Ratafia is not for Sissies!

This post is a follow-up on the Jane Austen Happy Hour workshop at last weekend’s RT convention where fellow Austen Authors Karen Doornebos, Marilyn Brant, Sharon Lathan, C. Allyn Pierson and I discussed regency-era alcoholic beverages, complete with taste-testing. I provided ratafia, and since I’d forgotten to bring the recipe cards, I volunteered to post the recipe on the blog. I’m sure more will be posted about the event, but I’m still recovering from all the excitement!

For those who didn’t attend, here’s the gist of my talk. Ratafia was one of the ladies’ beverages, along with lemonade, orgeat, and punch, so I assumed it was similarly low in alcoholic content. Silly me! It’s a liqueur made of brandy with fruit, spices, and crushed fruit pits steeped in it for 1-2 months, then filtered and sweetened with large amounts of sugar. The sweetness and fruitiness meant that men didn’t touch the stuff, but if you think about that recipe for a minute, you’ll realize it’s nothing more than slightly diluted flavored brandy. For added spice, as it were, some of the fruit pits used in making it contained hydrogen cyanide. The resulting drink is rather tasty, but highly intoxicating. Those ladies must have been laughing behind their fans at the gentlemen who blithely assumed they were drinking a dull concoction!

The recipe I used was a combination of various period recipes. The ingredients of period recipes depend on the season and availability; I followed this practice adapted to what was available in the supermarket and my kitchen. I skipped all the fruit pits, thinking that it might be wisest to go easy on the cyanide.

3 liters of brandy

3 pounds of peaches

2 pounds of raspberries

1 pound strawberries

3 oranges

6 cinnamon sticks, cracked

20 cloves

I partially crushed the fruit, then mixed everything together and allowed it to steep for two months, then drained it through a cheesecloth, squeezing out any remaining juice from the fruit. This produced about 4 liters of liquid, to which I added 3 cups of sugar. Upon tasting it, I realized that even if it was a period recipe, I couldn’t possibly serve this to workshop attendees in the mid-afternoon, so I added 2 liters of white grape juice. As anyone who tasted it can testify, it was still very, very strong.

Some people also asked for my list of Regency terms for drunks, drunkenness and drinking. The 15 terms found in Georgette Heyer’s novels are ape-drunk (very drunk), to be with malt above water, bosky, drunk as a wheelbarrow, dipping rather deep (drinking heavily), making indentures (drinking), a trifle disguised, eaten Hull cheese, foxed, half-sprung (tipsy), jug-bitten, on the cut (on a drinking binge), properly shot in the neck, tap-hackled, and top-heavy. Other regency terms included boosey, bowsy, chirping merry, clear (very drunk), corned, crown office, cup-shot, cut, as drunk as David’s sow, drop in his eye, drunk as an emperor, flawd or floor’d, flustered, in the gun, half seas over, swallowed a hare, hickey (tipsy), hockey (drunk on small beer), hocus, lush or lushy, maudlin drunk, mauled, mellow (almost drunk), nazy, in a merry pin, pogy, pot-valiant, sack, sucky, surveyor of the highways (drunk and reeling), tipsy, womble-ty-cropt, wrapt up in warm flannel. It’s enough to make one think that nobody in the regency was ever sober!

Here are some of the period recipes I found:

From Robert’s Guide for Butlers & Other Household Staff, published 1828:

Into one quart of brandy pour half a pint of cherry juice, as much currant juice, as much of raspberry juice, add a few cloves, and some white pepper in grains, two grains of green coriander, and a stick or two of cinnamon, then pound the stones of cherries, and put them in wood and all. Add about twenty five or thirty kernels of apricots. Stop your demijohn close and let it infuse for one month in the shade, shaking it five or six times in that time at the end of which strain it through a flannel bag, then through a filtering paper, and then bottle it and cork close for use; you can make any quantity you chose, only by adding or increasing more brandy or other ingredients.

Some slightly (but not much) weaker Victorian recipes:

From The Household Cyclopedia of General Information, 1881:

This a liquor prepared from different kinds of fruits, and is of different colors, according to the fruits made use of. These fruits should be gathered when in their greatest perfection, and the largest and most beautiful of them chosen for the purpose. The following is the method of making red ratafia, fine and soft: Take of the black-heart cherries, 24 lbs., black cherries, 4 lbs., raspberries and strawberries. each, 3 lbs.; Pick the fruit from their stalks and bruise them, in which state let them continue 12 hours, then press out the juice, and to every pint of it add 1/4 lb. of sugar. When the sugar is dissolved, run the whole through the filtering-bag and add to it 3 quarts of proof spirit. Then take of cinnamon, 4 oz., mace, 4 oz., and cloves, 2 drs. Bruise these spices, put them into an alembic with a gallon of proof spirit and 2 quarts of water, and draw off a gallon with a brisk fire. Add as much of this spicy spirit to the ratafia as will render it agreeable; about 1/4 is the usual proportion.

