Deadly Adulteration and Slow Poisoning Unmasked / Disease and Death in the Pot and Bottle

by Anonymous

[D] East-India or West-India Cape is that portion of Cape wines which has had the benefit of a voyage from the Cape of Good Hope to the East Indies, and thence back to London. Cape Sherry is that portion of Cape wine which bears the greatest resemblance in flavour to real Sherry. Cape Madeira is so denominated from its resemblance, in point of flavour, to Madeira. Cape Burgundy, Cape Hock, Cape Sauterne, Cape Port, Cape Pontac, Cape Champagne, Cape Barsac, &c. owe their appellations to their supposed resemblance, in point of flavour, to those wines.

[E] The respectable author of “The Art of Brewing on Scientific Principles” has the following note, “Spirits vended by retail are all adulterated, and some of them to a dreadful extent. Some months since (his work was published in 1826,) a person having writing to do that would occupy great part of the night, purchased, at a liquor shop, in Newgate-street, half a pint of gin; and, during the night, he drank a goblet-full of grog, which he had made from it. He was seized with most excruciating agony, spasms of the stomach, temporary paralysis, and loss of intellect. These he attributed to some natural cause, and he gave the remainder of the liquor to a person that called on him in the morning. In about an hour that person was similarly affected. This induced inquiry; and it was ascertained that the woman who served the liquor had mistaken the bottle, and had sold half a pint of the fluid intended to prepare the adulterations for sale. The last-mentioned person who partook of the infernal mixture died of its effects.” Similar consequences have occurred from adulterated beer. Among a thousand other instances, see the Coroner’s inquest in the Times Newspaper of the 29th of June, 1829.

[F] According to the testimony of the author of “Wine and Spirit Adulterators Unmasked” the profits of the wine and spirit compounders are so great, and the chance of the detection of their frauds and impositions on the public and the revenue is almost so impossible, that many of them are to be found “vieing with the nobility of the land in the splendour of their equipages and expenditure.” He mentions one gin-shop-keeper (a worthy in the neighbourhood of St. Luke’s) who “drives his family to church, on a Sunday, in his carriage and four.” Another, who has a “richly ornamented state bed.” A third, who is to be found lolling “on an ottoman, in a French dressing-gown.” And he adds, that it is usual to give from four to six thousand guineas for the good will of a gin-shop which has an unexpired lease of eighteen or twenty years, with the drawback of the purchaser being quite at the mercy of the magistrates as to the renewal of his license.

[G] The crusting of wine in the natural way generally takes place in about nine months; but, among the artizans of the factitious wine-trade, it is accomplished in a much shorter time. Those ingenious gentry line the inside of the bottles they intend to fill with their compound called wine, by suffering a saturated hot solution of super-tartrate of potash, coloured red with a decoction of Brazil wood, to crystallize within them. Others of that honest fraternity, who dislike trouble, put a tea-spoon full of the powder of catechu into each bottle, and by this artifice soon produce a fine crusted appearance of “aged wine.” This simulation of maturity is often accomplished by the humbler dealer by covering the bottles with snow, or by exposing them to the rays of the sun, or by keeping them for a few days in hot water. Where the casks are to be bottled off by the purchaser, or in his presence, they are stained in the inside with the artificial crystalline crust of super-tartrate of potash, as a proof of the age of the wine.

[H] To produce the dilapidations of “Father Time” on wine corks, the dry rot, however injurious to others, is of great advantage to wine-dealers, as it soon covers the bottles with its mouldy appearance, and consumes the external part of the cork; so that with a trifling operation on the bottles after they are filled, and then deposited in cellars pretty strongly affected with the dry rot, they can furnish the admirers of “aged wine” with liquor having the appearance of having been bottled seven or eight years, though it has not in reality been there so many months. The staining of the lower extremities of the corks with a fine red colour, produced from a strong decoction of Brazil wood and alum, to make them appear “aged,” or as if they had been long in contact with the wine, is another of the devices of the factitious wine-trade, and forms a distinct branch of its operations.

[I] Among the numerous delusions with which the senses of the “error ridden” nation of Englishmen—aye, and the “bonnie Scots,” and the “Sons of the Emerald Isle,” are benighted, is the false and erroneous opinion that strong stimulating liquors impart strength to the body. As a very sensible writer observes on this subject,—“To depend on spirituous liquors for the power to labour, is as wise as it would be in a man, setting out for York, to get a friend to give him a kick on the b—— to help him forward. His friend must continue the same kind office all the way, or he would continually flag.” No work of the present age has contributed more effectually to remove these mistaken notions than “The Oracle of Health and Long Life.” May its well-intentioned and judicious author have the consolation of finding that his important instructions have contributed to the health and welfare of the community; and may the unqualified approval of his little volume, by the respectable part of the periodical press of the country be a stimulus to fresh exertion to render the work faultless.

[J] Mr. Brewer Child’s recipe (see Treatise on Brewing, p. 23) for making new beer old, is to throw in a dash of vitriol. “A smack of age,” he likewise adds, at p. 18, “is also given to beer, by the addition of alum.” Well done, brewer Child; thou art an expeditious chap! Thou mightest have been of service in the Court of Chancery, in tempore Lord Chancellor Eldon, of doubting and delaying memory.

[K] On this subject, Mr. J. D. Williams, the Editor of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries, has rendered no trifling service to society, by his petition, presented to the House of Commons, by the Marquess of Blandford, on June 17th, 1830; in which he prayed the appointment of fit and competent persons for the digestment and simplification of, or, in the emphatical language of Lord Bacon, for “the choice and tender business of reducing and harmonizing,” the hybrid and confused state of the law. As he justly said, “no useful and beneficial amendment or amelioration can reasonably be expected; but the Statute Book will still continue to be disgraced with enactments which will be at variance with common sense, the first principles of justice, and even nullify the intent and purport of the enactments themselves, while the concoction of laws is entrusted to others than persons endowed with a spirit of comprehensive knowledge, great enlightenment, enlarged and liberal understandings, and who are acquainted with the nature of the subjects on which they presume to legislate.” The instances which that gentleman adduced in his well intended petition of “the great and singular blunders” as to “erroneous conclusions in the first principles of science,” committed by some of our law-makers are really amusing—if any honest man can derive amusement from his country’s injury and degradation.

[L] The addition of the farina or starch of the potato improves the bread, by counteracting its constipating effects, and by minutely dividing the particles of the flour during the fermentation; and for this reason its introduction into home-made bread would, as the author of “The Oracle of Health and Long Life,” says, be beneficial to health, as making it more nutritious and digestible.

[M] The remarks of the learned editors of the Monthly Gazette of Health, Nos. 160 and 162, are so much to the purpose, and so deserving of diffusion among all ranks and classes of the community, on the exhibition of the jew pedlars, the “groundly learned physicians,” the “Doctors” J. and C. Jordan, “physicians to the West London Medical Establishment,” and “proprietors of the celebrated Balsam of Rackasiri,” and the celebrated “Salutary Detersive Drops,” as the vagabonds impudently and unblushingly style themselves and their nostrums; and their redoubtable champion “Mr. Counsellor Bluster,” that I cannot do a greater service to the cause of truth and honesty and the discomfiture of roguery of all descriptions, than to refer my readers to those numbers of that work.