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Prune Tincture
*** It is absolutely necessary to have a tub with a clear surface-bed of 14 inches charcoal, to insure a perfect rectification. After rectification, high wine is called spirit, and this spirit when again distilled is called French or Cologne spirit. (See page 17.) Tincture of St. John's Bread.
Mash or cut in small pieces 16 lbs. beans, and let them infuse 3 days in 4 gals. water. Stir twice or more a day. This has a tendency to extract the sugar from the beans. Then rack off and put the tincture in a barrel. After this operation, pour over the beans 4 gals. spirit, 95 per cent., to extract the oil, let it infuse 8 days, then add spirit, tincture and beans to the first tincture.
Let it settle, and use the tincture according to prescription for Rum, Bourbon Whiskey; also for Cognac Brandy, in the proportion of one quart for 40 gals. liquor.
ANOTHER WAY TO PREPARE THE ABOVE TINCTURE.
Cut 16 lbs. St. John's Bread in small pieces, pour over 8 gals. spirit, 50 per cent., say proof, let infuse 10 days at least, stir every day twice or more, and use the tincture according to prescription. (See page 65.) Prune Tincture.
Mash 1 box, say 25 lbs., prunes, stones, kernels, the whole together. Pour over 5 gals. French spirit, proof. Let infuse 15 days at least before using the tincture, according to prescription for Brandy. Stir every day.
This is a compounder's flavoring extract, not a drink in itself: a quart or so was dosed into forty gallons of neutral spirit to imitate aged brandy. It cannot be reproduced safely, because the whole point of the method is to crush and macerate the prune kernels.
- The kernels are the hazard"Stones, kernels, the whole together" means the pits are broken open and the seeds inside macerated in alcohol. Prune kernels, like those of apricots, peaches and bitter almonds, contain amygdalin, which yields hydrogen cyanide when the seed tissue is crushed and wetted. Twenty-five pounds of fruit contributes a large, entirely unmeasured quantity of seed to five gallons of spirit.
- Fifteen days of extractionProof-strength spirit is half water, and will draw material out of the crushed kernels, including the benzaldehyde-bearing fraction that gives the "noyau" almond note the compounder wanted. Daily stirring over a fortnight is designed to maximise that extraction.
- No dose is verifiableThe book directs the reader to a prescription elsewhere in the volume for dilution into brandy. Without an assay there is no way to know the cyanide content of any given batch, and no way to calculate a dilution that is meaningfully safe. Commercial noyau and kernel flavourings today are made under controlled limits on hydrocyanic acid; a home maceration is not. If you want a prune or kernel note in a drink, use a current commercial flavouring.
- Ninety-five per cent spiritThe neutral alcohol called for in the surrounding paragraphs is trade-grade rectified spirit. The passage's talk of a charcoal bed fourteen inches deep, rectification, and "French or Cologne spirit" describes distillery practice, which is separately regulated and not a kitchen operation.
- Archaic terms"Proof" in this book means roughly 50 per cent alcohol by volume, as the preceding recipe states outright ("spirit, 50 per cent., say proof"); "high wine" is the spirit before rectification. A "box" of prunes is given by the author as 25 lb. "St. John's Bread" in the preceding recipe is carob pod, which is harmless and still sold whole.
- What the yield was forThe one quart per forty gallons proportion is the figure given for the St. John's Bread tincture; applied to five gallons of prune tincture it would flavour roughly eight hundred gallons of imitation brandy. Either way this is a wholesale formula, not a domestic one.
Manuals like this one belong to a nineteenth-century trade in compounded liquor: neutral spirit, bought by the barrel, coloured with caramel and burnt sugar and flavoured with tinctures until it could be sold as cognac, bourbon or rum. Carob pods (long called St. John's bread, from the tradition that the locusts John the Baptist ate in the wilderness were carob) supplied sweetness and a dark molasses note; prune kernels supplied the almond-and-stone-fruit smell that drinkers associated with genuine aged brandy, the same character sought in noyau and in kirsch. The practice was widespread enough that it helped drive the pure food agitation of the following decades, and labelling rules eventually distinguished "straight" whiskey from blended and imitation goods. The casualness about crushed pits is period-typical: the toxicity of kernel amygdalin was understood by chemists well before 1900.