalent to substitute.
- Sulphate of sodaGlauber's salt, sodium sulphate, and the sulphate of magnesia in the Pyrmont formula is Epsom salt. Both are purgative in larger quantities than appear here, and the formulas are built to reproduce the published analysis of the springs. These waters were drunk as medicine, not as refreshment.
- The lemonade is a fragmentThe Portable Lemonade entry breaks off mid-sentence, with the essence of lemon quantity lost and no instruction for rubbing down and bottling the powder. It belongs to a different kind of receipt entirely and would need a complete text before anyone attempted it.
- If you want the effectSparkling mineral waters of every mineral profile are sold ready-made, and iron supplementation is a matter for a current, dosed product and a doctor. Use one of those rather than any reconstruction of this page.
Chalybeate means iron-bearing, from the Chalybes, an Anatolian people whom classical authors credited with ironworking, and chalybeate springs made the fortune of half the spa towns of Europe: Pyrmont, which nineteenth-century English writers often placed loosely in Westphalia though it lay in the principality of Waldeck-Pyrmont and is in Lower Saxony, Passy on the edge of Paris, Forges-les-Eaux, Bussang in the Vosges, Mont-Dore in the Auvergne, and in England Tunbridge Wells and the Brighton spring named here. By the middle of the nineteenth century chemists had analysed these waters closely enough to publish their salt content in grains per pint, and the obvious next step was to build them again from the bottle shelf, sparing the patient the journey and the hotel bill. Jonathan Pereira, cited here, was the author of The Elements of Materia Medica, one of the standard English pharmacology texts of the 1840s, and his appearance is a reminder that a book like Mackenzie's sat on the same shelf as the druggist's manuals. Its readers expected a household compendium to cover medicine, dyeing and varnish-making alongside dinner, and drew no sharp line between a receipt for a pudding and a receipt for a tonic.