Perhaps because of the professionalization of pharmacy, and the concomitant standardization of its practices and procedures, druggists’ trade journals hosted the earliest American appearances of what would be the most influential and widely circulated set of flavor formulas: Kletzinsky’s table of artificial fruit essences. Vincenz Kletzinsky (1826-1882) — sometimes spelled Kletzinski — was an Austrian chemist known for his work in ‘animal chemistry.’ That is, he studied the chemical reactions underlying the physiological processes of life: digestion, metabolism, health and disease, the ways that drugs worked upon the body.
superior quality, strength, elegance, and agreeable flavor.” [218] Meyer Brothers Drug Co., “Annual Catalogue and Prices Current,” St. Louis, MO, August 1889: 218. Smithsonian Libraries Trade Literature Collection.
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Kletzinsky's Table of Formulas for "Artificial Fruit Essences" was first released into the world in 1865, when it appeared in his report of the latest pure and applied chemical research.111 It began its circulation when it appeared in the pages of Dingler's
Polytechnisches Journal, a widely-read German technical journal, the following year.112
The table made its print debut in the United States in April 1867, in the Druggists’
Circular and Chemical Gazette, and the following month, in the American Journal of
Pharmacy.113
For at least fifty years, Kletzinsky's table and its associated formulas percolated through the written record: first in trade journals and professional reference books for pharmacists, confectioners, ice cream makers, and those in the beverage or soda fountain trade; later in miscellanies and formula books for amateurs. The formulas are included in two of the earliest American monographs on the subject of manufacturing and using flavoring extracts: Charles Herman Sulz’s 1888 Compendium of Flavorings,114 and
111 V. Kletzinsky, Mittheilungen aus dem Gebiete der reinen und angewandten
Chemie, (Vienna: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1865): 45
112“Ueber die sogenannten Fruchtessenzen,” Dingler’s Polytechnische Journal 180
(1866): 77.
113 M. Kletzinski [sic], “On Fruit Essences,” Druggists’ Circular and Chemical Gazette
(April 1, 1867): 82; “On Fruit Essences,” American Journal of Pharmacy (May 1867): 238. Both of these early reprints contain an error, in that the column for “oil of persicot” (ie, essential oil of bitter almond, or benzaldehyde) is empty. These seem to be
transcribing an error from the reprint of these formulas in the London Pharmacy Journal; as the original table in Dingler’s Polytechnic contains quantities in this column.
114 This text was a selection and abridgment of a much larger volume published the same
year, A Treatise on Beverages, or The Complete Practical Bottler. (Sulz described himself as a “technical and analytical chemist” with experience as a “practical bottler.”) While A Treatise on Beverages was a comprehensive manual on nearly every aspect of producing bottled carbonated beverages, Compendium on Flavorings was intended to be work of broader utility, intended for all users of flavorings, with some recognition of the different needs these products had to fulfill in different contexts. For instance, Sulz drew
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Joseph Harrop’s 1891 Monograph on Flavoring Extracts with Essences, Syrups, and Colorings.115
By following Kletzinsky’s table, the flavor-maker could summon the aromatic specters of fifteen distinct fruity flavors: pineapple, melon, strawberry, raspberry, gooseberry, grape, apple, orange, pear, lemon, cherry and black cherry, plum, apricot, and peach.
a distinction between “extracts, essences, and tinctures made for the druggist,
confectioner, and carbonator.” While concentrated flavorings best served the purposes of the druggist and confectioner, the beverage bottler had other requirements: flavors that would “yield clear and bright syrups,” that wouldn’t separate or become turbid on the shelf, and that were water-soluble.
115 Joseph Harrop, Monograph on Flavoring Extracts with Essences, Syrups, and
Colorings. Also Formulas for the Preparation with Appendix. Intended for the Use of Druggists. (Columbus, OH: Harrop & Co, 1891.)
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Fig 1. Kletzinsky’s table of artificial fruit essences in one of its first appearances in the United States. M. [sic] Kletzinski, “On Fruit Essences,” American Journal of Pharmacy (May 1867): 238.
