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A Splendid Recipe
90 gals. plain proof spirit, 3¼ lbs. red Peruvian bark, 3¼ lbs. calisaya bark, 1⅛ lbs. calamus root, 4¾ lbs. orange peel, 3½ oz. each cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, 2 oz. cassia buds, 6½ lbs. red saunders.
First mash all the ingredients, put them in the spirit, and let them infuse fourteen days, being careful to stir the mixture well twice every day. Then rack off and color with 11 pints (1) gals.) brandy coloring, to get a dark red tint. Stir a quarter of an hour. Dissolve 30 lbs. of white sugar in 30 gals. water, add, and again stir half an hour. Let the mixture rest 4 or 5 days, and when bright, bottle. If the red saunders is not used, the color will be a bright amber.
By substituting New England rum for the spirit, the celebrated Plantation Bitters may be obtained. **This is the finest bitters in the market. Com-
This is a compounder's formula for bottled bitters, written for a liquor merchant working in hundred-gallon lots. Several of its ingredients are no longer permitted in food or drink, and the medicinal barks are present at doses that were the whole point of the product.
- Calamus root is not a food ingredientSweet flag (Acorus calamus) contains β-asarone, and calamus and its oil were prohibited as food additives in the United States in 1968 following animal studies showing tumour formation. A pound of it steeped in the batch is not a trace flavouring.
- The bark load is a drug doseSixty-eight pounds of red cinchona and calisaya bark in roughly 120 finished gallons works out to a quinine and cinchonine concentration far above the 83 parts per million that regulations now allow in quinine-flavoured beverages. Sustained intake at medicinal levels causes cinchonism — tinnitus, visual disturbance, nausea — and quinine can trigger severe immune-mediated thrombocytopenia in susceptible people.
- Red saunders is a protected species"Red saunders" is red sandalwood, Pterocarpus santalinus, listed on CITES Appendix II and heavily restricted in trade. The recipe itself notes it contributes nothing but colour; without it the liquor comes out amber.
- Reading the quantities"Plain proof spirit" means neutral spirit at proof, historically 50 percent alcohol by volume in the American system. The bracketed "(1) gals." does not agree with "11 pints" — 11 pints is not one gallon — so the text as it stands is garbled and the colouring quantity cannot be read reliably.
- Brandy colouringNot brandy. It was burnt-sugar caramel colouring, used to give cheap spirit the look of age.
- Cassia budsThe dried unripe flower buds of Cinnamomum cassia, once a standard grocery spice and now sold mainly by specialist spice merchants. They are not interchangeable with cassia bark.
- ScaleThe batch finishes at about 120 gallons before losses to the marc. Nothing in the method is written for domestic volumes, and the fourteen-day infusion assumes a cooperage-sized vessel that can be stirred twice daily.
- If you want bittersUse a current recipe from a modern source, built on food-grade botanicals at food-grade concentrations.
Bottled "bitters" of this kind sat deliberately astride the line between medicine and liquor: cinchona bark, the source of quinine, gave a genuine pharmacological alibi for what was mostly sweetened spirit, and in the United States a preparation sold as medicine escaped some of the taxes and licensing that fell on plain whiskey. Peruvian bark and calisaya are both cinchonas — the second from Cinchona calisaya, prized for its high quinine content — and their bitterness is the reason tonic water still tastes as it does. Drake's Plantation Bitters, named at the end of this formula, was among the most heavily advertised American proprietary medicines of the 1860s, sold in square cabin-shaped bottles moulded with the cryptic mark "S.T.-1860-X" and traded on a rum base and a tale of a Caribbean origin. Books like this one existed to let any merchant knock off such brands, and their casual instruction to "substitute New England rum" and thereby obtain "the celebrated Plantation Bitters" says most of what needs saying about how much the famous names were worth.