Home › Cordials and Liqueurs › Manufacture of Bitters (Lb cardamom seed oz cinnamon)
Manufacture of Bitters (Lb cardamom seed oz cinnamon)
1 lb. cardamom seed, 2 oz. cinnamon, 2 oz. cochineal, 1 gal. brandy, 8 66 water.
Grind all the ingredients to coarse powder, and infuse ten days, and filter.
Nonpareil Bitters. 2 oz. Peruvian bark, ই 66 66 1/2 " sweet orange peel, bitter 66 25 grains cinnamon, " 25 “ cloves, 25 66 nutmeg, 15 Cayenne seeds, 2 gals. alcohol, 65 per cent.
Grind all the ingredients to coarse powder, and infuse ten days; then filter.
Bokers Bitters. 1½ oz. quassia (rasped), 1½ 1½ 66 “ 1 66 66 calamus, 1½ " catechu (powdered), cardamom, 2 dried orange peel.
Macerate the above ten days in gallon strong whiskey, and then filter and add 2 gallons water. Color with mallow or malva flowers. (See page 163.) Spanish Bitters. 5 oz. of polypody, " calamus root, orris root,
Four run-together bitters formulas from a trade manual for liquor compounders, printed as continuous type and further mangled by the scanner. Several of the botanicals here are no longer permitted in food or drink, and the page is worth reading as a document rather than as a working formula.
- Calamus is the disqualifying ingredientBoker's and Spanish Bitters both call for calamus root (Acorus calamus). Its volatile oil contains beta-asarone, and calamus has been prohibited as a food or beverage ingredient in the United States since the 1960s on carcinogenicity grounds. There is no dose adjustment that makes it acceptable.
- Peruvian bark means cinchonaTwo ounces of cinchona bark infused into a couple of gallons of spirit yields a quinine concentration far above the limit now set for quinine in beverages (83 parts per million in the US). Quinine at higher doses causes thrombocytopenia and can damage the optic nerve; commercial aromatic bitters no longer rely on it.
- Quassia and catechuQuassia wood is now permitted only in alcoholic beverages and at limited levels; catechu, an astringent tannin extract from Acacia or Uncaria, has effectively vanished from food use. Both were ordinary compounding stock when this book was written and are not sold as food ingredients today.
- Orris rootOrris, the rhizome of Iris germanica or I. pallida, is a perfumery material. Fresh iris rhizome is an irritant emetic, and the dried root is a recognised contact sensitiser. It survives in gin botanical blends only in trace fixative amounts, not at five ounces to the batch.
- The quantities are not recoverableThe repeated "66" and "ই" are the scanner's rendering of ditto marks and fractions. "8 66 water" is probably eight gallons; the sweet and bitter orange peel weights in the Nonpareil are simply lost. Nothing here can be reproduced faithfully even setting the botanicals aside.
- Cochineal is the one benign oddityCochineal, the dried bodies of Dactylopius coccus, is still a legal colouring (carmine, E120) and must be declared on labels because it provokes reactions in a small number of people. It is doing nothing but reddening the first formula.
- If you want bittersUse a current recipe from a maker or a modern cocktail reference, built on gentian, wormwood-free bittering agents, citrus peel and baking spices. The technique the book describes -- coarse grind, ten-day maceration in high-proof spirit, filter -- is sound; the plant list is not.
The French Wine and Liquor Manufacturer belongs to a genre of nineteenth-century trade manuals written for the compounder rather than the cook: books that told a saloon-keeper or rectifier how to build a flavoured spirit from a shelf of drugs, bark and dye. That explains the company these formulas keep, with Peruvian bark, quassia, catechu and calamus sitting alongside cinnamon and orange peel, since the same wholesale druggist supplied all of them. Bitters in this period straddled medicine and refreshment, and the bitter principle was the point; "Boker's" refers to the New York house whose aromatic bitters were a fixture of pre-Prohibition cocktail recipes and which disappeared in the twentieth century, spawning a long line of imitations and, more recently, reconstructions. The instruction to colour with mallow flowers is a reminder that appearance was as saleable as flavour, and that a compounder's book was as much about making a product look like the branded original as about making it taste like it.