A look at 27 Daffy's Elixir recipes of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries reveals 26 different versions. But that's not all....
This is the second of two articles about Daffy's Elixir, the medicine. Click here for 'Will the real Daffy's Elixir please stand up?'.
A handwritten recipe for Daffy's Elixir. Undated, but probably 18th century (private collection). Giving directions for making just three pints at a time, this was possibly written down for personal use. It may have been copied or adapted from one of the many published versions, but so far I haven't found any that matches it exactly:
"A Receipt [recipe] , To make Daffeys Ellixir
2 Ounces & ½ of Senna
1 Do [ditto] Guamicam [guaiacum] Wood
1 Do Allium [paine?] Root
1 Do Liquorish Root
1 Do Annaseeds
1 Do Carraway seeds
1 Do Corriander seeds
N: B: The way to make ye above mentioned –
1st, You are to Brouse ye seeds in a mortar –
2nd Take 3 pints of Brandy or Gineavea –
first, put a Quart in to a wide mouth Bottle
& near the fier, and lett itt Stand for 3 or
four days, then straine ye Quart off, and put
the pint in, and lett that stand about ye same –
time or longer then itt will be fitt for use. –
You are to take about a Quantity of 2 ounces & a –
half on going to bed, or in the morning. –
Keep warm."
Having established that a range of different recipes for Daffy's Elixir were published, often simultaneously, over a period of two centuries or more, and that published recipes were quite frequently associated with two particular proprietor's names (Dicey, and Swinton), it's time to ask:
What was Daffy’s Elixir, really?
A common observation of the 18th and 19th centuries was that Daffy’s Elixir was similar to the Tincture of Senna that was part of the stock-in-trade of druggists and apothecaries of the times. Haycock and Wallis (1) examined nineteen Daffy’s Elixir recipes dating from as early as the 1680s through to 1850. They discovered a wide range of variation, with as few as four ingredients and as many as ten, but in common with Tincture of Senna the majority did contain both senna and substantial amounts of alcohol.
Haycock and Wallis were however most interested in the 17th century career of Anthony Daffy, and less interested in the 18th and 19th century makers of the Elixir. Although Dicey & Co, for example, get a mention in the Haycock & Wallis book it is only in passing. I decided to have another look at a range of Daffy’s recipes, to see what they might tell us about the medicine contained in the embossed bottles, dating between about the 1770s and 1920s, that can be found in many public and private collections today.
I looked at twenty-seven recipes, twenty-six from books published between 1696 and 1857 (2), and the undated manuscript recipe above. Several of the published recipes were labelled ‘Dicey Daffy’s’ or ‘Swinton’s Daffy’s (3)’, but the majority were unnamed.
So, how different were Dicey’s Daffy’s and Swinton’s Daffy’s, and what other types might be consistently identifiable?
Standardising all the recipes to one pint of finished product (the original recipes were for making anything from a few pints to 100 gallons at a time) and then putting the results into a table (below), various things immediately became clear:
Firstly, the twenty-seven recipes include no fewer than twenty-six different versions. Although some of the recipes have identical lists of ingredients they are often combined in very different proportions. Only two of the twenty-seven, both from veterinary books, are identical.
Secondly, with only a few exceptions the recipes fall into two distinct groups, differentiated from each other on the basis of three ingredients: senna, jalap, and guaiacum (4). Each of those two groups can then be divided into two sub-groups on a similar basis.
Summary of the main features of 27 Daffy's Elixir recipes dating between 1696 and 1857 (2). An 1809 recipe for Tincture of Senna is included for comparison. Some sweeteners, including treacle and sugar, have been omitted from this table for the sake of clarity.
Group 1. The Senna and guaiacum group (green in the table). Nine recipes, distinguished by the use of both senna and guaiacum along with large quantities of raisins. This group divides into two more groups, on the basis of the amount of senna used:
The Woolley group. Four recipes, the earliest of which was published in the 1696 edition of Hannah Woolley’s ‘Accomplish’d Ladies Delight’.
The Dicey group (so-called because all four of the 'Dicey Daffy' recipes are in this group). Five recipes that contain around twice as much senna per pint as the Woolley group. The earliest of these is the recipe of John Quincy, first published in 1718 (although I used the 2nd, 1719, edition of his book), quite possibly before Dicey & Co (or perhaps Cluer & Co, the predecessors of Dicey & Co) first started selling Daffy’s Elixir. The manuscript recipe, illustrated above, belongs in this 'Dicey' group but it doesn't match any others. I haven't yet found an exact match anywhere, begging the question of where the handwritten version came from.
Group 2. The Senna and jalap group (blue). Fifteen recipes, including all of the Swinton recipes, distinguished by the use of both senna and jalap, without (except for two veterinary recipes) any guaiacum. This group also divides into two groups:
The Swinton group (because all four are labelled ‘Swinton’s Daffy’ in the sources), or the Senna and concentrated jalap group.
The Senna and dilute jalap group. Eleven recipes, including the two veterinary recipes.
Group 3: Others (pink). Three recipes fall outside Groups 1 and 2, and defy easy categorising. They include two oddities that contain no senna at all and could be placed in a “without senna” group that it’s tempting to call 'the genuinely fake Daffy’s group’.
As already mentioned, most are variations of Tincture of Senna, and in fact all of the ingredients (almost 30 across all the recipes I looked at, although no single recipe contains more than thirteen) were also in use in mainstream medicine of the time, with many of them, including senna, jalap, guaiacum, liquorice, and aniseed being useful for treating digestive and bowel complaints. Unsurprisingly, given that tinctures are alcohol-based, all of the Daffy's Elixir recipes have a high alcohol content, ranging from around 25% to over 50% by volume.
