No. 164

Rum Flavored with Vanilla; Spirit of Strawberries, Raspberries and Apricots

Rhum Vanille; Esprit de Fraises, Framboises et Abricots

Rum flavored with Vanilla.—Put twelve vanilla beans cut in pieces in a quart bottle with a quarter of a pint of boiling water, twelve hours later fill up the bottle with good rum and leave it for ten days; it will then be ready for use.

Spirit of Strawberries, etc.—Crush thirty pounds of strawberries or raspberries; to this pulp add three quarts of spirits of wine, put into an earthen crock, cover and leave to infuse for fifteen days. Distill the fruits in an alembic in a bain-marie and continue the distillation until the liquor reaches twenty degrees. Spirit of apricots is made the same way only taking twenty pounds of fruit instead of thirty for each three quarts of spirit. The fruits are pressed through a sieve and the kernels broken and crushed in a mortar, then mixed in with the apricots.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Two very different procedures share one entry. The first is a simple maceration; the second and third call for redistilling alcohol in a still, and one of them deliberately adds crushed apricot kernels. Those cannot be reproduced in a home kitchen.

Distillation is the blocking problem"Distill the fruits in an alembic in a bain-marie" means concentrating alcohol vapour over heat. In the United States and most other jurisdictions operating a still to produce spirits without a federal permit is illegal regardless of scale, and an improvised still filled with high-proof vapour is a fire and explosion hazard in an ordinary kitchen.
Apricot kernelsThe apricot version has the stones "broken and crushed in a mortar, then mixed in" — this is what supplies the bitter-almond note. Apricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide on contact with moisture and enzymes; a distilled or infused extract concentrates that flavour compound along with the risk, and no quantity here is measured against any safe limit. Commercial apricot and almond liqueurs are made under controlled conditions that this recipe does not describe.
"Spirits of wine"Nineteenth-century spirits of wine is rectified ethanol, roughly 95 percent alcohol by volume. It is not the same thing as a bottle of vodka or brandy, it is not sold to consumers in many places, and it is flammable at room temperature.
"Until the liquor reaches twenty degrees"Most likely an alcoholometer reading rather than a temperature. The scale is not specified in the text, and the figure does not translate cleanly to modern proof or ABV. Treat it as unspecified rather than guessing.
ScaleThirty pounds of strawberries for three quarts of spirit is professional-kitchen volume. The vanilla infusion, by contrast, makes a single quart.
The archaic measuresA quarter of a pint is a gill, or half a cup. A quart bottle here is the US quart, 32 fl oz, so the boiling water accounts for about an eighth of the finished volume.
If you want fruit liqueurUse a current recipe for an infused or macerated cordial, which relies on steeping in purchased spirit rather than distilling, and which does not use stone-fruit kernels.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put these under "Elementary Methods" because a chef of the 1890s expected to manufacture his own flavourings rather than buy them: vanilla extract, fruit spirits and essences were kitchen products, not grocery products. The vanilla rum is a straightforward maceration of the sort still used behind bars, and the small charge of boiling water first is there to soften the beans. The fruit spirits belong to an older European tradition of the eau-de-vie and the perfumer's alembic, equipment a large hotel kitchen genuinely kept on hand in an era before commercial extract houses made it unnecessary. The apricot method — the pressing of the pulp and pounding the stones in with it — is the same logic behind noyau and the old bitter-almond flavourings: the kernel, not the flesh, carries the characteristic scent, a shortcut the period used freely and one that later food regulation curtailed.