Dry or Sharp Ratafia

Take of cherries and gooseberries, each 30 lbs., mulberries, 7 lbs., raspberries, 10 lbs.; Pick all these fruits clean from their stalks, etc., bruise them and let them stand 12 hours, but do not suffer them to ferment. Press out the juice, and to every pint add 3 oz. of sugar. When the sugar is dissolved, run it through the filtering-bag, and to every 5 pints of liquor add 4 pints of proof spirit, together with the same proportion of spirit drawn from spices.

Common Ratafia

Take of nutmegs, 8 oz., bitter almonds, 10 lbs., Lisbon sugar, 8 lbs., ambergris, 10 grs. Infuse these ingredients three days in 10 galls. of proof spirit and filter it through a flannel bag for use. The nutmegs and bitter almonds must be bruised and the ambergris rubbed with the Lisbon sugar in a marble mortar, before they are infused in the spirit.

From The Bartender’s Guide: How to Mix Drinks, 1862

Ratafia of Raspberries

12 lbs. of raspberries, the juice of them boiled for 5 minutes with 20 lbs. of sugar; dissolve in 4 1/2 gallons of water; strain, add 4 gallons of alcohol, 95 per cent. Filter.

If you’re still feeling sober after reading all of those, you must have a very strong head!

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13 comments on “Ratafia is not for sissies!”

    1. Sophia Rose
      That’s hilarious about how potent the stuff is and it was shunned by the guys because of the fruitiness. I think that I would have been quite the lush back then.Thanks for all the fun historic info!

    1. BeckyC
      After reading the recipes, I can see why there were so many terms to describle the various stages of drinking. Hilarious post. I bet it was quite a fun topic for the JA Happy Hour Workshop! Did you get through it with a straight face?

    1. Nina Benneton
      Oh my, no wonder those Georgian and Regency women think their men looked good in curly wigs, stockings and frills–after one of the ratafias above, I’d be falling in love with Dame Edna’s forebears, too.

        1. Monica P
          Hahaha!

    1. Susan Kaye
      “Oh, look at all this bruised fruit and pits! Here, let me get rid of that for you.”The Regency version of reduce and repurpose.

    1. Karana A
      I had always wondered what ratifia was and why it was considered a ladies drink. Thanks for the info.

    1. Marilyn Brant
      It tasted delicious, Abigail, but you’re SO RIGHT — not a drink for sissies!! It was strong stuff :razz: . Loved learning more about it here and at RT!

    1. Monica P
      This sounds yummy! I may have to make some for the next family gathering. It wouldn’t be the first time something’s been in the back of my fridge for 2 months, and this I can actually consume afterwards! Lol

    1. Susan Mason-Milks
      I wish I could have been there to taste it! It looks like you had a great time. What were the reactions of the people in your class?

    1. Karen Doornebos
      I didn’t even get a chance to try it, Abigail! You’ll have to make some more, ha ha ha!!! It looks like everyone else enjoyed it, though! Great post…

    1. Vera Nazarian
      This is just great, Abigail, and thank you for all the variant versions recipes!But… I am amazed at the cyanide use with all those apricot pits, eeek! Didn’t these people drop dead from drinking this stuff? Wow!

    1. Beatrice Nearey
      I enjoyed this very much. It inspired me to write a skit using the terms related to drinking for my Jane Austen group. It’s hard for people to listen to a long list like that, and I wanted to share the information with them. Thank you for posting this!

    1. suzan
      fascinating. I always wondered what was in the stuff since I’ve seen it mentioned in so many novels. Thanks for the wealth of info.

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    • Deborah on February 4, 2014 at 5:52 pm
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    I’ve heard of Ratafia before and never knew what it WS. It mind of sounds like it was similar to my grandfather’s homemade Schnapps. I think if the males had tried it they might have switched….glad they didn’t. The gsls had their secrets too. Thanks for the recipes.

    1. I can just picture the ladies laughing behind their fans at the men about how easy it was too fool them!

    • Chanpreet on February 5, 2014 at 10:14 pm
    • Reply

    Having always read about ratafia, I never knew what it was and am surprised I never bothered to look it up. I always assumed it was a sweet non-alcoholic drink. Thanks for the lesson. I’d love to try some!

    1. That’s what I thought, too, when I volunteered to make it. Historical research is full of surprises!

    • Anji on February 6, 2014 at 8:40 am
    • Reply

    Sounds like an interesting drink. I do like a nice brandy but not sure if this might be a bit sweet for me, with or without the cyanide!

    It’s somewhat similar to the sloe gin my husband makes every year. Sloes are the fruit from the shrub commonly known as blackthorn or Prunus spinosa. We have a hedge of it in our garden and I gather it’s been naturalised in some parts of eastern North America, too. The fruit is picked, slashed with a sharp knife and steeped in a solution of gin and sugar for two to three months. The sweetness of the final product depends on the amount of sugar used, obviously. We made three different ones last year, the least sweet being for me!

    1. Sloe gin sounds like it would make a fine Regency drink!

    • Kathy Shriver on February 26, 2023 at 3:38 pm
    • Reply

    If this was what was in the Ratafia, I wonder what was in the “lemonade” they served at the balls? Sounds like the ladies back in the day weren’t feeling much pain! Whoooeee!! Ratafia sounds sickeningly sweet too!

  1. […] brandy ranged from peaches and cherries to cinnamon and cloves. One recipe for ratafia can be found here at Austen […]

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