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.
Home › Cordials and Liqueurs › Finings for Cordials (Water Distill from off)
Finings for Cordials (Water Distill from off)
of water. Distill from off the water, 6 gallons flavored alcohol, and add 14 gallons of the whitest plain syrup, about 34 degrees, Baumé.
Malliorca d'Espagne.
Charge of the Still, Water Bath. 40 gals. alcohol, 55 per cent, 18 lbs. green anise seed, 5 gals. river water.
Put into the water-bath only 20 gallons of the alcohol, and 5 gallons river water. When 18 gallons are distilled off, add the remaining 20 gallons of alcohol, and continue the distillation until 18 gallons more are obtained, which mix with the 18 gallons previously obtained, and add one drachm of ether to give it age.
This is a commercial distiller's working note, not a kitchen recipe, and it cannot be followed today. The points below explain what the text is describing and where it goes wrong.
- It is a distillation, not an infusionThe procedure redistills 40 gallons of 55 per cent alcohol over anise seed in a water bath, drawing off 36 gallons of spirit in two charges. Operating a still to produce spirits is licensed activity in essentially every jurisdiction; in the United States it requires a federal distilled spirits plant permit, and no household exemption exists for beverage alcohol.
- The ether"One drachm of ether to give it age" means diethyl ether, once added to spirits to mimic the esters of long barrel maturation. It is not a permitted food additive. It is an anaesthetic, it forms explosive peroxides on standing, and its vapour ignites from a distance at temperatures far below anything a still room reaches.
- Ether plus a hot stillEther plus alcohol -- Beyond the toxicity, ether is extremely flammable. Its flash point is about -49F and its vapour is heavier than air, so it pools.
- River water'5 gals. river water' is untreated surface water, which carries Giardia, Cryptosporidium and bacterial load; a full 5 gallons of it goes in alongside the alcohol, though the charge is then distilled.
- The text is a fragmentThe page opens mid-sentence, in the middle of a different formula, before the Mallorca anisette begins. The quantities for the first item -- "6 gallons flavored alcohol" and "14 gallons of the whitest plain syrup" -- have lost their opening line, so the recipe is incomplete as printed.
- Reading the Baumé figureSyrup "about 34 degrees, Baumé" is a density reading taken with a Baumé hydrometer, roughly a heavy sugar syrup near saturation. Nineteenth-century syrup scales were read warm or cold depending on the house, so the number does not convert cleanly to a modern sugar-to-water ratio.
- If you want anisetteAnise liqueur is made today by macerating and sweetening a purchased neutral spirit, with no still and no ether. Use a current published recipe.
Anisette of the Mallorca type — here spelled Malliorca d'Espagne — was one of the standard sweet anise liqueurs of the western Mediterranean, and Spanish anisette was widely imitated by French and American houses selling under Spanish-sounding names. Manuals like this one were written for the trade rather than the home: they assume a still with a water bath (a bain-marie, used because direct fire scorches seeds and gives a burnt note), a Baumé hydrometer for syrup, and purchases by the barrel. The instruction to add ether "to give it age" is the period's most telling detail. Whatever the state of chemical understanding, distillers had observed that old spirit smelled fruity and volatile, and ether was a cheap way to suggest that character. A similar logic is often said to have put ether, chloroform and nitrobenzene into cheap cordials in the nineteenth century, a family of practices that pure-food legislation in Europe and the United States was among other things intended to curb.