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Fourth Combination
Instead of the liquors used in combinations 1, 2, and 3, use : gal. either Sherry or Malaga wine.
Color to the desired tint with sugar coloring.
To make Brandy with a little Foreign Liquor.
RECIPE No. 8.
1/2 gal. either Sherry or Malaga wine, 2 1/2 " Seignette brandy, 1/2 " Sherry wine, To 40 gals. pure spirits, 5 o. p., add : 66 Santa Cruz rum, 1/4 " apple brandy, 8 drops neroly (dissolved or cut in alcohol), 1 lb. white glycerin (to give age and smoothness), oz. tannin powder, 66 acetic ether.
To vary the flavor of this brandy, instead of neroly, add 1 pint raspberry syrup. When this is done you must dispense with the sugar syrup or you will have the brandy too sweet.
Color with sugar coloring.
To make Brandy with Foreign Liquor.
RECIPE No. 9.
To 37 gals. pure spirits, 5 o. p., add : 2 66 66 글 Seignette brandy, Sherry wine, By using the best Sherry wine, a very excellent brandy may be obtained.
Color with sugar coloring to the desired tint.
To make Brandy with Foreign Liquor.
RECIPE No. 10.
To ic gals. pure spirits, 5 o. p., add : 1 Marett Brandy.
This is not a cooking recipe but a rectifier's formula: a set of instructions for turning cheap neutral spirit into something that could be sold as brandy. It is worth reading as a document of the nineteenth-century liquor trade, and it should not be attempted.
- What "pure spirits, 5 o. p." meansO.P. is "over proof": the spirit is about five per cent stronger than proof. On the old British Sikes scale proof is roughly 57% alcohol by volume, which puts this near 60%; American trade usage of the term varied, so the figure is approximate. Forty gallons of it is the base of the whole formula; everything else is flavouring and colour.
- Acetic ether is the reason to stop hereAcetic ether is ethyl acetate. A trace of it occurs naturally in aged spirits and gives the fruity top note the compounder was chasing, but much of the commercial article was and is sold as a solvent rather than to any food specification, and the dose here has been lost from the text entirely. There is no way to work out a quantity, and no reason to add it to a drink.
- Neroly is not neroli as a cook knows itIn the liquor trade "neroly" or "neroli" meant a concentrated essential oil of bitter orange flower, used here eight drops at a time in forty gallons. Undiluted essential oils are not something to be measured by drop into a beverage at home.
- Glycerin and tannin were age-fakersOne pound of white glycerin per forty gallons supplies the sweet, viscous mouthfeel of a long-barrelled spirit; powdered tannin supplies the drying grip that oak would otherwise give. Both are honest enough as substances, but their whole purpose here is to make a two-day-old blend taste like a twenty-year-old one.
- Sugar colouringThis is caramel colour — sugar cooked past caramel to a bitter, almost black state and dissolved in water. It remains the standard colourant for commercial brandy and whisky.
- Seignette and MarettSeignette was a name long associated with the brandy trade of La Rochelle, and Marett appears here as another proprietary brandy; both stand for genuine French brandy used in small proportion to lend character to the blend. The sherry and Malaga of the neighbouring formulas are wines, added for flavour and body rather than as French spirit.
- The quantities cannot be recoveredMost of the proportions in these four numbered recipes have not survived legibly, including the volumes of rum, apple brandy, Seignette brandy and sherry. Anyone curious about historical blending should work from a documented modern source rather than trying to reconstruct these figures.
Books of this kind — and there were dozens of them in the second half of the nineteenth century, sold to saloon keepers, grocers and small rectifiers — existed because duty and freight, and perhaps also the phylloxera crisis, made real Cognac expensive while neutral spirit was cheap. The trade called the practice "compounding": buy high-proof spirit, add a small percentage of the genuine article for character, then build the rest of the profile with essential oils, ethers, glycerin, tannin and caramel. The formulas are explicit about their own logic, grading themselves as brandy made with "a little foreign liquor" or with "foreign liquor" according to how much real French spirit the buyer could afford. In the United States this whole industry is often said to have been among the targets of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and of the labelling fights over what could legally be called whiskey or brandy that followed it; books like this one are among the best surviving evidence of what the regulators were arguing about.