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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.
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Brandy
(See page 64.) This tincture imparts a fine taste as well as age to any whiskey or brandy, and is cheaper and better than the imported prune wine, juice, or extract; these are so weak in spirit that the quantity required to impart flavor will be sufficient to reduce below proof the spirits to which they are added. By making the tincture proof, each gallon of tincture adds a gallon to the quantity of proof spirit, costing only the price of the prunes, say about 36 cents a gallon. Raisin Tincture.
Mash 1 box, say 25 lbs., raisins, stems and all together, infuse them 20 days in 5 gals. French spirits, proof. Stir every day twice or more, and use the tincture according to prescription for Brandy. (See page 65.) N. B. Prune and raisin tincture, when combined with rum and sherry wine, are the finest of brandy flavors.
Cognac Brandy. 40 gals. French spirit, 10 A. P., 20 drops oil of cognac, 15 drops oil of bitter almonds. Dissolve the oils in a little spirits, 95 per cent. 2 pints tincture of raisin, 2 pints tincture of prunes (prepared as directed on page 258), 3 pints Jamaica rum (best), 3 pints sherry wine (best), 1/2 oz. ether (acetic). Color. The addition of 1 pound glycerine will impart age.
Brandy.
Take 40 gallons French proof spirit; infuse for 8 hours 1 drachm star-anise, breaking the star only, in 1 pint 95 per cent. alcohol, and add the infusion to the spirit; with one drachm oil of cognac, and 12 drops oil of bitter almonds, each dissolved in 95 per cent.
This is a rectifier's formula — a set of instructions for turning neutral spirit into something that will pass as aged cognac — and it cannot be followed today. The notes below explain the terms and the specific hazards.
- Oil of bitter almonds is the reason to stop hereUnrectified oil of bitter almonds contains hydrogen cyanide, historically at several per cent by weight; it was a recognised poison in the nineteenth century and remains one. The book calls for 12 to 15 drops in a 40-gallon batch, but the potency of any given sample was never standardised, and there is no way to dose it safely at home. Food-grade almond extract sold today is a different product entirely and is not a substitute in a recipe of this design.
- Acetic ether and the other congeners"Ether (acetic)" is ethyl acetate, added to mimic the esters that form slowly in a cask. It is extremely volatile and flammable, and the industrial grades available to a nineteenth-century liquor merchant were not made to any food standard.
- Compounding spirit is regulatedIn the United States and most other jurisdictions, blending, flavouring and colouring distilled spirits for sale is licensed activity under the same rules that govern distilling. The batch sizes here (40 gallons) point to commercial rather than domestic use, and a private person cannot legally work these formulas for sale.
- "French proof spirit" and "10 A. P."In American trade usage of the period proof spirit was about 50 per cent alcohol by volume; "10 A. P." is generally read as ten above proof, i.e. a somewhat stronger base. The 95 per cent alcohol used to dissolve the oils corresponds to what would now be sold as neutral grain spirit.
- Drachms, drops and boxesA fluid drachm is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, about 3.7 ml; a drop is roughly 0.05 ml, so these are trace additions to a very large volume. A "box" of raisins is given by the author himself as 25 lb.
- Glycerine "to impart age"Glycerine adds body and sweetness on the palate, which reads as maturity. It is the frankest admission in the passage that nothing here has aged: the whole formula is an attempt to counterfeit the effect of years in oak within a few weeks.
- The colour"Color" is left unqualified. Burnt sugar caramel was a common spirit colouring of the period, but the instruction is unusable as written because it does not say what to use.
- If you want the flavourThe raisin and prune tinctures on their own are simply fruit macerated in spirit, a technique still used in domestic liqueur-making. The brandy formulas that follow them are not salvageable; use a current recipe if you want to infuse a spirit.
Manuals of this kind circulated widely in the American liquor trade between the Civil War and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and they were sold openly to wholesalers, saloon keepers and "rectifiers" — merchants whose business was buying cheap neutral spirit by the barrel and turning it into branded cognac, Irish whiskey or Holland gin. Demand for imitation cognac is often said to have grown from the 1870s onward, when phylloxera devastated the French vineyards and genuine brandy became scarce and dear, though the connection is difficult to demonstrate from a book like this. The economics are stated plainly in the text: a gallon of prune tincture made at proof costs about thirty-six cents and adds a gallon of saleable spirit, whereas imported prune juice is too weak to flavour without diluting the batch below proof. Oil of bitter almonds appears here because it supplies the benzaldehyde note associated with grape spirit and stone fruit; its cyanide content was known at the time to pharmacists, who sold a rectified version for medicinal use, but nothing in a book like this obliged the buyer to ask which grade he was getting. Formulas of this general kind are commonly counted among the abuses that federal pure-food legislation and later labelling rules on "straight" versus "blended" spirits were meant to address.