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Ginger Liqueur
Mrs. Christopher Patterson.
One gallon of strong malt whiskey, four pounds of lump sugar dissolved in one pint of boiling water, five ounces of bitter almonds, five ounces of sweet almonds, five ounces of bruised ginger, the rind of six lemons; mix all in a jar; in five or six days filter and bottle.
This is a cordial made by cold infusion in spirit, and it is one of the recipes in this book that cannot be reproduced. The problem is the bitter almonds, and it is not a small one.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which converts to hydrogen cyanide on contact with moisture and the enzyme emulsin present in the nut itself. Five ounces steeped for five or six days in a water-and-spirit mixture is an efficient extraction, and the resulting cyanide passes straight through a filter into the bottle.
- Quantity is far out of rangeToxic doses from bitter almonds are generally reckoned in the tens of nuts for an adult and considerably fewer for a child, though the figures vary. Five ounces is roughly 140 grams, distributed through a gallon of liqueur with no way for a drinker to judge the dose.
- Bitter almond extract is not the same thingModern bottled bitter almond flavouring, and the benzaldehyde used in commercial amaretto and marzipan, are processed so the cyanogenic compounds are removed or reduced to trace levels. Sale of raw bitter almonds for eating is restricted in many countries for exactly this reason. Substituting extract does not make this recipe safe, because the quantities here are written for whole nuts.
- The alcohol does not helpThe alcohol does not make it safe -- nothing in the method involves heat that might drive off hydrogen cyanide, and the five- or six-day steep is a deliberate extraction.
- If you want a ginger cordialGinger, lemon rind and sugar in whiskey is a perfectly sound idea on its own, and a current recipe for ginger liqueur should be used instead of adapting this one.
- Reading the rest of itFor context only: whether a gallon here means the imperial gallon of 160 fl oz or the US 128 cannot be settled from the text; lump sugar is plain refined sugar in loaf or cube form; and "strong malt whiskey" probably indicates an unblended, high-proof spirit. Bruised ginger is fresh or dried root crushed to crack it open rather than grated.
Cordials like this one belonged to the household still-room tradition, in which a family kept its own bottles of flavoured spirit for guests, for cold weather and for what were half-seriously called medicinal purposes. Bitter almonds were a standard flavouring ingredient in nineteenth-century kitchens, valued for the intense marzipan note that sweet almonds do not provide, and cookbooks of the period call for them freely in ratafias, puddings and blancmanges. The dangers of prussic acid were understood by chemists throughout the century, but the connection was not consistently made in domestic recipe collections, where bitter almonds were simply another item at the grocer's. Contributed recipes like this one, credited to a named local woman, were the backbone of community compilations such as this book: they record what was actually being poured in a particular parlour rather than what a professional cook recommended.