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To Make Brandy with Foreign Liquor
To make Brandy without Foreign Liquors RECIPE No. 6.
3 drachms orris root powder, infused in spirit (see "Spirit of Orris Root"), 1/2 drachm vanilla, cut up finely and infused in spirit (see "Vanilla"), To 10 gals. pure spirits, 10 o. p., add : 3 drachms orris root powder, infused in spirit (see "Spirit of Orris Root"), drachm vanilla, cut up finely and infused in spirit (see "Vanilla"), 1 pint sugar syrup, 10 or 12 drops oil Cognac, cut in a little spirits, oz. acetic ether. 1/8 oz. acetic ether.
Color to the desired tint with sugar coloring, and filter. This makes a splendid brandy, and improves vastly with age.
To make Brandy with a little Foreign Liquor.
RECIPE No. 7.
This is a compounding formula, not a cooking recipe: it flavours neutral spirit so it can pass for aged Cognac. Several of its materials are no longer sold in anything resembling food grade, and the quantities of the actives are far outside what would be acceptable in a drink today.
- Why this one is off the tableThe formula calls for acetic ether (ethyl acetate) in ten gallons of spirit; the quantity has dropped out of the text, which reads only "oz. acetic ether". Ethyl acetate is now mostly sold as an industrial and laboratory solvent, and the technical grades on the market carry residues that were never intended for ingestion, whatever the trade grade this text assumes may have been.
- Oil of CognacSo-called oil of Cognac, or oenanthic ether, was a concentrated flavouring supplied to the trade. What is sold under that name now varies enormously in composition; dosing by "10 or 12 drops" into ten gallons gives no assurance of what is actually going into the glass.
- "10 o. p." spiritsO.P. means over proof on the old Sikes scale, so 10 o.p. is roughly 63 percent alcohol by volume. The recipe never dilutes it down and gives no proofing instruction at all, which means the finished liquid as described is well above normal drinking strength.
- Drachms and the apothecary scaleA fluid drachm is an eighth of a fluid ounce; a drachm by weight in the apothecary system is about 3.9 grams. The text also leaves two quantities missing where figures have not come through — the vanilla and the acetic ether both appear without any number — so the formula is incomplete as printed.
- Sugar colouringThis is caramel colour, made by cooking sugar to the point of browning and dissolving it. In the trade it did the work that barrel ageing does in genuine brandy, supplying colour that the spirit had not earned.
- The legal positionRectifying and compounding spirits for sale, and in most jurisdictions redistilling at home at all, requires a licence. Even setting the ingredients aside, this formula belongs to a regulated trade rather than a home kitchen.
- If you want brandyBuy it. Nothing in this formula can be sensibly substituted or scaled down into something safe to drink.
Books of this kind — and they circulated in English and French through the second half of the nineteenth century — were sold to grocers, publicans and small rectifiers who bought cheap neutral spirit by the barrel and turned it into whatever the shelf label said. The trade was called compounding, and its whole art lay in imitating the by-products of long ageing: the vanillin a cask gives up, the faint fruit-ester note of an old Cognac, the amber colour. Hence orris root and vanilla for a rounded, slightly powdery sweetness, acetic ether and oil of Cognac for the ester lift, and caramel for the tint. That such manuals were printed openly says a good deal about the state of drink adulteration before the food and drug legislation of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the UK Sale of Food and Drugs Act dates from 1875, the US Act from 1906; the phrase "improves vastly with age" is a candid admission that the product went out the door tasting raw. The neighbouring recipes in the same section, "with a little foreign liquor" and "with foreign liquor", are titles only, but they suggest a proportion of the real thing blended in to steady the imitation.