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.
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Glycerine
Bourbon Whiskey.
Take 38 gallons proof spirit, 1 gallon peach tincture (see page 117), 1 gallon domestic brandy, gallon prune tincture (see page 258), 1 pint wine vinegar.
Color with caramel.
A few drops of oil of wintergreen imparts a fine flavor if desired.
Bourbon Whiskey.
Take 40 gallons proof spirit; Add 20 drops oil of cognac, 10 drops oil of bitter almonds, Each dissolved in 95 per cent. alcohol; 2 drachms Jamaica rum essence, 1/2 ounce sherry wine essence, 1 lb. white glycerine. 1 pint wine vinegar.
Color with caramel.
Glycerine.
Glycerine was discovered in 1789, by Scheele, by whom it was called the sweet principle of oils. It is produced, not only during the saponification of the fats and oils, by oxide of lead in forming lead plaster, but also during the same process when affected by potassa and soda, in the manufacture of soap; the alkalies uniting with the oily acids, and setting the glycerine free. Hence soapmakers' waste is an abundant source of glycerine. But, thus originating, it is apt to have more or less odor, which even percolation through animal charcoal does not always remove.
This page is a compounder's formula sheet: two recipes for faking bourbon out of neutral spirit, followed by a note on glycerine as a body-and-sweetness additive. Neither formula can be made today, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- Oil of bitter almondsThe second formula calls for ten drops of oil of bitter almonds in forty gallons. Unrectified bitter almond oil contains benzaldehyde together with hydrogen cyanide liberated from amygdalin, and the crude oil was available in that state in the nineteenth century alongside a rectified grade; the recipe does not say which is meant. It is not a food ingredient, and no amount of dilution arithmetic makes handling the concentrate in a kitchen sensible.
- The glycerine described here is not food glycerineThe note is explicit that soapmakers' waste is the abundant source, and that glycerine arising from the lead-plaster process is one of the routes described. Glycerine from such sources would not have been purified to any food standard, and the text itself admits an odour that even percolation through animal charcoal does not always remove. Modern USP glycerin is a different article entirely.
- "Oil of cognac" and the essencesThese were trade preparations of the rectifier's supply house, not standardised flavourings. Oil of cognac usually meant ethyl oenanthate or a compound imitating it; the rum and sherry "essences" were proprietary blends of unlisted composition. There is no way to reproduce them, and no way to know what was in them.
- Proof spiritNineteenth-century American proof spirit was 50 per cent alcohol by volume. Forty gallons of it is a commercial batch, not a household one, and compounding spirits at that scale is a licensed activity in essentially every jurisdiction.
- The point of the formulaNothing here is distilled or aged. The whole exercise is to take cheap neutral spirit and, with caramel for colour, glycerine for viscosity and mouthfeel, vinegar for a trace of acidity, and a few drops of essential oil for aroma, sell it as bourbon. It is imitation by construction.
- If you want the flavoursPeach and prune tinctures, caramel and a whisper of wintergreen are legitimate flavour ideas in their own right. Use a current recipe from a source written under modern food-safety rules rather than adapting this one.
Books of this kind circulated widely among American and European rectifiers, saloon-keepers and grocers from the mid-nineteenth century until federal regulation caught up with them. Before the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 and the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, "whiskey" was a name a merchant could apply to almost anything amber and alcoholic, and an enormous trade existed in compounding neutral spirit into imitations of aged goods. Glycerine earned its place in these formulas because it is sweet, viscous and non-volatile, so it lends the round, slightly heavy mouthfeel that years in oak would otherwise supply. The historical note on the page is broadly accurate: Carl Wilhelm Scheele isolated glycerol in 1779 while boiling olive oil with litharge, and called it the sweet principle of fats, though the 1789 date given here is off and the name glycerine was later coined by Chevreul. That a formula book pauses to explain the chemistry tells you who bought it, tradesmen who needed to know what their additives were and where to source them cheaply.