I was shopping at World Market a few days ago and saw a book on how to make distillations and infusions.  Distilling means making hard liquor (like brandy or whiskey), while infusing means to take an existing liquor and add flavor to it.  I’m curious about distilling because, for many years in America, it’s been illegal to make your own hard liquor (and I mean very illegal—we’re talking federal prison time here, not just a little slap on the wrist).

I picked up the book and skimmed the introduction and, oops, it’s not actually a book about distilling because that’s illegal, but instead it’s a book about making infusions.  Okay, I understand why it wouldn’t talk about distilling, but why put distilling in the title of the book?  It seems quite lame.

Google Books, though, has lots of old books, and I found Old Time Recipes for Home Made Wines, Cordials, and Liqueurs from Fruits, Flowers, Vegetables, and Shrubs, by Gelen S. Wright, from 1909.

It really is quite a book.  In compiling the book the author went for breadth instead of depth, so there are lots and lots of different recipes, and many of the recipes are copied directly from older books rather than updated for today (or 100 years ago, as the case may be). To make strong mead we’re told to warm spring water “more than blood warm,” and then “dissolve honey in it until it is strong enough to bear an egg, the breadth of a shilling.” There are some drinks that are obviously quite old but that I’ve never heard of, like Ebulum, which seems to be ale with juniper-berries, elderberries, hops, and a number of spices, plus eringo root. I would make it but I’m not sure where to get half of the ingredients.

Looking through the book makes me think of how much variety we’ve lost over the years in terms of making liquors.  The last part of the book has recipes for making liqueurs (including some that need to be distilled), and there’s a bewildering number of different recipes.  There is page after page of ratafia recipes, which are fruit or nut flavored.  Here, for example, is the recipe for Ratafia de Bron de Noix:

Take sixty young walnuts whose shells are not yet hardened, four pints brandy, twelve ounces sugar, fifteen grains mace, fifteen grains cinnamon, fifteen grains cloves.  Digest for two or three months, press out the liquor, filter, and keep it for two or three years.

I’ve never even thought about making a liqueur from nuts.  Sometimes when I’m at a liquor store I check out the shelves stocked with flavored liqueurs, and this book goes far beyond anything that’s mass-produced today.  It’s really quite amazing.

You can check the book out yourself over at Google Books.