A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons | Page 3

substances of inferior value
are substituted for more costly and genuine ingredients, the
sophistication, though it may affect our purse, does not injure our
health. Of this kind are the manufacture of factitious pepper, the
adulterations of mustard, vinegar, cream, &c. Others, however, are
highly deleterious; and to this class belong the adulterations of beer,
wines, spiritous liquors, pickles, salad oil, and many others.
There are particular chemists who make it a regular trade to supply
drugs or nefarious preparations to the unprincipled brewer of porter or
ale; others perform the same office to the wine and spirit merchant; and

others again to the grocer and the oilman. The operators carry on their
processes chiefly in secresy, and under some delusive firm, with the
ostensible denotements of a fair and lawful establishment.
These illicit pursuits have assumed all the order and method of a
regular trade; they may severally claim to be distinguished as an art
and mystery; for the workmen employed in them are often wholly
ignorant of the nature of the substances which pass through their hands,
and of the purposes to which they are ultimately applied.
To elude the vigilance of the inquisitive, to defeat the scrutiny of the
revenue officer, and to ensure the secresy of these mysteries, the
processes are very ingeniously divided and subdivided among
individual operators, and the manufacture is purposely carried on in
separate establishments. The task of proportioning the ingredients for
use is assigned to one individual, while the composition and
preparation of them may be said to form a distinct part of the business,
and is entrusted to another workman. Most of the articles are
transmitted to the consumer in a disguised state, or in such a form that
their real nature cannot possibly be detected by the unwary. Thus the
extract of coculus indicus, employed by fraudulent manufacturers of
malt-liquors to impart an intoxicating quality to porter or ales, is known
in the market by the name of black extract, ostensibly destined for the
use of tanners and dyers. It is obtained by boiling the berries of the
coculus indicus in water, and converting, by a subsequent evaporation,
this decoction into a stiff black tenacious mass, possessing, in a high
degree, the narcotic and intoxicating quality of the poisonous berry
from which it is prepared. Another substance, composed of extract of
quassia and liquorice juice, used by fraudulent brewers to economise
both malt and hops, is technically called multum.[1]
The quantities of coculus indicus berries, as well as of black extract,
imported into this country for adulterating malt liquors, are enormous.
It forms a considerable branch of commerce in the hands of a few
brokers: yet, singular as it may seem, no inquiry appears to have been
hitherto made by the officers of the revenue respecting its application.
Many other substances employed in the adulteration of beer, ale, and

spiritous liquors, are in a similar manner intentionally disguised; and of
the persons by whom they are purchased, a great number are totally
unacquainted with their nature or composition.
An extract, said to be innocent, sold in casks, containing from half a
cwt. to five cwt. by the brewers' druggists, under the name of bittern, is
composed of calcined sulphate of iron (copperas), extract of coculus
indicus berries, extract of quassia, and Spanish liquorice.
It would be very easy to adduce, in support of these remarks, the
testimony of numerous individuals, by whom I have been
professionally engaged to examine certain mixtures, said to be perfectly
innocent, which are used in very extensive manufactories of the above
description. Indeed, during the long period devoted to the practice of
my profession, I have had abundant reason to be convinced that a vast
number of dealers, of the highest respectability, have vended to their
customers articles absolutely poisonous, which they themselves
considered as harmless, and which they would not have offered for sale,
had they been apprised of the spurious and pernicious nature of the
compounds, and of the purposes to which they were destined.
For instance, I have known cases in which brandy merchants were not
aware that the substance which they frequently purchase under the
delusive name of flash, for strengthening and clarifying spiritous
liquors, and which is held out as consisting of burnt sugar and isinglass
only, in the form of an extract, is in reality a compound of sugar, with
extract of capsicum; and that to the acrid and pungent qualities of the
capsicum is to be ascribed the heightened flavour of brandy and rum,
when coloured with the above-mentioned matter.
In other cases the ale-brewer has been supplied with ready-ground
coriander seeds, previously mixed with a portion of nux vomica and
quassia, to give a bitter taste and narcotic property to the beverage.
The retail venders of mustard do