"On Preserving Insects In Rectified Wine" etc - Katherine Langrish

I’ve been reading some more recipes and household tips from the ‘Family Receipt Book’ from 1837 which formed the subject of my August post, and I can’t resist sharing some more of them here. To dip in and out of this book – which is over 500 pages long – is to be amused, impressed and bewildered not only by the often mysterious (and sometimes downright dangerous-sounding) ingredients, but by the sheer variety of things – methods, objects, tasks – thought likely to be useful to the average 19^th century householder. There are innumerable separate recipes for making varnish, for example: varnish for oil-paintings, for toilet boxes and fan cases, for earthenware vessels, for plaster casts, for furniture.  There is Amber Varnish, Copal Varnish, Elastic Gum Varnish, Black Japan Varnish –

Melt eight ounces of amber, melt (separately from the amber) four ounces of asphaltum and four ounces of resin: when melted, add eight ounces of boiling oil and then sixteen ounces of oil of turpentine; then stir in from half an ounce to one ounce lamp-black and give it another boil or two...

There’s even a varnish ‘For preserving Insects, Fruits etc’:

Take one pound of rectified spirits of wine, and two ounces of white amber; add thereto an ounce of white sandarac and white mastic, an ounce and a half of Venice turpentine; digest the whole in balneo mariae during forty-eight hours, to an entire dissolution; take out the intestines of the insect you have a mind to preserve: lay them for some days in rectified spirits of wine, mixed with clarified sugar-candy; afterward besmear them with your varnish till they are transparent as glass; in this manner you will preserve them for a long time. 

The mind boggles. What is balneo mariae? What is white sandarac? How do you take out an insect’s intestines?  Why would you wish to?  What did a 19th century housewife's shopping list look like?  'Just sending the maid out for six drachms of balneo mariae and a pint of dragon's blood'?  (Yes, dragon's blood really does keep turning up in various recipes...)  I do not know, any more than I know why the average householder should wish for a ‘Varnish to prevent the Rays of the Sun from passing through the Glasses of Windows’? Were people really that worried about fading antimacassars? 

Some of the ‘receipts’ do sound worth trying, though you might want to cut down on the sugar.  To make ‘French Black Current Brandy’:

To each bottle of brandy add a pound of black currents, picked, with a little allspice, and broken cinnamon in a small muslin bag. Put the whole into a large bottle or jar, and cork it closely for six months. Then pour off the liquor, and for each bottle of this liquor add three-quarters of a pound of loaf sugar...

My teeth are wincing. Maybe not. How about ‘To make twelve Gallons of Milk Punch’?  The recipe begins, ‘Take four gallons of rum or brandy...’  

Then there’s ‘Domestic remedies’.  For ‘Cramp and Spasm’ during the night, the suggested remedy is to take thirty to forty drops of a blend of ‘Tincture of Opium and Aether’ every evening before retiring to bed. That should do it.  To cure hiccups (‘an involuntary convulsive motion of the muscular coat of the stomach’) the little book suggests two teaspoons of ‘Fetid spirit of ammonia, Ammoniated tincture of valerian (of each, thirty drops) and Musk julep, three large tablespoonsful.’ In cases of pleurisy (which I once had and know to be very painful) I feel extremely sorry for the poor 19^thcentury patient: 

Bleed freely from the arm, taking away at least sixteen ounces from an adult and repeating the operation according to circumstances twice, thrice or even four times in twenty-four hours. [My italics]. Whatever may be the violence of the fever, a large blister should be applied to the side as near to the seat of pain as possible.  When, as it sometimes happens, a sufficient quantity of blood cannot be procured, twelve leeches should be applied to the side, and repeated. ... Success will depend on a large quantity of blood being taken from the patient in the course of a few hours. [My italics]. 

As if that was not enough, the book urges that the patient should also be given laxatives! I feel we don’t really appreciate modern medicine half as much as we should.

