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To Make Batavia Arrack
per cent., filter, and mix the ingredients separately, and stir them well together. Color with sugar coloring. The above recipe is given by a celebrated German chemist.
To make Santa Cruz Rum.
RECIPE No. 7.
To 45 gals. New England Rum, add : 5 66 Santa Cruz rum, 4 drachms vanilla essence.
To make Santa Cruz Rum.
RECIPE No. 8.
To 50 gals. pure proof spirit, add : 5 66 Santa Cruz rum, 5 lbs. refined sugar dissolved in half gallon water, 3 oz. butyric acid, 2 66 acetic ether.
Color if necessary.
To make Pine-apple Rum.
RECIPE No. 9.
In Jamaica it is usual to put sliced pine-apples in the puncheons containing the finer qualities of rum, which is then termed pine-apple rum. To make pine-apple rum, use the following recipe :
To 50 gals. rum, made according to recipe No. 1, add: 25 pine-apples (sliced), 8 lbs. white sugar.
Let it stand two weeks before it is drawn off.
To make Batavia Arrack.
RECIPE No. 10.
Arrack is a variety of rum, imported from the East
This page belongs to the rectifier's trade rather than the kitchen: it is a set of formulas for turning neutral or cheap spirit into something that can be sold as an aged island rum. The chemistry it calls for is the reason it cannot be followed today.
- Butyric acidThree ounces of butyric acid into fifty gallons of spirit is one of the tricks found in rectifiers' manuals of this kind, since in great dilution it reads as the buttery, cheesy note of long cask ageing. Butyric acid as sold is a corrosive liquid that burns skin and mucous membrane, and the industrial grade a modern buyer would obtain is not made to any food specification. Nothing about the quantity given tells you the strength or purity of what is being poured in.
- Acetic ether"Acetic ether" is ethyl acetate, the fruity solvent note in fresh rum. It is flammable, it is sold today as a laboratory and paint solvent, and the reagent-grade material carries no assurance of freedom from the denaturants and residues that make it unfit to drink.
- ScaleThese are commercial batches of forty-five and fifty gallons, sized for a rectifier's vat. The trace additions are meaningful only at that volume; there is no honest way to scale three ounces of a corrosive acid down to a bottle.
- "Pure proof spirit"In an American book of this period proof spirit is 50 percent alcohol by volume; British proof is nearer 57. The recipes assume a rectifier who has both the spirit and a hydrometer, and who is diluting and colouring to a target the text never states.
- Santa Cruz rumSanta Cruz is St. Croix, then Danish, and its rum was a well-regarded name in the nineteenth-century American trade. In these formulas a few gallons of the real thing are used purely as a flavouring donor for a much larger volume of cheaper spirit.
- Sugar colouringThis is caramel colour, sugar cooked dark and dissolved, still used in the spirits trade to standardise the look of a blend. It is the one ingredient here that survives unchanged into modern commercial practice.
- The pineapple methodThe Jamaican practice described at Recipe No. 9 -- sliced pineapple steeped in a puncheon of good rum -- is the only part of the page that is simply a maceration. If the subject interests you, work from a current infusion recipe with known quantities rather than from these figures.
Manuals like this one were the working literature of the rectifier: the man who bought neutral or common spirit by the barrel and, with essences, acids, ethers and caramel, made it answer to the name of brandy, whiskey, or a named island rum. Batavia arrack, which the page breaks off while introducing, is a genuine article -- a spirit distilled in Java from sugarcane molasses with fermented red rice cakes as the starter, shipped to Europe through the Dutch trade and long prized in punch, where it is often said to have been, for a time, more esteemed than rum itself. Its scarcity and its distinctive funk made it exactly the sort of thing a compounder wanted to imitate. Books of this kind circulated freely in America until federal labelling and adulteration law, culminating in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the rulings on what could be called "whiskey" that followed it, made the trade they describe largely indefensible.