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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 › Hickory Nut Flavoring for Whiskey
Hickory Nut Flavoring for Whiskey
and pyroligneous acid (crude creosote). Whiskey owes its flavor to pelargonic ether, which is nearly identical with enanthic ether. The smoky taste apparent in the Scotch whiskey is imparted by pyroligneous acid, and is usually imitated by adding a small quantity of creosote dissolved in acetic ether, but a much better method is given in recipe No. 14. Like other liqours, whiskey is easily imitated by judiciously flavoring pure or neutral spirit with various ingredients, which we will describe hereafter. Should it be deemed necessary to filter whiskey, the brandy filter may be used for that purpose.
To make Bourbon Whiskey.
RECIPE No. 1.
Mix together 40 gallons proof spirits, 1/2 gallon peach flavoring (see Recipe No. 2), gallon hickory nut flavoring (see Recipe No. 3), 1 gallon highly flavored brandy (see "Highly Flavored Domestic Brandy," page 58), 1 pint wine vinegar, and 1 pint white glycerine. Add to these 12 drops oil of cognac dissolved in 95 per cent. alcohol, and color with caramel.
Peach Flavoring for Whiskey.
RECIPE No. 2.
Steep for 1 month, 10 gallons dried peaches, 10 gallons oak saw-dust, and 5 pounds black tea in 40 gallons proof spirits; strain and filter. Use 2 gallons of the above flavoring to 1 barrel of proof spirits. It makes an excellent rye whiskey.
Hickory Nut Flavoring for Whiskey.
RECIPE No. 3.
Crush one bushel hickory nuts, and infuse for 1 month in 12 gallons 95 per cent. alcohol; strain and filter.
Recipe No. 3 is a nut tincture, but it does not stand alone: it exists only as one component of the compounding formulas printed with it, and the surrounding text of this section recommends additives that are flatly poisonous. The notes below explain the terms and then the specific problems.
- Creosote and pyroligneous acidThe introductory paragraph directs the compounder to imitate Scotch by dissolving "a small quantity of creosote" in acetic ether and adding it to the spirit. Wood creosote and crude pyroligneous acid are mixtures of phenols, cresols and related tar compounds; coal-tar creosote additionally carries polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, some of which are recognised carcinogens. Neither is a food ingredient, and no measured quantity is given here in any case. Nothing on this page should be drunk.
- Oak sawdust as an ingredientRecipe No. 2 steeps ten gallons of sawdust in spirit to fake barrel age. Mill waste of this kind would not have been controlled for species or cleanliness, and it is not equivalent to the toasted, food-grade oak chips sold today.
- A bushel of hickory nutsA US dry bushel is about 2,150 cubic inches, or 32 dry quarts. Hickory nuts in the shell are commonly reckoned at roughly 45 to 50 lb to the bushel, so the formula calls for something near 50 lb of whole nuts, crushed shell and all, into 12 gallons of alcohol.
- "95 per cent. alcohol"This is 190-proof neutral spirit. It is not sold at retail in much of the United States and elsewhere, and it is not the same thing as the 151-proof or 120-proof spirits that are. "Proof spirits" in the other recipes means roughly 50 percent alcohol by volume.
- ScaleThe formulas are written for the trade: 40-gallon lots, a barrel at a time. Recipe No. 3 alone yields something like 12 gallons of flavoring extract, enough to dose several hundred gallons of spirit.
- What "filter" meantThe text refers the reader to the book's own brandy filter. Filtration of this kind was used to strip harshness and colour from raw spirit; it cannot be relied on to remove creosote, and it does not make a creosoted spirit fit to drink.
- Legality of compoundingEven setting the toxic additives aside, rectifying, flavouring, colouring and rebottling distilled spirits for consumption is a licensed and taxed activity in the United States and most other jurisdictions. Blending caramel, glycerine and essential oils into bulk neutral spirit at home is not a private matter.
Books of this kind were tools of the nineteenth-century rectifying trade, the business of turning cheap neutral spirit into something that could be sold as aged Bourbon, rye or Scotch. The logic is chemical rather than agricultural: whiskey flavour is reduced to named esters, smoke to a phenolic additive, and age to sawdust, caramel and glycerine for body. Hickory and peach appear because they were the plausible American notes, and because dried peaches and nut hulls were cheap; hickory (Carya) nuts, gathered wild across the eastern states, were a genuine autumn kitchen ingredient long before anyone steeped them in grain alcohol. The trade these formulas served is precisely what the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 was written against, guaranteeing a spirit that was straight, aged and government-supervised, and what the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 later addressed on the adulteration side. Read now, the page is less a recipe than evidence of why those laws were thought necessary.