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Recipe No. 4
40 gals. spirit, 10 o. P., 1 lb. Jamaica rum essence, 4 66 Tincture St. John's Bread, 15 drops oil of cloves. Color.
How to Make the Tincture of St. John's Bread.
Mash four pounds of St. John's Bread, and infuse ten days, one gallon of spirit. 95 per cent., stir the infusion twice each day. This will extract the oil from the beans. Rack off the spirit, and pour over the beans one gallon of soft water, to extract the sugar. Let it infuse four days, and stir twice every day. Rack off and filter through flannel. Mix both tinctures together and add it to the rum.-(See Appendix.) To make Jamaica Rum. (GOOD.) RECIPE No. 5. 20 gals. spirit, 10 o. P., 20 66 New England rum, lb. Jamaica rum essence, 2" Tincture of St. John's Bread, prepared as above, 15 drops of oil of cloves, 1 lb. white glycerin, to give smoothness and age.
Color.
To make Jamaica Rum.
RECIPE No. 6.
To 50 gals. pure proof spirit, add: 1 lb. rum essence, 4" St. John's bread, 2 lbs. sugar candy.
Cut the beans of the St. John's bread in small pieces, and boil in a gallon of soft water for five minutes, and when cold, filter. (This is done to extract the sugar from the bean.) Afterwards take the St. John's bread and macerate it for ten days in one gallon alcohol, 95
This is a rectifier's formula, not a cook's: neutral spirit is flavoured, sweetened and coloured to pass as aged Jamaica rum. Everything here is compounding, and no distillation is involved.
- St. John's Bread is carobThe "beans" are the dried pods of Ceratonia siliqua, sold today as whole carob pods. The two-stage treatment is deliberate: alcohol pulls the aromatic oils, water pulls the sugars, because neither solvent takes both well.
- "10 o. P." means ten over proofSpirit ten per cent above proof strength. On the British scale proof is about 57% ABV, which would make this roughly 62-63%; American proof spirit was reckoned at 50% ABV, which would put it nearer 55%. Which convention this book follows is not stated.
- Scale is industrialThe batches run 40 to 50 gallons. Dividing every quantity by 100 gives a trial batch of under half a gallon, but essences and oils at that scale must be measured by drop and by weight, not by eye.
- Rum essence no longer exists as soldRum essence is not a modern shelf item in this form -- The "Jamaica rum essence" of the trade was a proprietary preparation from a druggist's supply house, generally built on esters. The baking flavourings sold under similar names today are not the same thing. (The book refers the reader to its Appendix for the essence itself.)
- Oil of cloves is the danger to the flavourOil of cloves dominates -- Fifteen drops across forty gallons is a very small dose for a reason: clove eugenol is powerful, and a heavy hand would push the whole batch towards the medicinal.
- The colour is caramel"Color" unqualified in these manuals means burnt-sugar caramel, added drop by drop until the spirit matches aged rum. Sugar candy in No. 6 is rock candy or hard-boiled loaf sugar, used for body as much as sweetness.
- Filtering through flannelA doubled square of clean flannel in a funnel does the same work as a coffee filter but passes far more liquid and holds back the fine carob sediment that would otherwise haze the batch.
- GlycerinThe pound of white glycerin in Recipe No. 5 is there purely for mouthfeel, imitating the roundness of barrel age. Food-grade vegetable glycerin is the modern equivalent; the pharmacy grade is not always intended for consumption.
- One legal noteBlending and flavouring purchased spirit for personal use is a different matter from producing it. Nothing in these formulas requires a still, and none should be read as licence to build one.
Books like this served the nineteenth-century rectifier, a tradesman who bought plain grain spirit by the barrel and turned it into whatever the market wanted, and Jamaica rum was among the most profitable things to want: the genuine article carried a heavy premium for its pungent, high-ester character, and the trade's essences were built expressly to mimic those esters. Carob pods, long known in English as St. John's bread from the tradition that the locusts eaten by John the Baptist were in fact these pods, gave the compounder both sugar and a dark, faintly smoky sweetness that read as age. New England rum, called for in Recipe No. 5, was the cheaper molasses spirit distilled along the Massachusetts and Rhode Island coasts, used here as a real-rum backbone under the imitation. The frankness of these pages is worth noting: nothing is disguised as anything but imitation, and the reader is assumed to be selling it.