Home › The Still and Distillation › Another Recipe
Another Recipe
To sixty gals. of pure proof spirits add one pound of sweet spirit of nitre, one pound of cassia-buds, ground, one pound of bitter almond meal (the cassia and almond meal to be mixed together before they are put to the spirits), two oz. of orris root, sliced, and about thirty or forty prune-stones; a little butyric ether or spirit of prunes may also be added; stir them all well together two or three times a day, for three days or more let them settle, then add one gal. of the best white wine vinegar, and if you wish to have it better than domestic brandy is in general, add to every four gals. one gal. of foreign brandy, and you will obtain a mixture nearly equal to the foreign produce.
How to Cut Foreign Brandy with Pure Spirits.
RECIPE No. 14.
To 100 gals. pure proof spirits, add : 65 66 2 66 Seignette brandy, sugar syrup, 1/2 pound black tea, 3 or 4 pounds prune kernals, mashed up and hung in little bags in the cask.
Stir up well one or two times a week. Color, if necessary. 56 TO IMPROVE ARMAGNAC BRANDY WITH SAINTONGE.
To make a Second Quality RECIPE No. 15.
To 50 gals. of the brandy made as per recipe No. 14, add: 50 gals. pure proof spirits.
Add 1 pound mashed prune kernals, same way as in recipe No. 14, and stir up as directed in that recipe.
To make a Third Quality.
RECIPE No. 16.
To 50 gals. of the brandy made as per recipe No. 15, add: 50 gals. pure proof spirits.
Add 1 lb. mashed prune kernals, same way as in recipe No. 14.
To Improve Saintonge Brandy with Cognac.
RECIPE No. 17.
To 25 gals. Cognac, add 75 gals. Saintonge brandy; then add, an infusion of 1/2 lb. liquorice root, boiled in 1 gal. of water, and filtered; when the brandy is thus mixed, add, to your taste, as many gals. of liquorice water (prepared as above) as you think will improve the flavor.
To Improve Armagnac Brandy with Saintonge.
RECIPE No. 18.
To + Saintonge brandy add Armagnac, then a decoction of liquorice root and water, as directed in Recipe No. 17.
TO IMPROVE THE FLAVOR OF INFERIOR BRANDY. 57 To Improve the Flavor of Inferior Brandy.
RECIPE No. 19.
To 100 gals. inferior brandy, add : 10 lbs. prunes, prepared as follows:- Put the prunes in an iron pan, over the fire, turn them over and over, for five minutes, until they are a little burned; then bruise them until the stones are broken, and steep the whole in spirits, sufficient in quantity to cover the prunes. If you desire to make a large quantity, it would be better to use a chopping-knife similar to either of those shown in Figs. 1 and 2. Your chopping-board should be of hard wood, with the grain at right angles; we would recommend a board not less than three inches Fig. 1.
Fig. 2. thick, smooth on both sides, so that either may be used, and about two feet square. On this should stand a loose, bottomless tub (see Fig. 3), to confine the materials, and the whole resting on the floor, should be used with a knife, sufficiently long in the handle to be employed by a person standing erect, and it should have a small crossbar for the hands, as A Fig. 3. shown in Fig. 4. Prunes Fig. 4. prepared in this way are called torrefied prunes, and are also much esteemed as a flavor for Port wine.
This is not a distilling recipe but a rectifier's formula: neutral spirit dressed up with flavouring agents so it can pass as aged French brandy. Several of those agents are poisons, and the page cannot be followed today.
- Bitter almond mealBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when wetted in the presence of the enzyme emulsin. A pound of the meal steeped in spirit gives a cyanide-bearing infusion with no way to measure or control the dose. Raw bitter almonds are for this reason not generally available for food use in the United States, and bitter almond flavouring is sold only with the prussic acid removed.
- Prune stones and "prune kernals"The kernels inside plum stones carry the same amygdalin chemistry as bitter almonds, and the benzaldehyde they yield is the almond-like note that reads as "cognac." Thirty to forty stones, or three to four pounds of mashed kernels hung in a cask, is an unmeasured dose of a cyanogenic material added to drinking spirit.
- Sweet spirit of nitreAn old pharmacy preparation of ethyl nitrite in alcohol, once dosed as a diaphoretic. It is not a food ingredient, it degrades to nitrite and nitrous fumes, and adding a pound of it to a cask of drinking spirit is outside any modern safety range.
- Butyric etherEthyl butyrate does survive as a legitimate flavour compound, sold today in food grade at parts-per-million levels. The nineteenth-century trade article was an industrial chemical of unstated purity, dosed by eye.
- Scale and legalityThe quantities run from sixty to one hundred gallons — a commercial rectifying house, not a kitchen. In the United States, blending and bottling spirits for sale requires federal permits, and compounding neutral spirit and selling it as Cognac, Armagnac or Saintonge would be straightforward fraud.
- What the harmless parts were doingCassia buds, orris root, black tea, sugar syrup and liquorice decoction are the cosmetic half of the formula: tannin and colour from tea, sweetness and body from syrup, spice and a fixative from cassia and orris. Torrefied prunes — scorched five minutes in an iron pan — supplied the caramel-and-dried-fruit character of barrel age.
- If you want brandy flavourUse a current, tested recipe or a food-grade flavouring from a reputable supplier. Nothing on this page should be reconstructed.
Books of this kind belong to the nineteenth-century trade of the rectifier, the middleman who bought cheap neutral spirit and sold it as something with a French address. The recipes are frank about it: cut Cognac with Saintonge, cut Saintonge with plain spirit, then repair the difference with prune kernels for the benzaldehyde note, tea for tannin, syrup for body and colour, if necessary. The prune-stone trick rests on real chemistry, since the almond-like aroma of amygdalin-bearing kernels genuinely overlaps with the aromatic character of aged grape brandy, and "torrefied prunes" were a recognised article of the flavouring trade, used for port as well.