Important: Safety Warning
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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Auction Rum
Indies. and in this country is chiefly used to make punch. Arrack is distilled from the fermented juice of the cocoa nut and the fermented infusion of rice in husk or ricebeer. Some varieties are pleasant flavored and as wholesome as the other spirits of commerce, but the inferior qualities are regarded as more heating and apt to disagree with the stomach than either brandy, whiskey , rum, or gin. When sliced pine-apples are put into good arrack, and the spirit kept for some time, it mellows down and acquires a most delicious flavor, and is thought by many to be then unrivaled for making nectarial punch.
To 12 gals. pale rum, add : 2 oz. flowers of benzoin, 1½" balsam of Tolu, 1 " sliced pine-apple.
Digest with occasional agitation for a month; then add : 1/2 pint raw milk. Agitate well for 15 minutes, and rack in a week. A fine imitation.
To make Batavia Arrack.
RECIPE No. 11.
To 8 gals. rice spirit, 10 o. p., add : 66 3 fine Batavia arrack, 4 drachms tincture of flowers of benzoin.
This is a splendid imitation of the genuine article. Auction Rum.
Is prepared from plain or neutral spirit. The spirit is educed to any proof with soft water, and a fictitious strength is given with Guinea pepper, grains of Paradise, and pellitory, about one fourth genuine Jamaica rum is added, together with beading and coloring. (See "Auction Brandy.") Like all auction liquors, this is cheap,
This page is two things at once: a workable-looking fining and flavouring formula for imitation arrack, and a frank description of how "auction" spirits were faked for sale. Neither should be attempted, and the reasons are specific.
- Pellitory is the disqualifying ingredient"Pellitory" here is pellitory of Spain, the root of Anacyclus pyrethrum, used because it burns and numbs the mouth and so mimics alcoholic strength. It is a mucous-membrane irritant and sialagogue with no place in a drink, and its use here is plainly to deceive a buyer about the strength of the spirit.
- "Fictitious strength" means deliberate deceptionGuinea pepper (capsicum) and grains of paradise were added so that watered spirit would still bite on the tongue. Both were named as prohibited adulterants in early nineteenth-century British excise legislation, chiefly in the rules binding brewers, and the whole point of the technique here is to make a weak, cheap liquor pass as a strong one.
- "Beading" was rarely harmlessBeading liquid was sold to make small bubbles cling to the side of the glass, the old proof test. Nineteenth-century beading preparations were variously based on sugar, glycerine, sweet oil or sulphuric acid, and the book does not say which is meant. An unspecified proprietary additive of this era should not be assumed to be food-safe.
- "Coloring" is equally unspecifiedSpirit colouring of this period was commonly burnt sugar, but the book does not say so, and not every colouring preparation of the era was harmless. There is no way to reproduce the instruction as written without guessing at the substance meant.
- Balsam of Tolu and benzoin are resins, not flavouringsBalsam of Tolu and benzoin are perfumery and pharmacy materials -- Both appear in the arrack imitation above as fixatives, dosed by the ounce into twelve gallons; "flowers of benzoin" is the sublimate of gum benzoin rather than the gum itself. Benzoin and Tolu are both known contact allergens.
- The raw milk step is genuine practice, but not a rescueMilk fining, curdling milk in spirit and racking off the clear liquor, is a real and still-used clarification method and is the one sound technique on the page. It does nothing about the pepper, the pellitory, the beading or the colouring, and does not make the rest of the formula usable.
- If you want the flavourPineapple steeped in a good rum or in genuine Batavia arrack is the honest version of what this page is imitating, and a current recipe for a pineapple rum or an arrack punch will get you there. Use one.
History: The book says only that auction liquors are cheap. Such spirits were compounded down for the low-priced trade, with about a quarter genuine Jamaica rum carried for the aroma while the pepper, beading and colouring supplied the impression of strength and age. Batavia arrack, distilled in Java from fermented rice and sugarcane, reached Europe through the Dutch trade and was a mainstay of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century punch, expensive enough that imitations were worth compounding. Manuals of this kind were working books for the liquor trade, and their candour about grains of paradise, capsicum and pellitory belongs to the conditions that pure food and drink legislation later addressed.