Important: Safety Warning
This page contains a formula or preparation using substances now known to be dangerously toxic, such as arsenic, mercury, lead, or cyanide compounds. Exposure to these substances can cause severe poisoning, permanent injury, or death.
This page describes additives or treatments for food or drink that are now known to be toxic and are prohibited in food today.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Amazon Bitters
alcohol; gallon best sherry or madeira wine, and 1 pint wine vinegar.
Brandy.
Take 40 gallons French proof spirit, 1 gallon brandy flavor (see page 59), 1 quart hickory-nut tincture (see page 117), 1 drachm oil of cognac dissolved in 95 per cent. alcohol. and 1 pint wine vinegar. Color with caramel Bitters made with Essences. 40 gals. sprit, proof, 1 drachm each oil of anise, caraway, lemon, orange, and cinnamon, 1/2 drachm each bitter almonds and cloves, 1 gal. sugar syrup.
Cut the oils in alcohol, 95 per cent., and mix. Color with brandy coloring.
Amazon Bitters.
This is a compounder's sheet from the trade rather than a household recipe: spirit is measured in forty-gallon lots and flavour comes from bought essential oils. The formula that survives here cannot be made in a kitchen today, and the reasons are chemical rather than a matter of technique.
- Oil of bitter almondsThis is the disqualifying ingredient. Nineteenth-century oil of bitter almonds was distilled from Prunus kernel meal and carried free hydrocyanic (prussic) acid alongside the benzaldehyde that gives the almond smell. It was a recognised poison in the period's own pharmacy texts, and the amount called for here (the figure before "drachm each bitter almonds and cloves" is missing from the text) is not a trace amount.
- Caramel and "brandy coloring"Trade colouring preparations of this era were not standardised, and nothing here tells you which colouring house or formula was meant, which is itself a reason to treat the sheet as history only.
- What a drachm wasA fluid drachm is one eighth of a fluid ounce, roughly 3.7 ml. The oils were meant to be cut in 95 per cent alcohol first because they will not disperse into a spirit-water mixture on their own.
- Proof spirit"French proof spirit" and "40 gals. sprit, proof" refer to a diluted neutral spirit at the trade's working strength, not to 40 per cent ABV vodka as sold now. Historic proof standards differed between France, Britain and the United States, so the strength intended is not recoverable from the text alone.
- The scaleEvery quantity assumes a forty-gallon barrel, about 150 litres. These are wholesale compounding figures for a merchant blending and selling under a house name, not a batch anyone was expected to make at home.
- If you want bittersUse a current recipe from a modern source. Sweet-almond or benzaldehyde flavourings sold for food use today are regulated products and are not what this page is calling for.
The nineteenth-century "liquor manufacturer" manual was a genre of its own: a book that taught a merchant how to turn cheap neutral spirit into something that could be sold as brandy, cognac, or a proprietary bitters, using essential oils, tinctures, sugar syrup, a splash of vinegar for bite, and caramel for the colour that age would otherwise have supplied. Bitters in particular sold well because they were pitched as medicinal, which in many markets meant they escaped both the tax and the moral objection attached to plain liquor; grand exotic names of the Amazon-and-Orinoco sort were part of the pitch, often said to promise rare tropical botanicals over a base that was, at least in some formulas, anise, orange peel and cinnamon. Books like this one are best read as evidence of what the pure food and drug legislation of the early twentieth century was written to stop, since the same pages that list harmless spices also reach without comment for compounds now known to be poisonous.