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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Electricity as an Agent, Etc
To Impart a Smoky Flavor to Whiskey RECIPE No. 14.
The simplest way to impart this peculiar flavor to whiskey, is by preparing the barrel. Insert securely a large sheet-iron funnel into the bung-hole of a dry 40-gallon barrel; provide a small open furnace, containing a charcoal fire; put 1 pound of birch bark on the fire, and support the barrel, with its funnel downwards, over the furnace, so that the funnel, which should be considerably wider than the furnace, will receive the smoke from the bark. When the bark ceases smoking, remove the funnel and bung the barrel up tight. After it has stood 24 hours, put the spirit in the barrel, and keep it there for 36 hours, frequently rolling the barrel, in order that the spirits may be thoroughly impregnated with the smoke and smoky deposit on the inside of the barrel. The spirits will then be found to have acquired the desired flavor. Creosote, diluted with alcohol, is sometimes used to impart the smoky flavor to spirits, but it is not so good as the above method.
Electricity as an Agent for improving Whiskey and Wines.
From experiments made on a large scale, it has been found that electricity in any form, either as a regular current or a succession of discharges, renders wine or whiskey mellow and mature. It is supposed that the bitartrate of potassa is decomposed, setting free potash and tartaric acid: the former tending to neutralize the acids of the wine; and the tartaric acid, reacting upon the fatty matters present, favors the formation of the ethers which constitute the bouquet
This is a rectifier's procedure — a set of instructions for making cheap neutral spirit taste like something aged and expensive — rather than a distiller's or a cook's. Several parts of it are unsafe or simply do not work as claimed.
- Creosote is the disqualifying lineThe recipe offers creosote diluted with alcohol as a shortcut to smoky flavor. Wood creosote and coal-tar creosote are not food ingredients; they contain phenols and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are toxic by ingestion, and are prohibited in beverages. There is no safe dilution to drink.
- An open charcoal furnace under a barrelCharcoal burning in a confined or poorly ventilated space produces carbon monoxide, which is odorless and can be rapidly fatal. The arrangement described — a furnace beneath a barrel with a wide iron funnel channeling smoke upward into it — concentrates combustion gases as well as smoke, and it involves an open fire under a cask that will later be filled with high-proof spirit.
- Smoke deposit is not the same as smoke flavorThe instruction is to soak spirit against a layer of condensed smoke tar on bare staves for 36 hours. That deposit is unburnt pyrolysis residue, chemically closer to the creosote the author dismisses than to the smoke phenols absorbed during malt kilning in a peated whisky, where the smoke meets the grain and not the finished spirit.
- "40-gallon barrel" is a nineteenth-century trade caskAmerican whiskey barrels of the period ran roughly 40 to 48 gallons; the modern standard is 53. Bung-holes and barrel-rolling are cooperage matters, not kitchen equipment — the whole procedure assumes a rectifying house, not a home.
- The electricity passage is not a method at allNo apparatus, voltage, duration or electrode material is given, so there is nothing here to follow. The chemistry offered — potassium bitartrate splitting into free potash and tartaric acid, which then reacts with "fatty matters" to build bouquet — is not how esterification in wine or spirit works. Cream of tartar does not decompose that way in solution, and electrodes in an alcoholic liquid mainly generate metal ions and off-flavors.
- If you want smoke in a drinkUse a commercially produced peated whisky, or a food-grade smoked ingredient from a current recipe. Nothing in this entry should be reproduced.
Books like this one belonged to the trade of rectifying: buying plain high-proof spirit by the barrel and selling it as brandy, rye, Scotch or Cognac by means of color, flavoring and age-mimicking treatments. The period between the 1860s and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 in the United States was the high season for such manuals, and their contents range from harmless caramel coloring through prune juice and glycerin to the frankly poisonous — creosote here, and other dubious additives elsewhere in the genre. The electricity paragraph belongs to a genuine strand of late nineteenth-century research: several European and American experimenters claimed that passing a current through wine or spirit could accomplish in hours what a decade in wood accomplished slowly, and spirits were reportedly promoted as "electrically matured" on that basis. The claims were never substantiated, and the tartaric-acid explanation offered here is best read as an example of how period chemistry was pressed into service to justify a commercial shortcut.