Kletzinsky outlined a basic set of chemical materials that would be used in the production of synthetic flavors. These included a range of ethers and amyl ethers, a couple of essential oils, a pair of aldehydes (including benzaldehyde and acetyl aldehyde, which was listed as “aldehyd” after Liebig’s usage), a handful of organic acids, and other constituents including chloroform, nitrous ether, glycerin, and, especially, alcohol. These compounds could readily be purchased from druggists’ wholesalers and chemical supply houses, as well as from many essential oil dealers. Following the model of some earlier flavor formulas, Kletzinsky’s table specified ratios rather than fixed quantities: the proportional quantities of one or two esters dissolved in 100 parts of alcohol. Expressing the formula as a ratio of chemicals rather than as measured quantities suggests that users could scale production up or down as needed.
By presenting each compound in a range of different flavor applications, the sensory meaning of each of these ethereal chemicals was ultimately not fixed to one particular fruit; it could vary depending on concentration, as well as chemical and local contexts. Consider the case of amyl acetate, the essence of Jargonelle pear, often sold as ‘pear oil.’ In Kletzinsky’s table, it also plays a role in strawberry, raspberry, and orange flavorings. In the United States, this chemical was also frequently sold as ‘banana oil,’ named for its apparent evocation of the odor of that fruit, and was used as a component of varnishes in addition to its role in flavorings. (The candy-banana smell of isoamyl acetate
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remains familiar to us.) Indeed, reprints of Kletzinsky’s formulas in American publications often included an additional formula for banana essence (usually a combination of amyl acetate and ethyl butyrate) indicating the popularity of this flavoring.116
The text accopanying Kletzinsky’s table was spare — one scant paragraph. It underscored the importance of using only chemically pure substances, including pure alcohol. It also explained that the glycerine was included in nearly all of the formulas because it “appears to blend the different odors, and to harmonize them.”117 Glycerine is
a simple sugar alcohol, a viscous liquid derived from fatty substances such as palm oil, valued for its efficacy as a solvent. It had multiple applications in the nineteenth century, including in pharmacy, surgery, and the preparation of scientific specimens.118 (It remains
important in flavor production to this day.) Kletzinsky’s articulation of the idea that “blending” and “harmonization” were virtues to which artificial flavors should aspire would remain important, as we shall see. The production of synthetic flavors exhibiting “blendedness” and “harmony” — a condition in which the individual chemicals
contributing distinct sensory qualities to a substance were not detectable to the senses, but were submerged into and contributing to a single, irreducible perceptual experience —
116 Nadia Berenstein, “The History of Banana Flavoring,” Lucky Peach (August 2016):
http://luckypeach.com/the-history-of-banana-flavoring/
117 Kletsinki 1867. The version of the table published in Dingler’s uses a phrase from
perfumery, describing glycerine as causing the “individual flavor and odor notes” to blend into “a single sensory chord.”
118 Wm. Abbots Smith, On Glycerine, and Its Uses in Medicine, Surgery, & Pharmacy.
Being Principally an Abstract of M. Demarquay's Treatise, 'De La Glycerine,' &c.
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would also come to trouble efforts to create and enforce a definition of these flavors that distinguished them from the strictly “natural.”
Kletzinsky’s table is equally notable for what is left unaddressed. First, Kletzinsky makes no mention of how he compiled or created the table. Although it is likely that he collected formulas from commercial flavor manufacturers rather than developing them himself, it is unknown how generally these formulas were used among flavor manufacturers, or, alternately, how local or particular they were to one town or region.119 What is certain, however, is that the process of developing these formulas did
not begin with an analysis of the chemical components of fruits. It started with a recognition of the sensory qualities of organic chemicals. Manufacturing chemists worked empirically with available organic chemicals, combining and diluting them, mixing and sniffing, until they obtained recognizable, and pleasurable, results.120
Kletzinsky’s table also did not explain the process of actually making these mixtures: how to select chemicals in order to ensure that they were of proper purity or quality, what order they should be combined in, or what type of instruments should be used to do this. Nor did it explain anything about usage: what foods or beverages these could be added to, the quantity of flavoring that should be used in different products, how
119 There is some evidence that formulas may have varied regionally and internationally.
For instance, an 1866 article in the London Chemist and Druggist (reprinted in the American Druggist’s Circular and Chemical Gazette) notes that the artificial fruit essences produced by German manufacturers in the Zollverein department “differ
considerably from those met with in British commerce.” The substance of this difference is left unexplained. “The Composition of Some Artificial Fruit Essences,” Druggist’s
Circular and Chemical Gazette, (Jan 1866).
