Important: Safety Warning
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.
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 › Brandy, Whiskey and Imitation Spirits › Flavoring Compound for Brandy
Flavoring Compound for Brandy
Imitation French Brandy.
To 40 gallons French proof spirit, add 1 quart tincture of orris root (see page 66), 1 pint vanilla flavoring (see next receipt), 1/2 gallon best sherry or Madeira wine, and 1 pint wine vinegar. Dissolve separately, 1 drachm oil of cognac, and 12 drops oil of bitter almonds, each in a little 95 per cent. alcohol, and add them to the mixture, coloring the whole to suit with caramel. 1 pound of glycerine will give age and smoothness to the brandy.
Vanilla Flavoring for Liquors.
Slice 1 drachm vanilla in small pieces; infuse for 20 days in 1 pint 95 per cent. alcohol; filter.
Imitation Pale Brandy. Fine.
Infuse 1 drachm star-anise (breaking the star only) for 8 hours in 1/2 pint 95 per cent. alcohol, and filter ; add this to 40 gallons proof spirits ; then add 1/2 gallon best Jamaica rum, and 1 pint of the best raspberry syrup. Dissolve 1 drachm oil of cognac, and 12 drops oil of bitter almonds, separately, in a little 95 per cent. alcohol, and mix them with the whole. Add 1 pound of pure glycerine to the brandy, to give it age-and smoothness. (For a very fine brandy recipe, see page 259.) Flavoring Compound for Brandy.
Mash 25 pounds raisins, 12 pounds prunes, 3 pounds figs, and 1 pineapple sliced; infuse for 15 days in 20 gallons proof spirits, stirring every day, and then filter. This splendid Brandy flavor is used in combination with other flavors.
These are rectifier's formulas — bulk blending sheets for a nineteenth-century liquor house, not kitchen receipts — and two of the three call for oil of bitter almonds, which is why the page carries a warning.
- Oil of bitter almondsUnrectified bitter almond oil contains hydrogen cyanide, commonly cited at around 2-4 percent, alongside benzaldehyde. Cyanide poisoning is dose-dependent and rapid, and 12 drops of it is not a quantity to be improvised. Both brandy formulas on this page are unusable for that reason alone.
- The scale is industrialThese are forty-gallon lots. The fruit compound at the end works on 20 gallons of proof spirit and yields a concentrate, not a drink; it is described as a flavor "used in combination with other flavors," meaning it was dosed into a much larger blend.
- Drachm and proof spiritA fluid drachm is about 3.7 ml, an apothecaries' drachm by weight about 3.9 g; this page appears to use both senses without distinguishing them, which is one reason these formulas resist conversion. "Proof spirit" in this trade meant roughly 50 percent alcohol by volume.
- Glycerine as a fining agentGlycerine -- A pound of glycerine in forty gallons is a mouthfeel additive, standing in for the softening that barrel time gives real cognac. It is still permitted in some spirits and wines, but its presence here signals the whole purpose of the page: making young neutral spirit pass as aged brandy.
- Star-aniseThe recipe means Illicium verum, Chinese star anise. Japanese star anise, Illicium anisatum, looks similar, has been found adulterating commercial supplies, and is neurotoxic.
- Legality, not just safetyCompounding and rectifying spirits for sale is licensed activity in essentially every jurisdiction, and colouring neutral spirit to sell as French brandy is fraud under modern labelling law regardless of what goes in it. If you want a fruit-infused spirit, use a current recipe.
The French Wine and Liquor Manufacturer belongs to a genre of trade manuals written for rectifiers — the men who bought barrels of cheap neutral or grain spirit and turned them into "cognac," "Jamaica rum" and "Holland gin" with essential oils, wine, caramel and sugar. The economics were simple: aged brandy cost years of capital, while a quart of orris tincture and a drachm of oil of cognac did not. The fruit compound here — raisins, prunes, figs and a pineapple macerated for fifteen days — is the least deceptive item on the page, and the most revealing: it is an attempt to build by infusion the dried-fruit and stone-fruit notes that long oak ageing produces in genuine grape brandy. Practices of this kind were what the United States eventually addressed with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the "straight whiskey" rulings that followed, which forced blends and imitations to say so on the label.