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Distillation (Take of spearmint leaves fresh)
Take of spearmint leaves, fresh, any quantity; water, 3 times as much. Distil as long as the liquor which comes over has a considerable taste or smell of the mint. Or, take spearmint leaves, dried, 1½ lbs., water as much as is sufficient to prevent burning. Draw off by distillation 1 gall. Cinnamon Water.
Take of bruised cinnamon, 1 lb.; water, 2 galls.
Simmer in a still for 1/2 an hour, put what comes over into the still again; when cold strain through flannel.
Eau Sans-Pareil.
Take 2 galls. of fine old honey-water, put it into a still capable of holding 4 galls., and add the thinly pared rinds of 6 or 8 fresh citrons, neither green nor mellow ripe. Then add 60 or 70 drops of fine Roman bergamot; and, having luted the apparatus well, let the whole digest in a moderate heat for 24 hours. Draw off, by a water-bath heat, about 1 gall.
Jessamine Water.
Take 6 lbs. of the white sweet almond cakes from which jessamine oil has been made abroad; beat and sift them to a fine powder, and put to it as much fresh oil of jessamine as will be required to make it into a stiff paste. Let this paste be dissolved in about 6 qts. of spring-water, which has been previously well boiled, and left until it has become about half cold. Stir and mix the whole well together; and when the oil and water have been well combined, let the whole stand until the powder has fallen to the bottom of the vessel. Now pour the liquid off gently, and filter it through cotton, in a large tin funnel, into the glass bottle in which it is to be kept for use. The powder or sediment which has been left at the bottom of the vessel, when dried by the heat of the sun, answers very well for making almond paste for the hands.
Jamaica Pepper Water.
Jamaica pepper is the fruit of a tall tree growing in the mountainous parts of Jamaica, where it is much cultivated because of the great profit arising from the cured fruit, sent in large quantities annually into Europe. Take of Jamaica pepper, lb.; water, 2 galls.; draw off 1 gall. with a pretty brisk fire. The oil of this fruit is very ponderous, and therefore this water is made in an alembic.
Myrtle Water.
Infuse 8 or 10 lbs. of the cuttings of green myrtle in nearly 20 galls of rain or river water, and add thereto a pint of fresh yeast, after it has stood for 24 hours. At the end of another day and night, put the whole into a still, with 1 lb. of bay-salt.
Draw off the whole of the water, and next day infuse more myrtle leaves as before, and distill again. Repeat the same a third time.
Orange-flower Water. used in flatulent colics. A wineglassful may be taken, and often repeated.
This is a run of perfumer's and apothecary's distilled waters copied one after another under a single heading, and most of them are not food at all. Several cannot be attempted in a domestic kitchen, and one is straightforward spirit distillation.
- Eau Sans-Pareil is spirit distillation"Honey-water" in this period was a compounded alcoholic perfume, not sweetened water, and drawing a gallon off it in a luted still over a water bath is distilling alcohol. Operating a still to separate spirit is licensed or prohibited almost everywhere, and the practice carries a fire and vapour-explosion risk quite apart from the law.
- Luted apparatus under heatTo "lute" is to seal the joints of a still with a paste of flour, clay or lime so vapour escapes only by the head and worm. If that outlet chokes there is no relief path, which is how stills burst; the direction assumes a still of the period and an operator who knows its behaviour.
- Perfumers' oils are not flavouringsThe Roman bergamot, the oil of jessamine and the imported jessamine cakes are perfumery materials. Modern equivalents sold as fragrance oils are not food-grade and are not safe to swallow, whatever the old text implies about "waters."
- Jamaica pepperThis is allspice, Pimenta dioica, and the botanical note about the Jamaican mountain tree is accurate for the period. The pepper quantity has dropped out of the text entirely -- it reads "lb." with no number -- so the proportion cannot be recovered.
- The myrtle water is a fermentationTwenty gallons of river water, myrtle cuttings and a pint of yeast standing two days is an uncontrolled ferment in an open vessel, then distilled three times over with fresh leaves. Bay-salt is coarse unrefined sea salt; the text does not say why it is added. None of this is a food process.
- ScaleThese are trade quantities: gallons of water, pounds of leaf, a still holding four gallons. The book is speaking to a small manufacturer or a country house stillroom, not to a cook working with a saucepan.
- The orange-flower water entry is a fragmentOnly the dose survives -- "used in flatulent colics. A wineglassful may be taken, and often repeated" -- with no method given in this text. Orange-flower water is sold ready-made and food-grade today; buy it rather than reconstructing this.
The compendium in which this receipt appears -- often attributed to Mackenzie and circulated in many editions through the nineteenth century under various receipt-count titles -- was a compendium rather than a cookbook, and its distillation section belongs to the stillroom -- the room in a large household where the women of the family made cordial waters, medicinal simples and perfumes. Distilled aromatic waters sat on the boundary between kitchen, medicine chest and dressing table: spearmint and cinnamon water were carminatives given for wind and colic as much as flavourings, while Eau Sans-Pareil and jessamine water were straightforwardly cosmetic. The jessamine entry is a reminder of how the trade worked; the "almond cakes from which jessamine oil has been made abroad" are the spent cake left over from scent-making elsewhere, still fragrant enough to be worth reworking. By the time this book was being reprinted, commercial chemists were supplying such waters ready-bottled, and the domestic still was on its way out of the English house.