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Wine of Coca
Fluid extract of coca, 2 ounces; port wine, 1 gallon; sherry wine, 2 gallons; powdered orris-root, 2 ounces. Color to suit. Let it stand 48 hours, then filter. The finished product should measure 3 gallons.
This is a soda-fountain formula for coca wine, a class of tonic that was legal and commonplace when the book was printed and is not legal or safe now. The notes below explain what the ingredients were and why the formula is a historical document rather than a working recipe.
- Fluid extract of cocaThis is an alcoholic extract of Erythroxylum coca leaf, and its active constituent is cocaine. Two fluid ounces of a pharmacy-strength fluid extract spread across three gallons is a small but real dose in each glass, with no assay, no labelling and no control over how much any one customer drank. Coca leaf and its extracts are controlled substances in the United States and most other countries; possession and preparation are criminal offences, and the only legal domestic coca importation is for a decocainised flavouring made under DEA licence.
- Cocaine in alcoholDissolving a coca extract in wine is not a neutral act. Cocaine and ethanol taken together form cocaethylene in the body, a metabolite with a longer half-life than cocaine itself and greater cardiac toxicity.
- Orris-rootPowdered orris is the dried rhizome of Iris germanica, I. pallida and related irises, used here as a fixative and for its violet note. It is still sold for perfumery and gin botanicals, but it is a recognised contact and respiratory allergen and is not a general-purpose food ingredient; two ounces steeped in three gallons is a perfumer's proportion, not a cook's.
- "Color to suit"In a fountain book of this period this most likely points to whatever colouring stood on the druggist's shelf -- caramel, cochineal, or the coal-tar dyes, some of which were later delisted as unsafe. The instruction assumes a dispenser with a colour cabinet and no requirement to declare what went in.
- The arithmeticThree gallons of wine plus two fluid ounces of extract and two ounces of powdered orris yields the stated three gallons only because the orris is filtered out and a little is lost in the pad. The forty-eight-hour stand is a maceration, and the filtration is there to clear the sediment, not to remove anything active.
- If you want the flavourThe bitter-aromatic profile that coca wine was prized for is approximated in modern commercial products by decocainised coca extract, available only to licensed manufacturers. There is no home substitute, and a current recipe for a wine-based aromatic tonic should be used instead.
Coca wine was the invention of the Corsican chemist Angelo Mariani, whose Vin Mariani, first sold in Paris in the 1860s, macerated coca leaf in Bordeaux and was endorsed in print by popes, monarchs and Sarah Bernhardt in one of the earliest large-scale celebrity advertising campaigns. Its success bred imitators on both sides of the Atlantic, among them John Pemberton's French Wine Coca of Atlanta, which he reworked into a non-alcoholic syrup after local prohibition; formulas like this one let any druggist compound a house version from stock bottles rather than buy the branded article. The soda fountain sat inside the pharmacy, and its counter blurred the line between refreshment and medicine, so a coca tonic belonged there as naturally as a phosphate. That arrangement ended in stages: the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 forced disclosure of cocaine on labels, and the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914 brought the trade under federal control, after which recipes of this kind survive only in old books.