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St. Johns Bread
Torrefied Prunes.
To prepare this flavor, see "Recipe No. 19." This is another and much esteemed kind of prune tincture.
Brandy Essence.
This flavor is prepared by dissolving two fluid ounces oil of Cognac in eighteen fluid ounces of rectified spirits. (See "Cognac Oil.") Spirit of Raisins.
This is recommended in "Recipe No. 4," and is a good flavor when used in conjunction with the other ingredients given in that recipe. It is also much used by the French manufacturers. The essence is prepared thus :- Take five pounds of the best Malaga or Bordeaux raisins, stems and all, mash them up in a mortar, add to them double their quantity of spirit, 95°, and digest ten days, agitate frequently (see "Infusion"), then filter. By combination with pear oil, or oil of wintergreen, raisin spirit makes a fine flavor for Bourbon whiskey. In France, raisin spirit is obtained by distillation; but it is so difficult to procure a genuine article here that we recommend the above process.
St. John's Bread. (SILIQUA DULCIS.) The Carob-tree is a native of Syria, Egypt, and all Southern Europe. The fruit of this tree is a bean from four to six inches long, and one inch wide, of a brown leather color, known as St. John's Bread. This bean contains a marrow of a light brownish color, and very aromatic, the seeds of the bean are very hard, and of a brilliant brown color. This flavor when combined with raisins is much esteemed by the French and Ger-
This page belongs to the compounder's trade rather than the kitchen: it is a set of flavouring essences meant to be blended into neutral spirit to imitate brandy and Bourbon. Only the raisin spirit and the brandy essence are given as workable procedures — the St. John's Bread entry is descriptive and breaks off mid-sentence with no method at all.
- The one instruction that mattersThe raisin spirit is an infusion, not a distillation: mash, cover with spirit, stand ten days with frequent shaking, then filter. Agitation is what does the work, since the alcohol has to draw flavour out of dense dried fruit; a jar left undisturbed extracts far less. (The brandy essence is simply an oil dissolved in spirit, and the text notes the French distil their raisin spirit.)
- "Spirit, 95°"This denotes the strength of the alcohol, not a temperature; in American manuals of the period it points to a highly rectified spirit of about 95 per cent, though the scale intended is not stated. The nearest modern food-grade equivalent is grain neutral spirit at 190 proof; a 40 per cent vodka will extract more slowly and give a much weaker essence.
- ProportionsFive pounds of raisins to "double their quantity of spirit" is ambiguous — it may mean twice the weight or twice the bulk — but either way it is several quarts of spirit, a bulk batch of concentrate rather than a bottle. Scale down by tenths if you want a usable quantity.
- Oil of CognacThe nineteenth-century flavourist's name for ethyl oenanthate, the ester fraction associated with grape brandy aroma. It is not the same thing as cognac, and the two fluid ounces to eighteen given here is a concentrate for dosing by drops, never a drink in itself.
- Pear oilIsoamyl acetate. It is still made, and much of it is sold as an industrial solvent; only material labelled as a food or flavour grade belongs anywhere near something to be drunk.
- WintergreenGenuine oil of wintergreen is largely methyl salicylate and is toxic in small quantities — a teaspoon is a serious dose. Where old flavouring manuals call for it by the drop they mean exactly that, and modern flavour extracts sold for baking are a different, far more dilute product.
- St. John's Bread itselfCarob pods, sold whole in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern shops. The "marrow" the text praises is the sweet pulp between the seeds; the seeds are rock-hard and useless for flavour, and pods should be broken up and the seeds discarded before any infusion.
- FilteringFilter paper or a coffee filter will clear a fruit tincture but slowly, since raisin infusions are thick with sugar and pectin. Straining through cloth first, then paper, saves clogging.
Books like this one served a nineteenth-century trade that has largely vanished from view: the liquor compounder, who bought plain rectified spirit by the barrel and turned it into "brandy," "Cognac" or "Bourbon" with essences, colouring and sugar. That the author recommends steeping raisins rather than distilling them — because a genuine French raisin spirit was "so difficult to procure here" — is a candid glimpse of how much American spirits of the period were built rather than aged. St. John's Bread is the carob pod, Ceratonia siliqua, and the name comes from the old tradition that the locusts John the Baptist ate in the wilderness were in fact these pods; the tree's seeds are also traditionally credited as the origin of the carat used by jewellers, though the supposed uniformity of their weight has been questioned. Carob pulp is sweet, faintly chocolatey and full of natural sugars, which is precisely why a compounder wanted it: it lent body and a suggestion of cask age to a spirit that had seen neither fruit nor wood.