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Vanilla Flavoring
Steep one dram of freshly-sliced vanilla bean in one pint of ninety-five per cent. alcohol for twenty days. At the end of that time filter the liquor, and bottle it ready for use.
This is a pharmacist's tincture written for a hotel kitchen that bought vanilla beans and grain alcohol by the case. The proportions and the alcohol strength both need translating.
- A dram is very little beanAn apothecaries' dram is 1/8 ounce, about 3.5-3.9 g, which is roughly one plump Madagascar bean or two thin ones. Steeped in a full pint that works out to about 8 g of bean per litre, against the 100 g per litre the U.S. standard of identity now requires for something labelled pure vanilla extract. For extract of modern strength, use ten to twelve beans per pint.
- PintTwo cups, 473 ml. Use a jar that the liquid nearly fills; less headspace means less alcohol evaporating over the twenty days.
- Ninety-five per cent alcoholThis means food-grade neutral grain spirit, sold today as 190-proof Everclear where state law permits. Denatured alcohol, methylated spirit, rubbing alcohol and isopropanol are not substitutes at any strength and are poisonous. Where high-proof spirit is unavailable, 40 per cent vodka works and is what most modern extract recipes assume.
- Why the strength mattersVanillin dissolves readily in strong alcohol, but a number of the minor aromatics that give vanilla its roundness come out better with water present. Extract made at 95 per cent is sharp and thin; cutting the finished tincture with water to somewhere around 35-40 per cent alcohol gives a fuller flavour and matches commercial practice.
- Twenty daysReasonable for high-proof spirit with the beans sliced open, though flavour keeps developing for months. At vodka strength allow six to eight weeks, shaking every few days, before you judge it.
- FilteringA paper coffee filter or two layers of muslin will take out the seeds and fibre. It will run slowly and should not be forced.
- Yield and keepingOne pint, enough for years of domestic baking. Store in a dark bottle away from heat; the alcohol keeps it from spoiling, though the aroma fades over time, and the spent beans can be left in the bottle to go on giving.
Household flavouring extracts of this era were pharmacy formulas as much as kitchen ones, and the phrasing here gives it away: a dram rather than an ounce, ninety-five per cent alcohol rather than spirit, and the instruction to filter and bottle. Cookbooks and dispensatories of the 1890s carried similar tinctures. Vanilla itself is the cured pod of a Mexican orchid, used by Mesoamerican peoples long before Europeans reached it, and it only became affordable enough for hotel-scale use after the hand-pollination method credited to Edmond Albius on Reunion in 1841 allowed the vine to be grown commercially outside its native range and its native bee. By the time Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896 the Waldorf's kitchen would have gone through vanilla in quantity, in ices and custards and pastry, and making up its own extract from whole beans was both cheaper and more reliable than buying bottled flavourings, which at the time were widely adulterated with coumarin from tonka bean or with synthetic vanillin, then made from clove oil or from conifer-derived coniferin.