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To Make Angostura Bitters
be infused for 5 or 6 days in 95 per cent. alcohol. The color can be deepened with cherry juice. Brandy, rum, whiskey and arrack punch may be made as above, substituting the liquor for the wine and spirits. To make French Cognac Bitters.
Take 1½ pounds each red Peruvian bark, calisaya bark, bitter orange peel, and sweet orange peel; 2 ounces calamus root ; 4 ounces cardamom seeds; 1½ ounces each cinnamon, cloves, and nutmegs; 4 ounces caraway seed, and 3 pounds wild cherry bark. Pound or granulate all the above ingredients well, and steep for 15 days in 45 gallons proof spirit (or 60 gallons spirit 25 below proof), stirring occasionally. Then rack it off, and mix sufficient caramel to make it a dark red; add 15 pounds white sugar dissolved in 15 gallons water; let the whole settle, then filter. If the bitters are required to be of an amber color, omit the wild cherry bark and the caramel coloring. This splendid bitters is even superior to the Amazon bitters, which it very much resembles.
To make Angostura Bitters.
Take 4 ounces gentian root; 10 ounces each calisaya bark, Canada snake-root, Virginia snake-root, liquorice root, yellow bark, allspice, dandelion root, and angostura bark; 6 ounces cardamom seeds; 4 ounces each balsam of tolu, orangetis, Turkey rhubarb, and galanga; 1 pound orange peel; 1 pound alkanet root ; 1½ ounces caraway seed ; 1½ ounces cinnamon 1/2 ounce cloves; 2 ounces each nutmegs, coriander seed, catechu, and wormwood; 1 ounce mace; 1¼ pounds red saunders, and 8 ounces curcuma. Pound these ingredients and steep them as in the last receipt, in 50 gallons
This is a commercial compounder's formula, printed in a trade manual for liquor merchants rather than for a household. Several of its botanicals are no longer considered fit for consumption, and the text as transcribed is corrupt in places.
- Virginia snake-rootAristolochia serpentaria contains aristolochic acid, which is nephrotoxic and a known human carcinogen. It is prohibited in food and supplements in the US, EU and elsewhere; kidney damage from Aristolochia species is documented and irreversible. This alone rules the formula out.
- Wormwood and alkanetTwo ounces of wormwood contributes thujone, which is regulated by strict limits in beverages. Alkanet root, used here purely for red color, carries pyrrolizidine alkaloids and is not an approved colorant.
- Turkey rhubarb and Canada snake-rootRhubarb root is a stimulant anthraquinone laxative rather than a simple flavoring. Canada snake-root (wild ginger, Asarum canadense) contains aristolochic acid as well.
- The scale is industrialFifty gallons of proof spirit is a working still-room batch, not something that scales down cleanly — and in the US, blending bitters for sale requires federal and state permits. Buy commercial aromatic bitters, or work from a current published formula built on approved botanicals.
- Missing quantity for clovesThe red saunders quantity was checked against the printed page and reads 1¼ pounds, as given here. The cloves entry still lacks a number, reading only "ounce cloves," so treat that amount as unspecified and scale it against the 2 ounces each of nutmegs, coriander, catechu and wormwood beside it.
- What the old names meanRed saunders is red sandalwood, used as a dye; curcuma is turmeric; galanga is galangal; calisaya (cinchona) and yellow bark are quinine barks; catechu is the astringent extract of Acacia catechu. "Orangetis" is a printer's mangling, probably of orris root.
- "Proof spirit"In the period this meant roughly 50 percent alcohol by volume in the US and about 57 percent under the older British definition. "25 below proof" in the preceding formula is three-quarters of proof strength — consistent with that recipe's 45 gallons at proof against 60 gallons weaker — so somewhere between about 37 and 43 percent depending on which standard the book was following. The 95 percent alcohol mentioned at the head of the page is neutral spirit, not a drinking strength.
Angostura bitters take their name from the Venezuelan town of Angostura on the Orinoco, now Ciudad Bolívar, where a German-born surgeon in Bolívar's army, Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, is generally credited with compounding them in the 1820s as a stomachic; the family firm later moved production to Trinidad. The formula was and remains a trade secret, which is precisely why books like this one existed: nineteenth-century liquor manuals sold rectifiers and wholesalers plausible imitations of branded goods, alongside recipes for "French Cognac" and "Amazon" bitters that had never seen France or the Amazon. One quiet joke of the genre is that the compounder here dutifully includes angostura bark (Galipea officinalis), a bitter the genuine article is not believed to contain at all. The long list of barks, roots and dyewoods also shows how close the bitters trade sat to the druggist's counter — gentian, cinchona and rhubarb were pharmacy stock, and a bitters bottle was sold as much for the digestion as for the drink.