Thunder Powder, Phantasmagoria, and Artificial Asses' Milk - by Katherine Langrish

This book has been in our family for a very long time; I remember opening it as a teenager and laughing over some of the contents with my mother, in whose bookcases I recently rediscovered it.  Published in this ‘improved’ edition in 1837, it is a compendium of all sorts of useful information and tips for every imaginable kind of domestic circumstance or emergency.  Do you wish to ‘increase the durability of tiles’? Prevent fishing lines from rotting?  Purify wool infested with insects?  Do you wish to ‘write both blue and red letters at once with the same ink and pen and upon the same paper’?  Do you wish to cure boils, burns, nosebleed, the hiccough, gout, gravel or jaundice?  How about advice on how to prevent accidents from leaving a poker in the fire (weld a small iron crosspiece to the end of the poker, so that it will catch on the fender, should it slip out) – or on how to ‘make Transparent Screens for the Exhibition of the Phantasmagoria’? 

Our ancestors lived dangerously, it seems. In 1837, Charlotte Bronte was nineteen. Much wonder has been expressed that she and her sisters in their quiet, remote parsonage, should have been able to construct such passionate and dramatic imaginative worlds.  All right: but this little book, if they had possessed it, would have encouraged them to attempt amusements such as these:

Thunder Powder

Take separately three parts of good dry saltpetre, two parts of dry salt of tartar and pound them well together in a mortar; then add thereto one part, or rather more, of flower of brimstone ... put this composition into a bottle with a glass stopper, for use.

Put about two drachms of this mixture in an iron spoon, over a moderate fire, but not in the flame; in a short time it will melt and go off with an explosion like thunder or a loaded cannon. 

Such fun!  Or Charlotte, Emily and Anne could have written their books with:

The Phosphoric Pencil 

Is a small bit of phosphorus, put into a quill, and kept in a phial, in water; when you write, dip your pencil often in the water, to prevent its taking fire. 

It was possible also to make your own matches by ‘mixing one part of flower of sulphur with eight of phosphorus’: the author warns however:

This requires caution, and should afterwards be handled with great care, lest any part of the mixture get under the finger nails, a small portion of which might occasion great inconvenience. When used to procure a light, a very minute quantity is taken out of the bottle on the point of a match, and rubbed upon cork or wood, which produces an immediate flame.

A 'small portion of which might occasion great inconvenience' sounds a suspicious understatement to me. 'Hurts like h-ll', more probably...  Conditions in homes may be guessed at by entries such as these: “A mouse trap, by which forty or fifty mice may be caught in a night’ (a see-saw placed at the edge of the dresser, baited with butter and oatmeal, which tips them into a bucket full of water where they drown). A receipt ‘To destroy Bugs’ is also illuminating:

The risk of bugs in a big city is inevitable; the clothes-boxes of servants, the going to a public place of in a public carriage, or the insect being blown against the apparel while walking the streets, may introduce it into the house. But to cleanly people, whose beds are examined, and the joints oiled with pure sweet oil three or four times a year, they cannot become troublesome; except what no person can guard against ... a filthy, though perhaps very fine predecessor, who has permitted the animal to entrench itself in the walls and the ceiling. 

The only solution then is to seal up the fireplace, windows and doors, and fumigate the rooms with ‘vitriolic acid gas’...

Do you wish to make artificial Asses’ Milk?  Then take: 

Two ounces of pearl barley, two ounces of hartshorn shavings, three ounces of Eringo root candied, nine garden snails; boil these in six quarts of spring water till it comes to three; put two spoonsful of cow’s milk into half a pint of the above, and drink it lukewarm about half an hour before you rise in the morning. 

NB – You may leave out the snails if you do not like them, but it is best to use them.

Were you, like me, hoping all through this recipe that the Artificial Asses’ Milk was going to be used as a toilet water, rather than as something to drink?  I love the footnote. 

‘For improving coffee’ – ‘To discover vitriol in Beer’ – ‘To discover if bread is adulterated with alum’ – ‘To cure smoky chimneys’ – ‘To preserve meat by treacle’ – this enchanting book goes on and on. I shall share some more with you another time, but will leave you for the moment with this:

Vulgar Error respecting the putting of Spirits into Boots and Shoes to prevent the Effects of Cold

The custom of pouring brandy into the boots or shoes, when the feet have got wet, with a view to prevent the effects of cold, is a practice which (though very common) is founded in prejudice and misconception, and often proves fatal, by bringing on an inflammation and consequent obstruction of the bowels.