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To Make Jamaica Rum (Dition of pineapple juice)
dition of pineapple juice, impart to it the virtue conferred by age. When it is necessary to filter rum, the brandy filter may be used for that purpose.
To make Jamaica Rum.
RECIPE No. 1.
To 45 gals. New England rum, add. 5 66 Jamaica rum, 2 oz. butyric ether, 14 “ 1/4 " oil of caraway, cut with alcohol, 95 per cent.
Color to the desired tint with sugar coloring.
The above, or any of the following recipes, may be prepared in smaller quantities by observing the proportions of the ingredients used.
To make Jamaica Rum.
RECIPE No. 2.
To 36 gals. pure spirit, 10 o. p., add : 1 66 Jamaica rum, 3 oz. butyric ether, 66 3 acetic ether, gal. sugar syrup.
Mix the ethers and acid with the Jamaica rum, and stir it well in the spirit. Color to the desired tint with burnt sugar coloring.
To make Jamaica Rum.
RECIPE No. 3.
To 60 gals. pure proof spirit, add : 1 lb. rum essence.
Color to the proper tint with sugar coloring.
This is not a rum recipe in any distiller's sense; it is a rectifier's formula for turning cheap neutral spirit into something that smells and sells like Jamaica rum. The vocabulary is trade vocabulary, and several of the ingredients are laboratory solvents rather than foodstuffs.
- Why this cannot be madeButyric ether (ethyl butyrate) and acetic ether (ethyl acetate) are here specified by the ounce into barrel quantities of spirit, with no purity grade or source named. Commercial ethers of the period were often solvent-grade and could carry residual acids and other impurities; adding them to drinking spirit on these terms is not a food process.
- "Rum essence" and "oil of caraway, cut with alcohol""Rum essence" -- a proprietary flavour concentrate sold to the liquor trade rather than a standardised article, so a pound of one house's essence need not have matched another's and the formula cannot be reproduced with any precision. Oil of caraway, by contrast, was an ordinary essential oil of commerce.
- The volumes are wholesaleThe batches run from thirty-six to sixty gallons of spirit, cask scale. The book's own note that the proportions may be scaled down is the only concession to a small operator, and it does nothing about the underlying problem.
- "10 o. p."Over proof by ten. On the British system, where proof spirit is about 57 per cent alcohol by volume, that is roughly 63 per cent; on the American definition it would be nearer 55. The recipe does not say which is meant. Spirit at either strength is flammable.
- Sugar colouringBurnt sugar, what would now be called caramel colour. This is the one wholly innocuous ingredient in the list, and it is doing the same job in cheap rum today.
- New England rum versus Jamaica rumNew England rum was distilled in the northern states from imported molasses and was light and thin; Jamaica rum was heavy, high in esters, and expensive. The whole point of Recipe No. 1 is to stretch one gallon of the costly article across nine of the cheap one.
- If you want the flavourBuy an aged pot-still Jamaican rum. No blending formula of this type has any place in a domestic kitchen.
Books of this kind were written for the compounder or rectifier — the middleman who bought neutral spirit by the cask and turned it into branded goods on the premises. Jamaica rum was the benchmark of the class, prized for the heavy ester character that pot-still fermentation and long ageing gave it, and expensive enough that imitating it was a standing commercial temptation. The esters named here are precisely the compounds a chemist of the day would have identified in genuine aged rum; the trade's logic was simply to add them directly and skip the years in wood, a shortcut the text states openly when it says such additions "impart to it the virtue conferred by age." Manuals like this circulated freely in the decades before the American Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and comparable food-adulteration legislation elsewhere, and their frank tone is itself the historical evidence: the practice was ordinary, competitive and, at the time, largely unpoliced — though various state adulteration and labelling statutes predated the federal act.