[2]The taste of allspice is warm, aromatic, pungent, and slightly astringent, and it imparts its flavor to water and all its virtue to alcohol. The infusion with water is of a brown color, and reddens litmus paper. Allspice yields volatile oil by distillation, a green fixed oil, a fatty substance in yellowish flakes, and tannin, gum, resin, sugar, coloring matter, malic and galic acids, saline matter, moisture and lignin. ----- Footnote 2: State of Michigan, Dairy and Food Commission. The green oil has the burning, aromatic taste of pimento, and is supposed to be the acrid principle. Upon this, therefore, together with the volatile oil, the active properties of the berries depend. The shell contains 10 per cent. of volatile oil, and perhaps a little chlorophyl. Allspice is reported to contain an alkaloid having the odor of caneine. The volatile oil, which is used as a flavoring in alcoholic solution, is of a brownish-red, clear appearance, and has the odor and taste of pimento, but is warmer and more pungent. It is readily soluble in alcohol, and if two drops of the oil be dissolved in one fluid drachm of alcohol, and a drop of ferric chloride test solution be added, a bright-green color will be produced. If one C. C. of the oil be shaken with twenty C. C. of hot water it should not give more than a scarcely perceptible acid reaction with litmus paper. If, after cooling, the liquid be passed through a wet filter, the clear filtrate will produce, with a drop of ferric chloride test solution, only a transient greyish green, but not a blue or violet color, a fact which indicates the absence of carbolic acid. Pimento oil consists, like the oil of cloves, of two distinct oils, a light and heavy oil, separated by distilling the oil from caustic potassa. The light oil passes over, leaving the heavy oil behind, combined with the potassa. The heavy oil may be recovered by distilling the residue with sulphuric acid. The heavy oil has the acid property of combining with the alkalides, forming crystallized compounds, which is identical with the eugenol from the oil of cloves, from which is prepared the vanillin of commerce. Powdered allspice is often adulterated with clove stems, peas, almond shells, cracker dust, etc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: CINNAMON AND CASSIA 1 Ceylon 2 Batavia 3 Cassia Liguea 4 Java 5 Saigon 6 Cassia Liguea bud 7 Leaf stalk or flowering twig] CHAPTER IX CINNAMON AND CASSIA Robbed of your bark in masses large, It’s sent abroad by ship and barge; And India’s fragrance you bestow, In summer climes and frigid snow.