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the mixtures should be stored. All of these factors, as manufacturers and users of
synthetic flavors were beginning to recognize, had an effect on a flavoring’s quality and utility. Ultimately, by presenting different fruit flavors as combinations of a limited set of related chemical compounds, Kletzinsky’s table had a static and closed quality. Aside from glycerine, it made no attempt to describe the role that each of the components played in the ultimate composition, and thus had limited utility on its own as a tool for creating novel flavors, altering existing ones, or incorporating new materials.
The contexts where Kletzinsky’s formulas appear give some indications of how different groups of flavor-makers might have put these formulas to use. For instance, in
his Monograph on Flavoring Extracts, Harrop replicates Kletzinsky’s formulas (without
attribution) but also provides variants for a few flavors: pineapple, strawberry, and
raspberry. Harrop’s alternative formulas are simpler versions with fewer components. For instance, Harrop’s second raspberry flavor includes only three of the thirteen chemicals included in the first formula, which reproduces Kletzinsky’s original.121 Harrop did not
explicitly address the differences between alternative formulas for a single flavor, or the contexts for which each was best suited. However, he implicitly provides a key for the interpretation of the flavor formulas. In his explanation of his strawberry flavors, he writes that butyric and acetic ethers “form the base, although the combination may be added to almost without limit.”122 In other words, by building on a standard chemical
foundation that provides the “sensible core” of a flavor, the practical chemist can invent, improvise, add nuance, capitalizing on the multiple sensory possibilities available in each
121 Harrop 1891: 78-9. Also changes the relative proportion of these ethers to each other. 122 Harrop 1891: 77.
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chemical to achieve desired effects and inflections, while still maintaining a resemblance. Harrop ends with the valediction, “license is given to figure for yourself, provided you are able.”123
Nearly thirty years after Harrop’s monograph, Kletzinsky’s table is reproduced in the 1919 edition of the Scientific American Cyclopedia of Formulas, a compendia of miscellaneous recipes for manufacturing household goods, where it is included alongside 15,000 formulas for things such as glues, embalming fluids, and varnishes, and
descriptions of the symptoms of poisoning by sewer gas, among many other things. Although Kletzinsky's table remained more or less unchanged from its first appearances in chemistry and pharmacy journals, its meaning had changed; its standing in the world had dropped. By the twentieth century, its formulas were no longer cited in professional literature, except with caution or derision. Erich Walter, in his 1916 Manual for the Essence Industry, wrote: "In the course of time, the public has come to look with disfavor on the artificial fruit flavors formerly employed, and in the formulas which follow no attention will be paid to such imitations." (He then went on to supply his own formulas for imitation fruit flavors.) The 20th edition of the U.S. Dispensatory (1918) was the first to demur from including Kletzsinky's formulas, referring readers looking for that
information to previous editions.
The persistence of Kletzinsky's table is one of the signs of the expanding
commercial need for synthetic flavor additives, which could perform functions in factory- produced foods that “genuine” flavors could not. The diminishing status of Kletzinsky’s
123 Harrop 1891: 85.
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formulas, however, indicates something else: a widening divide between flavor amateurs, following standard formulas, and flavor professionals, the kind of workers who would “go figure for [themselves].” This marks the opening of a rupture at the beginning of the twentieth century between "practical chemists" who mix up flavors and fragrances, among many other things, and specialized chemical workers (affiliated with newly established firms specializing in flavor and fragrance materials) who claim a particular kind of expertise with aromatic materials, an expertise that is both scientific and sensory.