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To Make Sauterne
alcohol, drachm oil of anise, and 5 drops each of the oils of calamus, bitter almonds, and coriander; dissolve also 4 to 4 1/2 ounces oil of caraway in sufficient alcohol (95 per cent.) to make a clear solution. Incorporate these with 40 gallons French proof spirit; and add 10 pounds sugar dissolved in 5 gallons water. Absinthe by Distillation.
Take 16 pounds large absinthe, 20 pounds green anise, 20 pounds fennel, and 1 pound coriander ; place them in a cask, first moistening them with a little water; then add 40 gallons 75 per cent. spirit, and let them steep for 2 or 3 days, occasionally stirring. Next, add 20 gallons water, and distil, changing the receiver before the faints come over. After distillation, put the products again in the still with 4 pounds small absinthe, to give the color; heat very slowly, and remove the fire as soon as the hand can no longer be borne on the head of the still. When the distillate is cold, rack off, let it rest, and finally filter it. This second distillation requires to be conducted slowly, the fire must be therefore carefully managed, so as not to allow the boiling heat to be reached.
To make Claret.
Take 55 gallons wine made by fermentation (see page 140), 5 gallons Marseilles wine, 1/2 ounce gum kino dissolved in 2 ounces 95 per cent. spirit.
If not red enough, add a little cherry juice.
To make Sauterne.
Take 55 gallons of wine by fermentation (see page
This page is a run-on of several trade formulas — a compounded absinthe, an absinthe by distillation, a "claret" and the beginning of a "Sauterne" — set down for liquor merchants working in 40- and 55-gallon lots. Several elements of it are illegal, toxic, or both.
- Oil of bitter almondsUnrectified oil of bitter almonds contains hydrogen cyanide alongside benzaldehyde. Nineteenth-century flavouring houses sold it in that state, and drop-count dosing of a cyanogenic oil into a spirit is not a margin any modern cook should work with.
- DistillingThe second formula is a pot-still operation. In the United States distilling spirits at home for beverage purposes is a federal offence, and running some 60 gallons of spirit-and-water charge over an open fire is a serious vapour-explosion risk in any building.
- Calamus oilOil of calamus (sweet flag) was a standard bitters and cordial flavouring. Its beta-asarone content is genotoxic and carcinogenic in animal studies, and the FDA has prohibited calamus and its derivatives as food additives since the 1960s.
- Wormwood"Large absinthe" and "small absinthe" are Artemisia absinthium and the smaller Artemisia pontica, the latter added purely for the green colour of the second run. Thujone content in finished spirits is capped by law in the US and EU, and cannot be judged by eye or taste.
- Gum kinoKino is the dried red exudate of Pterocarpus and related trees, used here as a colouring and astringent to make a thin wine read as claret. It was a pharmacy item, not a food ingredient, and has no current food-additive standing.
- Incomplete first formulaThe caraway quantity was checked against the printed page and reads as our text now gives it, 4 to 4 1/2 ounces. The opening of the first formula, "alcohol, drachm oil of anise," is still headless, the page having been picked up mid-recipe. A drachm is about 1/8 fluid ounce, but with the spirit quantity missing that formula cannot be reconstructed.
- The Sauterne itselfThe recipe the page is titled for breaks off after a few words and cross-refers to a fermentation method on an earlier page. There is nothing here to follow even in principle.
- What "faints" meansThe faints are the tail fraction of a distillation run, heavy with fusel oils and higher alcohols. The instruction to change the receiver before they arrive is the whole skill of the operation, and the book gives no cut point beyond the operator's nose.
Books of this kind — and there were dozens on both sides of the Atlantic between about 1850 and 1900 — were written for the wholesale liquor trade rather than the household, and their frank subject is the manufacture of wines that never saw a vineyard. The "claret" here is fermented wine stretched with a cheap southern French bulk wine, tinted with kino and cherry juice; the "Sauterne" that follows would have been the same base sweetened and adjusted. This was the ordinary commerce of the period, not a fringe practice, and it is precisely the trade that the British Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875 and the American Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 were written against. The absinthe formulas sit in the same volume for the same reason: absinthe was then a bulk industrial product, compounded from essential oils as often as distilled from herbs, and the distinction between the two methods was a matter of cost rather than law. A number of European countries went on to ban the drink, though by no means all and not on any common schedule: Belgium in 1905-06, Switzerland by a vote in 1908 that took effect in 1910, France in 1915, Germany not until 1923, while Britain and Spain never banned it at all.