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Turmeric
Cherry Juice.
To prepare cherry juice for coloring and flavoring Port wine see "Recipes" Nos. 12 and 13.
Orchil, or Archil, and Cudbear.
This peculiar coloring matter is derived from lichenous plants which grow on maritime rocks. Orchil, as as prepared in England, is in the form of a thickish liquid of a deep reddish purple color.
Cudbear is obtained from the same plant, and generally comes in the form of a purplish-red powder. It is procured in the same manner as orchil; but the mixture, after the development of the color, is dried and pulverized. This color is very fine, cheap, and easy to prepare, but it is not very fast. It is prepared as follows: put 10 lbs. Orchil or cudbear in a barrel, add 10 gals. of the wine you desire to color, let it steep 4 or 5 days, and then add to each 60 gals. wine, 1 gal. prepared as above. When drawing off the coloring, let it run through a piece of flannel. The above coloring is better for Port than Claret wine, because the former contains a greater per cent of alcohol, and, therefore, preserves it from precipitating, and depositing on the sides of the cask. Turmeric Is the root of a plant which is a native of the East Indies and China. The best is said to come from the latter place. Turmeric yields a yellow color, and is used to give the natural tint to white, Sherry, and Madeira wines. The powdered root should be digested in alcohol, 95 per cent, in greater or less proportions according to the depth of color required.
This is not a drink recipe so much as a set of instructions for falsifying one: two lichen dyes and a spice tincture used to give cheap wine the colour buyers expected of Port, Sherry and Madeira. The chemistry is worth understanding; the procedure is not one to carry out.
- Orchil and cudbear are dyestuffs, not food coloursBoth are made from lichens (Roccella and related genera) treated with ammonia to develop orcein — the same chemistry that gives litmus its colour. They are textile and indicator dyes, not approved as food colourings in the US or EU, and some lichens contain usnic acid and related compounds that have been associated with liver injury. Ten pounds steeped into a barrel of wine is a dye bath, not a seasoning.
- The colour was known to be unstable even thenThe text admits it "is not very fast" and warns that in lower-alcohol wine it precipitates onto the cask sides. That is the author telling you the pigment falls out of solution — a purely cosmetic fix with a short life.
- Turmeric here is a tincture, not a spice"Digested in alcohol, 95 per cent" means macerating the powdered rhizome in near-absolute ethanol to extract curcumin, which is fat- and alcohol-soluble and barely water-soluble. Curcumin itself is a permitted food colour today; the point of objection is what it is being used to disguise.
- The purpose is adulterationColouring a wine to pass as Sherry, Madeira or Port would breach modern labelling and wine-composition rules in most producing countries, quite apart from the dyes involved. Permitted additions to wine are enumerated by regulation, and these dyes do not appear on those lists.
- ScaleThe quantities are commercial cellar quantities: the recipe doses one gallon of prepared colouring into every 60 gallons of wine. Nothing here was intended for domestic use, and there is no sensible way to scale it down.
- If you want the effectBuy a wine that is the colour it should be. There is no corrected version of this procedure.
Books like this one belonged to a nineteenth-century trade in "doctoring" — the open, semi-respectable business of building wines and spirits to a customer's expectation from a base of neutral or inferior stock. Colour mattered enormously because buyers judged Port, Sherry and Madeira largely by eye, and a pale or brownish cask could be tuned with elderberry, logwood, burnt sugar, cochineal or, as here, lichen dyes. Orchil had been an important purple textile dye since the Middle Ages, generally traced to Mediterranean and Canary Island lichen harvesting; cudbear is the powdered Scottish version, its name usually said to come from Cuthbert Gordon, who worked the process commercially in the eighteenth century. Turmeric's presence is a reminder that the same East India trade routes supplied both the kitchen and the dyehouse. Manuals of this kind circulated freely until food and drink adulteration became a public scandal, and legislation on both sides of the Atlantic — the British Sale of Food and Drugs Acts of 1875, amended in 1899, and the U.S. Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 — made this whole genre of instruction obsolete.