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Cardamom
flavor when pure, and care should be taken not to use too much. Nitric acid converts the pure oil into a crystal- line mass, and the pure article may thus be proven. Oil of cassia is generally adulterated with alcohol; this fraud may be detected by placing a lump of perfectly dry chloride of calcium in a test-tube containing the suspected oil, and shaking it well. If the oil is pure, the chloride of calcium will remain unaltered; but if it contains alcohol, the lump will dissolve and form a dense sub-stratum. This test will detect alcohol in any essential oil. (See also "Oil Neroly" and "Oil Cognac.") Lemon Peel. (OIL AND ESSENCE.) The oil of lemon is obtained both by expression and distillation. It is chiefly imported from Portugal, Italy, and the South of France. Pure lemon oil is very fluid, colorless, and of an agreeable odor. Like turpentine, the oil of lemon has the same elements as the oil of juniper. (See "Oil of Juniper.") One hundred lemons yield by expression 1 to 2 ounces of oil, and by distillation 14 to 1½ ounces. Essence of lemon peel is made as follows: Digest 1¾ lb. of the thin outside yellow peel of fresh lemons in 1 quart alcohol 95 per cent, let it stand one week, then press and filter. This is a fine gin flavor. Care should be taken that none of the rind should be detached but that portion in which the cells are placed, containing the essential oil.
Cardamom.
This valuable plant is a native of the mountains of Malabar, where it springs up spontaneously in the forests after the removal of the undergrowth. The odor of cardamom is fragrant, the taste warm and highly aromatic
Most of this page is trade reference — adulteration tests and botanical notes — but embedded in it is a working formula for essence of lemon peel, a maceration still used by gin compounders and bartenders. The notes below deal with that formula and with the surrounding material a modern reader will trip over.
- The hinge: peel only, no pithThe instruction to detach nothing but the outer yellow layer "in which the cells are placed" is the whole recipe. The oil sacs sit in the flavedo; the white albedo beneath contributes only bitterness, and it also carries water and pectin that cloud the finished essence.
- "Digest"In this period digest means steep at gentle warmth or simply at room temperature, not heat on a stove. A sealed jar left in a warm cupboard for the specified week is what is meant.
- Alcohol 95 per centThis is 190-proof neutral spirit (Everclear and equivalents), not 95-proof. Its availability is restricted in many jurisdictions. Lower-proof spirit will work but extracts less oil and more water-soluble bitterness, giving a duller, cloudier essence.
- ScaleOne pound of thin zest is an enormous quantity — the yellow-only peel of perhaps fifty or more lemons, depending on size. A tenth of the formula, about 1.5 oz peel to a scant half-cup (roughly 3 fl oz) of spirit, is a sensible household batch.
- Press and filterPress the spent peel to recover the spirit it has absorbed, then filter through a coffee filter or fine muslin. The essence keeps for a year or more in a full, tightly closed bottle away from light; oxidised lemon oil turns turpentiney.
- DosingThis is a spirit tincture rather than the pure oil, but it is still strongly flavoured: add it a little at a time and taste. The caution about not using too much at the head of the page belongs to the entry above it (oil of cassia), though the same principle applies here.
- The chemical tests are not kitchen workNitric acid and anhydrous calcium chloride are laboratory purity assays for essential oils, intended for the trade buyer checking a supplier. They have no place in food preparation and nothing tested this way should be tasted.
- Oil yieldsThe figures given — 1 to 2 ounces of oil per hundred lemons by expression — describe commercial production, not something to attempt at home. The "14 to 1½ ounces" for distillation is plainly a misprint or scanning slip, most likely for 1¼ to 1½.
- The cardamom entryIt breaks off mid-description and gives no method. Flavourings of this kind are elsewhere in the book made by macerating the material in strong spirit, then pressing and filtering.
Manuals of this kind were written for liquor rectifiers and compounders — men who bought neutral spirit by the barrel and turned it into gin, cordials and "imitation" brandies with essences, sugar and colouring. They belong to the decades before the American Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which is why so much space goes to detecting adulteration: an oil of cassia cut with alcohol or a lemon oil stretched with turpentine cost the buyer real money, and the calcium chloride test described here was a standard trade check. The botanical asides reflect the same commercial eye. Cardamom from the Malabar coast, lemon oil from Portugal, Italy and the South of France, and juniper reached these workshops as imported commodities, and the compounder needed to know their provenance to judge what he was being sold. Lemon peel essence in particular sat at the heart of gin making: citrus and coriander alongside juniper is a combination generally traced to the Dutch and English distillers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it remains the backbone of London dry gin.