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Extract of Vanilla
Cut and chop very fine two or three vanilla beans, or pound them in a mortar. Stir in with them a small quantity of powdered sugar. Put the vanilla and sugar into a pint bottle, add to it one tablespoonful of water, and allow it to stand all night. The next day pour on it one-half pint of spirits of wine, cork it well, and let it stand for a month, shaking it well every day.
A straightforward maceration that still works, provided you understand what "spirits of wine" meant in 1896 and what the phrase can mean on a modern label.
- Spirits of wineIn period usage this is rectified ethanol — drinkable grain spirit, usually around 90-95 percent. Anything sold today as "spirits of wine," "methylated spirit" or "denatured alcohol" in a hardware or art-supply shop contains methanol or other poisons and must never go into food. Use a high-proof neutral drinking spirit; plain vodka at 40 percent also works, only more slowly.
- MeasuresHalf a pint is one cup, 8 fl oz. The "pint bottle" is a 16 oz bottle, which leaves useful headroom for shaking.
- Bean quantityTwo or three beans per cup is thin by current standards. Commercial single-fold extract works out to roughly 1 oz of beans — six or so average pods — per cup of spirit. Three is drinkable; six gives noticeably more depth.
- Chopping versus splittingChopping or pounding does speed extraction, but it also puts seed grit and bean fibre into the finished bottle, which will need straining through muslin. Splitting the pods lengthwise and cutting them to fit is the usual modern compromise.
- The sugar and the overnight waterThe tablespoon of water softens the pods and pulls out the water-soluble aromatics that pure spirit leaves behind — one reason commercial extract is made at 35-40 percent alcohol rather than 95. Do not skip the overnight rest.
- The month, and afterA month of daily shaking is generally treated as the minimum; longer maceration of three months or more is usually said to give a rounder result. Leave the pods in the bottle and top up with fresh spirit as you draw it down.
- YieldRoughly one cup of extract. Store in dark glass at room temperature; refrigeration offers no advantage and may cause cloudiness.
Vanilla is the cured seed pod of a Mexican orchid, cultivated long before contact by the Totonac and later traded through the Aztec world; it stayed a Mexican monopoly until the discovery of hand-pollination in the nineteenth century made plantation growing possible in the Indian Ocean colonies. Réunion was the early beneficiary, with Madagascar and Tahiti supplying much of the world market later. That expansion is part of why a hotel kitchen in the 1890s could buy beans by the pound and make its own extract. Commercial flavouring extracts of the period were frequently adulterated, often with tonka bean, whose coumarin smells convincingly of vanilla and was later banned from American food. A pastry department that macerated its own beans in known-good spirit knew what was in the bottle.