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Used for Imitating Foreign Brandy
Sugar Coloring or Caramel.
TAKE 75 lbs. white sugar, and add 3 gals. water; let it boil over a brisk fire, being careful to stir and skim it all the while; every now and then dip in a boiling-stick, and when the sugar that remains on the stick becomes hard and brittle so that it breaks instantaneously, add 1 gall. warm water slowly and gradually, stirring it constantly, then let it burn brown. This is called sugar coloring, the French call it caramel, and it may be used to color any liquor or wine. To make the above quantity, the boiler or pot should be about 35 gals. capacity, as the liquid is apt to run over in a smaller vessel. The boiling-stick mentioned above should be about 18 inches long, 1 inch in diameter at one end, and gradually tapering off to a point at the other. Before using this stick, dip it in cold water and shake it off. A smaller quantity may be made by observing the above proportions.
French Chemical.
A French Brandy Coloring and Flavor.
Take 1/2 gall. molasses, boil it, and then add 4 lbs. white sugar, and continue to boil until it becomes thick, ropy and dark; then reduce it with some warm water. This is a fine coloring, and also yields a delightful aroma, but must be used for brandy only. To make the chemical as it is sold in bottles, add oil of Cognac, or oil of bitter almonds, cut with alcohol in such proportion as you like, (say to oz. to coloring sufficient for 100 gals. brandy.)
This is two formulas in one entry: a plain burnt-sugar coloring, and a "French chemical" intended to make neutral spirit pass as imported Cognac. The second cannot be made safely, and it compromises the page as a whole.
- Oil of bitter almonds is the disqualifying ingredientUnrectified bitter almond oil contains benzaldehyde together with hydrocyanic acid — cyanide — generated from the amygdalin in the kernels. It was sold freely in the nineteenth century and caused repeated fatal poisonings when used by guess. Nothing in this text distinguishes rectified from unrectified oil, and there is no way to judge which the writer meant.
- The doses are missing from the textThe original reads "say to oz." and "Take gall. molasses" — the numerals have dropped out of the printing. A flavor oil dosed at the ounce level into 100 gallons has no margin for error, and the recipe as it survives gives no figure at all to work from.
- "Oil of Cognac" was not one substanceThe trade name covered several preparations, commonly ethyl oenanthate or blends sold under that label, of wildly varying strength. A period formula written around it cannot be reproduced with any confidence about concentration.
- ScaleSeventy-five pounds of sugar and four gallons of water in a 35-gallon pot is a commercial batch, not a domestic one. The warning that a smaller vessel will boil over is the one piece of practical caution in the entry, and it tells you what kind of workshop this book was written for.
- The boiling-stick testDipping a wetted tapered stick and waiting for the sugar to set hard and snap cleanly corresponds to what confectioners called the hard-crack stage, judged this way before thermometers were common. The cold-water dip presumably keeps the syrup from sticking to the wood.
- What plain caramel color is forBurnt sugar coloring is still a legitimate and widely used food additive; the coloring half of this entry is unremarkable in itself. It is the flavoring "chemical" built on top of it, and the purpose of the whole, that make the formula unusable. If you want caramel color or caramel syrup, use a current recipe.
- The intentThis is a counterfeiting formula. Passing off compounded neutral spirit as French brandy is fraud under modern food and beverage labelling law wherever it is sold, independent of the safety question.
Books of this kind proliferated in the second half of the nineteenth century, when American and British rectifiers bought cheap neutral spirit by the barrel and sold it as aged imported brandy, whiskey or wine. The trade depended on two things: color, supplied by burnt sugar, and aroma, supplied by essential oils and ethers bought from druggists under names like "oil of Cognac" and "French chemical." Bitter almond oil is often said to have been a mainstay of that trade, valued for the marzipan-and-stone-fruit note it lends in tiny quantity, and its hazards were understood unevenly at best. Adulteration on this scale is a large part of why food and drink legislation arrived when it did u2014 the British Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875 and the American Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 both belong to a period in which a manual like this one could be sold openly as a guide to honest business.