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Apple Brandy
Apple brandy is a spirit made wholesale in the United States from apples, and is more familiarly known as Apple Jack. To five barrels of good rectified spirit, add one gallon of syrup of gum-arabic, one pound of oil of apple and half a pound of oil of pear. Let it remain for some time in the barrel, then stir well, and filter.
This is not a recipe for brandy at all but a nineteenth-century compounder's formula for imitating one: neutral spirit dosed with synthetic fruit essences and given body with gum syrup. It cannot be made today, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- "Oil of apple" is not apple oilIn the trade literature of the period, oil of apple meant amyl valerate (amyl valerianate) and oil of pear meant amyl acetate, both prepared from fusel oil. Amyl acetate survives as a permitted flavouring substance, but material sold as a laboratory reagent is not food grade and carries no purity guarantee. A pound of one and half a pound of the other is a flavouring dose in the range of the essence factory, not the kitchen.
- ScaleFive barrels of spirit is roughly 150 to 250 gallons depending on which barrel the writer meant. Nothing about this formula is domestic; it is a wholesale rectifier's sheet reproduced in a chef's book.
- Rectified spiritThis means high-proof neutral alcohol, essentially undiluted. No dilution, no proofing figure and no ageing schedule are given, so the finished strength is undefined.
- LegalityCompounding, flavouring and rebottling spirits for sale, or producing them at home, is regulated in most jurisdictions and generally requires a permit.
- Syrup of gum arabicA sugar syrup thickened with acacia gum, once standard for giving thin spirit a rounder mouthfeel. Gum arabic is still a legitimate food additive.
- If you want apple brandyBuy calvados or an American applejack from a distiller. There is no household version of this page.
Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896, at the tail end of a long era in which "apple brandy" on a bar shelf might be the genuine article, distilled from cider in New Jersey or Virginia, or a compound built in a warehouse from cheap grain spirit and essences. Formulas like this one circulated widely in liquor-dealers' manuals and druggists' formularies of the 1870s and 1880s, and Oscar seems to have lifted this entry from that literature rather than from anything done in the Waldorf's own kitchen. The fruit esters he calls for came out of the same mid-century chemistry that gave confectioners pear drops and pineapple candy: amyl acetate and its relatives were among the first synthetic flavourings made at commercial scale. Public disquiet about exactly this kind of substitution helped drive the American pure-food agitation that culminated in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, a decade after this book was printed, after which such a compound could still be sold, but only if it was labelled as an imitation.