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Ambergris
cool. Use in such proportions as you think will give a proper flavor. (See "Recipe 17.") The manufacturer must be his own judge as to the quantity to be used. Raspberry Syrup.
This syrup is sometimes used to give a vinous body and flavor to brandy. (See "Recipe No. 8.") It is made thus: 2 pints of filtered raspberry juice. 4¼ lbs. of sugar.
Select the fruit, either white or red. Having picked them over, mash them in a pan, which put in a warm place until fermentation has commenced. Let it stand for about three days. All mucilaginous fruits require this, or else they would jelly when bottled. Now filter the juice through a close flannel bag, or blotting-paper, and add sugar in the proportion mentioned above; this had better be powdered. Place the syrup on the fire, and as it heats skim it carefully, but don't let it boil; or you may mix in a glass vessel or earthenware jar, and place in a pan of water on the fire. Boil, strain, and cork as directed in the recipe for making quince syrup. Use a pint to 40 gals. brandy.
Ambergris.
This substance, which is found floating on the sea, or thrown by the waves upon the shores of various countries, is now generally believed to be produced in the intestines of the spermaceti whale, and perhaps in those of some other fish. From the high price of the genuine ambergris, it is very frequently adulterated. When quite pure and of the best quality it is nearly wholly soluble in hot alcohol and ether, and yields about 85° of
This page runs two things together: a working raspberry syrup formula meant for doctoring brandy, and an encyclopedia-style note on ambergris. Neither can be followed today as printed, and the reasons are different in each case.
- The sugar quantityThe printed page reads 4¼ lbs. of sugar to two pints of juice, which is what our text now gives.
- The deliberate three-day fermentThe instruction is to mash raw fruit, hold it in a warm place until fermentation begins, and leave it three days before straining. That is an uncontrolled open ferment with no temperature or time controls. The text does direct a boil at the end, by cross-reference to the quince syrup recipe, but gives no times or temperatures for it.
- Bottling without measured processingThe recipe defers to "the recipe for making quince syrup" for boiling, straining and corking. Corking a partly fermented sugar syrup for storage without specified fill temperature, headspace or processing time is home preserving without any of the numbers that make it sound. A current tested syrup or shrub recipe should be used instead.
- Ambergris is not an ingredient you may buyAmbergris is not an ingredient you may casually buy -- Ambergris is a sperm whale product. Sperm whales are listed on CITES Appendix I and, in the United States, protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act; in the US, possession, import and sale of ambergris are generally treated as prohibited. CITES itself regards ambergris as naturally excreted waste and does not control it, and the trade is legal in some other countries, so the position depends on jurisdiction. The solubility test described here is a purity check for a substance most readers cannot lawfully obtain.
- What the syrup was actually for"Vinous body" means the impression of wine-derived weight and fruit that aged grape brandy has and that neutral spirit does not. A pint to 40 gallons is a flavouring dose, not a sweetener, which tells you the target spirit was thin and needed dressing up.
- "Mucilaginous fruits"The pectin in raspberries is what the fermentation step was meant to break down, so the syrup would pour rather than set in the bottle. Modern practice achieves the same clarity with enzymes or simple filtration of pressed juice, without holding raw mash warm for days.
- Filtering through flannel or blotting-paperBoth were standard 19th-century clarifying media. A jelly bag or coffee filter is the direct equivalent, though the wider problem with this formula is not the filtration.
This is a page from the trade literature of spirit compounding, a large and largely unregulated business in the nineteenth century: neutral or lightly flavoured alcohol was coloured, sweetened and "fined" until it could pass as aged French brandy, Jamaica rum or Irish whiskey. Manuals like this one sold the recipes to rectifiers and grocers, and their contents are a fair index of what customers thought good brandy tasted like — fruit, faint sweetness, a little weight on the palate — rather than of what brandy is. Ambergris, a waxy concretion formed in the gut of the sperm whale and found washed ashore, was valued chiefly by perfumers, but compounders used trace amounts as a fixative and aromatic in high-priced cordials and imitation spirits; its cost made adulteration routine, hence the solubility test given here. Practices of this kind are part of what drove the food and drink adulteration laws passed on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades around 1900.