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Vanilla Liquor
Cut four sticks of vanilla in small pieces, place in quart bottle, fill up with good brandy and let infuse for eight days, being careful to thoroughly shake bottle daily. Place a half pound granulated sugar with two gills water in copper basin, set on fire and let boil for five minutes. Add all the contents of vanilla bottle, lightly mix with a wooden spoon and boil for ten minutes, pass liquor through paper filter into a bowl, let cool, bottle, cork tightly, and use when desired.
A household vanilla cordial: an eight-day brandy infusion married to a hot sugar syrup. The technique is simple, but two details in the original need attention before you start.
- Boiling spirits over a flameThe recipe has you add a full quart of brandy to boiling syrup and cook it ten minutes. Alcohol vapour ignites readily, and this step is the reason the dish deserves care rather than casualness. Use an electric burner or an induction hob if you have one, keep the pan well below the rim in volume, and stand back when the spirit goes in.
- The copper basinAn unlined copper sugar basin was standard equipment in a professional kitchen of this period and was reserved for sugar work. For an acidic, alcoholic mixture, use stainless steel or a lined pan instead.
- GillsTwo gills is one cup, 8 fl oz. With half a pound of granulated sugar, that gives you roughly equal weights of sugar and water, about a 1:1 syrup.
- "Four sticks of vanilla"These are vanilla beans, not extract. Four whole pods to a quart is generous by modern pricing; two or three will still give a pronounced infusion, and splitting them lengthwise before cutting exposes more seed.
- Brandy"Good brandy" here presumably means a plain grape brandy or cognac at the usual bottling strength of about 40 percent. Nothing so fine that boiling it is a waste, but nothing harsh either, since the sugar will not hide a rough spirit.
- What the ten-minute boil doesIt drives off a considerable share of the alcohol and concentrates the liquid, so the finished cordial is sweeter and weaker than the spirit that went in. If you prefer a stronger result, some modern versions simply cool the syrup and stir it into the infusion cold, though that is a departure from the text.
- FilteringA paper coffee filter or a double layer of dampened cheesecloth in a fine sieve works for the "paper filter." It will run slowly because of the vanilla seed; do not force it, or the liquor will cloud.
- Yield and keepingExpect somewhere around a quart of finished cordial, depending on how hard it boils. Corked tightly and kept dark, the sugar and remaining alcohol should hold it well for a year or more.
Vanilla arrived in European kitchens by way of Mexico, where the Totonac and later the Aztec used the cured pods of Vanilla planifolia; it reached Spain with the sixteenth-century chocolate trade, and supply broadened after the 1840s, when hand-pollination, worked out on Réunion, allowed the vines to fruit away from their native pollinators, Madagascar becoming a major producer later in the century. Homemade cordials of this kind — a spirit infused with a flavouring, then sweetened with boiled syrup and filtered clear — were a standing category in French and Franco-American household cookery, sitting alongside orange, ratafia and noyau in the same chapters. Their appeal was economy: the commercial liqueur houses charged dearly for what a cook with a bottle of brandy, a few pods and eight days of patience could approximate at home. The specified copper basin and wooden spoon suggest a writer accustomed to professional equipment, which would be consistent with a book out of the hotel and restaurant trade of the period.