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To Imitate Cognac Brandy
+ gal. Sherry wine, 6 drachms black tea, infused (see "Black Tea").
Color with sugar coloring.
To make Brandy with Foreign Liquor.
RECIPE No. 11.
To 40 gals. pure spirits, 5 o. p., add : 5 66 Cognac brandy, 1/2 gallon best Madeira wine.
This will make an excellent-flavored brandy, and, if desired, may be further improved by adding 1 lb. white glycerine, to give age and smoothness. Let it stand 8 or 10 days, and color as desired.
To Imitate Seignette Brandy.
RECIPE No. 12.
To 2 gals. pure proof spirit, add : 1 “ 1½ 66 soft or distilled water, Seignette brandy, a little black tea, and a few drops of acetic ether. Color if necessary.
To Imitate Cognac Brandy. By Dr. Ure.
RECIPE No. 13.
Dilute the pure alcohol to the proof pitch, add to every hundred pounds weight of it from half a pound to a pound of argol (crude wine-stone) dissolved in water, a little acetic ether, and French wine-vinegar, some bruised French plums, and flavor-stuff from Cognac ; then distill the mixture with a gentle fire, in an alembic, furnished with an agitator. The spirit which comes over may be colored with sugar coloring to the desired tint, and roughened in taste with a few drops of tincture of cate chu, or oak bark. The above recipe will afford a spirit TO CUT FOREIGN BRANDY WITH PURE SPIRITS. free from the deleterious drugs too often used to disguise and increase the intoxicating power of manufactured brandy; one which may be reckoned as wholesome as alcohol in any shape can ever be. Good judges think that brandy of this kind may be manufactured just as well without resorting to the process of distillation. To Imitate Cognac Brandy.
This is a compounder's formula from the trade side of the drinks business: neutral spirit dosed with acids, esters and tannin, then redistilled to pass as Cognac. It is readable as a document but not workable as a procedure in a home kitchen, for the reasons below.
- It is a distillation, and that is the hingeThe instruction is to run the mixture through an alembic over a gentle fire. Operating a still to produce beverage spirits without a federal permit is illegal in the United States regardless of scale, and the practice itself concentrates vapour that is both flammable and, in the early and late fractions, unfit to drink. Nothing about the rest of the formula can be salvaged around that step.
- "Pure alcohol" and "proof pitch"Ure means near-anhydrous spirit of roughly 95 percent, diluted down to about 57 percent alcohol by volume, the old British proof standard. The "5 o. p." in the neighbouring recipe means five degrees over proof. These are not strengths a domestic cook has any legitimate access to in bulk.
- Acetic etherEthyl acetate, added here to mimic the fruity esters of aged grape brandy. What was sold to nineteenth-century compounders was a technical-grade solvent, and what is sold under that name today is generally an industrial or laboratory solvent rather than food grade.
- ArgolCrude tartar scraped from wine-cask walls, the raw source of cream of tartar. It was added to supply the tartaric acidity of a real wine distillate. Unrefined cask deposit carries whatever else was in the cask and is not a food ingredient.
- Tincture of catechuAn astringent extract of Acacia heartwood, used to fake the tannin a spirit picks up from oak. It was a common adulterant in both spirits and tea.
- "Flavor-stuff from Cognac"An unspecified flavouring material, presumably a compounder's essence. There is no way to know what was in it, which is itself the point: the book assumes a trade in unlabelled compounds that no longer exists.
- The surrounding recipesRecipe No. 11 on the same page adds a pound of white glycerine per forty gallons "to give age and smoothness" and blends in Cognac and Madeira. Weighting spirit with glycerine to imitate maturity was a known rectifier's practice and was among the abuses complained of in the later fights over labelling. Treat all of these as evidence, not method.
- If you want the flavourBuy a Cognac, or an Armagnac if you prefer something rougher and more rustic. A current, properly sourced recipe should be used for any drink you intend to serve.
"Dr. Ure" is Andrew Ure (1778-1857), the Scottish chemist whose Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines was the standard English-language reference for industrial processes for decades, and whose entries were lifted wholesale into trade manuals like this one. The book he lands in belongs to a specific commercial world: the American rectifier, who bought neutral spirit by the barrel and compounded it into whatever the market wanted, at a time when "Cognac" on a label carried no legal guarantee of origin. Note how defensively the passage ends, insisting the product is "free from the deleterious drugs too often used to disguise and increase the intoxicating power of manufactured brandy" and "as wholesome as alcohol in any shape can ever be" -- a tacit admission of what else was circulating. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the long fight over whether blended and rectified spirits could be called whiskey or brandy at all grew directly out of this trade; France's appellation rules, which reserved the Cognac name to spirit distilled in the Charente, tightened in the same era. The closing line is the sharpest thing on the page: good judges thought you could counterfeit brandy just as well without bothering to distil it.