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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.
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To Color Cordials
through, fill up the filter again so as to keep it full. When the liquid runs clear and limpid let it all run through, and commence filtering the cordial, being careful to keep the filter always full. If the liquor does not run clear, add about two ounces of granulated animal charcoal (sifted and fanned from the dust), to each filter. The charcoal should be washed with a little muriatic acid before being used.
To Color Cordials.
Blue, use indigo dissolved in sulphuric acid :
Green, mix the above solution with infusion of saffron : Yellow, use infusion of saffron :
Red, rose, or different shades of red, by alcoholic infusion of cochineal. Take 1 lb. cochineal, „ Cochineal.
1/2 " Roche alum.
Reduce them both to powder in a mortar, and pour on them 16 lbs. of boiling water. The result is a red of greater or less strength according to the amount of cochineal used.
Wild Red Poppy.
This is a very fine color.
Take two pounds of the leaves, bruise them in a mortar; then pour over them one gallon of boiling water, adding one drachm of tartaric acid to facilitate and quicken the extraction of the color.
This is a colourist's page from a nineteenth-century liquor manufacturer's manual, and several of its ingredients are mineral acids and industrial dyes rather than foodstuffs. It is readable as a document of the trade, not as a working procedure.
- Indigo in sulphuric acidThe blue is sulphonated indigo, the dyers' 'Saxon blue', made in situ by dissolving indigo in concentrated sulphuric acid; neutralised, this is the same colourant later sold as indigo carmine. The sulphonation is strongly exothermic and the acid burns skin, eyes and lungs. Any residual free acid carries straight into the drink, and the crude product of the period was not purified to any food standard.
- Muriatic acid on the charcoalMuriatic acid is hydrochloric acid, used here to strip mineral ash from bone char. Concentrated hydrochloric acid is corrosive and gives off choking fumes; charcoal washed at home and imperfectly rinsed will pass acid and dissolved metals into the filtered cordial.
- Roche alumRoche or rock alum is potassium aluminium sulphate, used as a mordant to fix the cochineal. It is not a colouring in itself, and taking aluminium salts in quantity in a drink is not something modern food law permits at these unmeasured levels.
- CochinealThis one is a genuine food colour — dried Dactylopius coccus insects, still sold as carmine or E120 — but it is a known allergen for a small number of people, and the ratio here (1 lb to 16 lbs water) is a dyer's strength, not a kitchen one.
- Saffron infusionThe yellow, and the green when combined with the blue, comes from an infusion of saffron; the book does not say in what. Saffron itself is harmless in culinary amounts; the green is unsafe only because of the indigo-sulphuric solution it is mixed with.
- Wild red poppyThe petals of Papaver rhoeas — the corn poppy — were a standard European red colouring and are not the opium poppy. 'Leaves' here most likely means the petals, as it often does in period usage; either way two pounds is a very large quantity of a very light material.
- What to do insteadEvery colour on this page has a modern equivalent sold ready-made and food-graded: carmine, curcumin, anthocyanin fruit concentrates, spirulina blue. Use a current source rather than attempting any part of this.
Manuals like this one were written for the compounder — the tradesman who bought neutral spirit by the barrel and turned it into a shopful of branded cordials with essences, syrups and dyes. Colour did the heavy lifting: a curaçao had to look orange, a crème de menthe green, a maraschino water-white, and the customer judged the bottle before the glass. Cochineal, imported from Mexico and later the Canaries, was the great red of the nineteenth century and remains in use as carmine; saffron and corn-poppy petals were the traditional yellows and reds of European kitchens long before they reached the distiller. The indigo-and-sulphuric-acid blue belongs to a different world entirely — it came into the liquor trade straight from the textile dyehouse, where sulphonated indigo had been standard since the 1740s. That borrowing is the real lesson of the page: before food-additive law, the dyer's shelf and the distiller's shelf were the same shelf, and adulteration scandals through the 1850s and 1870s turned on exactly that overlap.