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Vanilla Essence
Procure a quarter pound of best vanilla in sticks, slice on a small wooden board as finely as possible, place in mortar with three ounces lump sugar and thoroughly pound. Remove, place in a quart bottle, fill up with pure ninety-degree alcohol, cork bottle tightly, thoroughly shake, and after a day's infusion it can be used. Be very careful to always shake bottle thoroughly before using, and always keep it tightly corked. N.B. When the essence is all finished, add one-third the amount vanilla and sugar (prepared same as before) to bottle, also balance of vanilla, fill up bottle again with alcohol and keep as before.
This is a concentrated vanilla extract, considerably stronger than anything sold today. The method is sound; the alcohol specification is the part that needs translating carefully.
- "Ninety-degree alcohol""Ninety-degree alcohol" most probably means alcohol of about 90 percent by volume — the strength long sold on the continental degree scale — though on some older English-language scales "degrees" meant proof, which would put it nearer 45 percent. Only food-grade drinking alcohol will do — denatured alcohol, methylated spirit, rubbing alcohol and isopropyl are poisons and were never what was meant here. Where high-proof grain spirit is unavailable, vodka at 40 percent works, though extraction is slower.
- Quantities in modern termsA quarter pound of vanilla beans is about 113 g, or somewhere between 25 and 40 pods depending on grade and moisture. Three ounces of lump sugar is about 85 g. A quart bottle is 950 ml.
- StrengthCommercial single-fold extract uses roughly 100 g of beans per litre of 35 percent alcohol. This formula matches that in bean weight but at more than double the alcohol, so it extracts harder and tastes sharper straight from the bottle. Treat it as at least as strong as shop extract and start with less than a recipe calls for.
- One day is not enoughThe pounding with sugar shatters the pods and speeds things up, but a day's infusion gives a thin, grassy result. Give it four to eight weeks in a cool dark place, shaking every few days, before you judge it. The colour and aroma keep deepening for months.
- Why the sugarLump sugar acts as an abrasive in the mortar, letting the sticky pods be ground rather than smeared. It also rounds the raw edge of high-proof spirit slightly. It is not there for sweetness in any meaningful amount.
- The replenishing noteThe N.B. describes what is now called a perpetual or rolling extract: top up with fresh spirit and add a third of the original beans, leaving the spent pods in place. It can be carried on for a long time, provided the beans stay fully submerged — pods left standing above the liquid may mould.
- StorageKeep it corked and out of light. Alcohol at this strength evaporates readily past a loose stopper, which will change the strength of what is left in the bottle.
- YieldAbout a quart of strong extract — a lifetime's supply for most households. Halving or quartering the batch is sensible, particularly at current bean prices.
Vanilla is the cured seed pod of a climbing orchid native to the Gulf coast of Mexico, and until the nineteenth century it could only be had from plants pollinated by particular local insects. Hand-pollination, generally credited to Edmond Albius on Réunion in the 1840s, is what allowed cultivation to spread to Madagascar, the Comoros, Tahiti and Java, and it is still done bloom by bloom by hand today — the reason vanilla remains one of the costliest spices by weight. That expense explains why a book of this vintage expected a cook to make essence rather than buy it: the household bought whole pods, extracted them at high strength, and then squeezed a second and third life out of the spent beans, as the closing note instructs. The alternative on the market was often synthetic vanillin from clove oil, or adulteration with tonka bean, which is precisely why a professional kitchen would insist on "best vanilla in sticks" and do the work itself.