Which was the real Daffy’s Elixir?
The truth is that, if we're defining 'real' as original, there is no recipe that can be attributed with any certainty to the first few elixir-selling generations of the Daffy family. On top of that, in the cutthroat world of Georgian and early Victorian patent medicines, tinkering with recipes was probably so widespread as to be routine: even Anthony Daffy claimed to have 'improved' Thomas's original recipe (1).
Accidental changes, caused by transcription errors and other mistakes made when recipes were transferred between people and generations, may also have been commonplace. So not only do we not know with any certainty what Anthony Daffy’s recipe was (let alone the original recipe of Thomas Daffy), it’s even possible that those direct descendants of Anthony Daffy who sold the medicine during the 18th and early 19th centuries didn’t know the original recipe either, whether they were aware of the fact or not.
So where does this leave Dicey’s Daffy’s, the brand that, through accident or design, became widely accepted as the genuine article?
The fact that the four recipes identified as Dicey Daffy’s in the various books are very similar suggests that the version sold by Dicey & Co and their successors probably was of that general type, containing guaiacum and a relatively high concentration of senna sweetened with raisins, but without jalap. Was it exactly the same as any of those recipes? Without the discovery of some pretty convincing documentary evidence we will never know (11).
The same can be said of Swinton’s Daffy’s: the medicine sold by the Swintons probably was a senna and jalap version, with a relatively high concentration of jalap.
The 1718 recipe of John Quincy is very similar to the ‘Dicey Daffy’ recipes, but quite possibly pre-dates the earliest Dicey/Cluer sales of the medicine. Could Quincy’s book have been the original source of Dicey’s recipe, and of others in the 'Dicey group'? Again, we cannot know with any certainty, but it is possible.
Although only eight or nine proprietors names, including Dicey and Swinton, are so far known to have been embossed on Daffy’s bottles, there were probably hundreds of other makers over the 300 year lifespan of the medicine, particularly if we include local druggists and apothecaries who didn’t go to the expense of getting their own bottle moulds made. Selling their product in generic bottles embossed only "True Daffy's Elixir", or in unembossed, label-only bottles, such makers could have chosen to use, or to modify, any of the recipes publicly available to them.
So, we can't be sure which version of Daffy's Elixir was sold in any particular bottle, but we can be fairly certain that it would have fitted somewhere in one of the groups identified above.
In the absence of any evidence to the contrary we can also be fairly confident that Dicey & Co had no more claim to be selling the 'True' Daffy’s Elixir (5) of either Thomas or Anthony Daffy than any number of other makers.
A generic Daffy's Elixir bottle. Simply embossed 'True Daffys Elixir' front and back, this example dates to around 1800 - 1820 but the style, with distinctive lower case embossing of the first two lines, probably continued in use until around 1840. Bottles with generic embossing were available to buy from many glass bottle manufacturers, and would have been used by makers of Daffy's Elixir for whom the expense of private moulds for bespoke bottles was uneconomic, or unnecessary.
This post is based upon an article that first appeared in ABC Magazine, No. 75, 2019.
Notes and References.
1. Haycock & Wallis (2005). Quackery and Commerce in Seventeenth-Century London: The Proprietary Medicine Business of Anthony Daffy. In Medical History, Supplement No. 25.
2. Sources for the recipes are:
Beasley, H. 1857. The Druggist’s General Receipt Book. 4th Edition. John Churchill, London.
Cooley, A. J. 1851. A Cyclopaedia of Six Thousand Practical Receipts; and collateral information in the Arts, Manufactures and Trades. New York.
Graham, Thomas J. 1835. Modern Domestic Medicine; A popular treatise. 6th Edition. London.
Henderson, W. A. 1829. Modern Domestic Cookery, and Useful Receipt Book. Adapted for families in the middling and genteel ranks of life. By W. A. Henderson, enlarged & Improved by D. Hughson, M.D. Published by Thomas Kinnersley, New York.
MacDonald, D. 1811. The New London Family Cook; or, Town and Country Housekeepers Guide. London.
Powell, R. 1809. Translation of the New London Pharmacopoeia. 2nd Edition. London.
Quincy, J. 1719. Pharmacopoeia Officinalis & Extemporanea: or, A Compleat English Dispensatory, In Four Parts. 2nd Edn. London.
Rennie, J. 1829. A New Supplement to the Pharmacopoeias of London, Edinburgh, Dublin and Paris. Baldwin & Cradock, London.
Scott, W. (Ed.) 1826. The House Book or, Family Chronicle of Useful Knowledge and Cottage Physician. London.
Smith, E. 1739. The Compleat Housewife or, Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion. 9th Edition.
Woolley, Hannah. 1696. The Accomplish’d Ladies Delight, in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery. 7th Edition. London.
3. See Patent Medicines 2: Will the real Daffy's Elixir please stand up? for some background on both the Dicey and Swinton businesses.
4. Guaiacum. The wood of the tree Guaiacum officinale, formerly used to treat gout, rheumatism, boils and other eruptions of the skin, and scrofula. Jalap. The root of plants of Ipomoea purga, the active ingredient of which acts as a purgative, purging the lower bowel of contents. Senna. A laxative from plants of the genus Senna. The active ingredient, senna glycoside, is still used in many laxatives sold over-the-counter.
5. Dicey's name did however become so strongly associated with Daffy's Elixir, and their Daffy's Elixir was so popular, that fake Dicey's Daffy's was definitely a thing, conclusive evidence being available in the form of forged British Government tax stamps bearing the Dicey name. Such forgery was not something to be done lightly: Penalties if caught forging tax stamps included death. A future post about patent medicine tax will include more on Dicey forgeries.
© Jeremy Kemp, 2022.
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