The Wholesale and Retail Wine & Spirit Merchant’s Companion, and complete instructor to the trade: containing several hundred valuable receipts, from practical experience. By Joseph Hartley
London: Printed for the author and sold by T. Rodd, 2, Great Newport Street, Long Acre, and J. Wacey, 4, Old Broad Street, Royal Exchange, 1835.
Duodecimo, (16 x 10.5 cm.), ii, 208 pages. Index. FIRST EDITION. New editions published in 1839, 1843, & 1850. One of a number of handbook for the manufacture of various wines and spirits to emerge in the first half of the 19th century focused on the production and care of wine and spirits. The one hundred sixty-nine recipes for wines or spirits – some honest, some approximations – include Finings for Bucellus Wine, A Superior Bitter, Wormwood Bitters, Beading for Brandy, Rum or Gin, To Make Gin, To Remove the Color from Spirits, To Remove the Blackness from Gin, To Make a Puncheon of Rum, Of Leeward Island Rum, Caraway Brandy, Cherry Bounce or Cordial, Lovage (cordial), Noyeau, The Highly Esteemed Liquor: Curraca, Martinique Noyeau, Poppy Brandy, Usquebaugh, and White Spruce Beer. About one third of the recipes are identified as “British Wines”, and these include Apricot Wine, Birch Wine, Cowslip Wine, Pearl Gooseberry Wine, Macaroni Coridal (!) and additional techniques for Cider, Mead, Whiskey, and Beer. All of this is preceded by instructions for keeping a cellar, and avoiding problems with the tax man, followed by descriptions of equipment, and basic ingredients, such as hops and malt. Some of the material appears to have been sourced from John Davies’ Innkeeper and Butler’s Guide (Liverpool, 1805), which itself could trace the lineage of its contents to Gervase Markham and his Countrey Contentments (London, 1623). Davies’ work was one of the targets of food reformer Frederick Accum in his Treatise on the Adulteration of Food (London, 1820), and the subsequent publication of Hartley’s work is an example of the persistence of these ancient methods. With light soil to edges of text block; new marbled endpapers. In dull marbled boards, over half black calf, professionally re-backed, and with the original gilt-titled spine label (perhaps excised from the original back-strip). Generally very good. Scarce. [OCLC locates nine copies; Gabler, page 172; Noling, page 192; Simon BG 818 (another ed.)].
Price: $1,200.00