Old snuff recipes

Regarding ammonia content in Goldfish snuff, 15 parts of ammonia is a gross blunder. I tried adding such amount of 10% ammonia water to some stale snuff and binned the concoction immediately after a single pinch. It seems there’s a decimal point missing - should be 1.5%, not 15. I tried 3% previously and found it all-right.

1.5-3% meets the requirements of old Soviet snuff manufacture regulatory document VTU 256-56, which defined a total amount of alkalizers (potash, sodium carbonate and 25% ammonia water) up to 3%.

6 Likes

@volunge, I just did the same thing with slaked lime.  I could have sworn I’d read that up to 10% by weight was ok to use.  It was WAY too much ammonia!  However, after a couple of weeks in the jar, I dumped it out into a large bowl and set it outdoors in the breeze.  About two hours later, I could actually sniff the bowl without it “knocking me out”.  LOL

4 Likes

@Cobguy, White Elephant contains 6.39 g of… calcium (sic!) per 100 g of snuff:

http://www.41photosnuff.in/certifiacte.php

If calcium stands for slaked lime, that’s almost 6.5% of the stuff in there. I bet moisturized Elephant would emit knocking amounts of ammonia as well.

I would love to play with pH meter someday… You can’t go wrong with that device. Here’s the link to related discussion: https://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/threads/homemade-snus-with-rustica-tobacco-leaf.82566/ , breathtaking! Some interesting diagrams there.

5 Likes

Morning, friends!

Sharing the latest find - Verbesserte Rauch- und Schnupftabak- und Cigarren-Fabrikation.  Leuchs, Johann Carl (Nurnberg, 1846).

It’s a German book on tobacco, snuff and cigars fabrication. Scanned book is available here: https://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/resolve/display/bsb10305199.html

Or you can visit Bavarian State Library :). 

Many famous recipes there. Jump to page 200 for snuff.

7 Likes

Is a good one. I used a later edition for recipes!

5 Likes

@snuffmiller Thanks for verifying the source, Jaap! I will search for different edition to make a comparisson. Interesting to explore, how the recipes evolved.

2 Likes

This is awesome. Just gearing up to start making my own. Wish Chef Daniels was still around! Good to see others involved as well.

2 Likes

Many old snuff and snus recipes and other useful information shared in this yahoo group:

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Snuff\_Grinders\_homemade\_nasal\_snuff

3 Likes

Hey @volunge quick note: when possible (and convenient) please copy the pertinent quotes from the source material over here. I ask that because when reading old snuff threads so many of the links are no longer accessible. Thinking of myself when I come back to this thread years from now when I finally start making my own snuffs :slight_smile:

3 Likes

@ar47 Unfortunately, scanned Russian and German books are in .pdf and .jpeg formats, and it’s impossible to do OCR conversion to editable text format due to old fonts (OCR would allow basic machine translation). Learning languages can be fun, but these two sources are probably the worst way to do that. While old Russian doesn’t differ much from modern (just some obsolete letters they don’t use anymore), Gothic font might be a pain. Anyway, I’ll drop links for downloading these files once I have them uploaded somewhere. Or even transcribe them using modern fonts, but it’s too time consuming for me at the moment.

Some dead links can be resurrected with a help of Wayback Machine: https://archive.org/web/

3 Likes

Interesting indeed! I bought a paper package of Russian snuff on eBay 10 years ago. It was really horrible! I like the old recipes of de kralingse. I still have many 100 gram tubs in my freezer but I like to take modern snuff just as much. I wish we could still get snuff from the windmills!

5 Likes

@mrmanos, if you still have that old Russian rustica snuff, try restoring its original moisture by adding 25% of water. Or - even better - 22% of water and 3% of ammonia water (of 10% concentration). It makes day and night difference! Regrind with spoon before proceeding, add liquids, mix properly, let it sit overnight, mix again and sift through any tea strainer. Work with small amount of snuff, add 2.2 ml of water and 0.3 ml of ammonia water to 7.5 g of snuff.

If you don’t want to mess with ammonia water, skip it. Just add 2.5 ml of water.

Fresh stuff was released with 25% of moisture.

Which one did you get, the regular plain one, or the peppermint version?

2 Likes

Didn’t know where to post this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4i32cGbxlw

is this the St.Omer 1 mr @snuffmiller ?

4 Likes

@tobaccobob: No Sir! This picture was made after I left the windmills. I don’t know what the result  was of this “exercise” but I doubt it resulted in any special snuff at all.

Jaap Bes.

3 Likes

@tobaccobob, thanks for sharing the link!

2 Likes

@volunge here’s the man himself I believe @snuffmiller. https://youtu.be/5qWM0xbpAgI

5 Likes

@rostanf: Yes, I can recognise myself.

Jaap Bes.

9 Likes

Here’s a link to snuff recipes thread in Polish snuff forum:

http://www.top25snuff.com/forum/41-produkcja-tabaki/137-przepisy-tabaczne.html

Just one of the recipes, originally posted there by top25snuff.com member Calculator:

"The following recipe is a great instruction for producing Scotch snuff:

16 pounds of potassium carbonate,
5 pounds of ammonium chloride,
4 pounds of salt,
100 pounds of smalls and stalks

Dissolve the first three ingredients in approx. 20 pounds of warm water, then pour onto the stems (finely cut) and smalls. The whole mixture must stand for 10-14 days until it is warm enough. Before it is ground, set it aside to dry. If it is to be scented, the essence of bergamot or lemon or Tonka beans will give it the right aroma."

Rough expression in % (mass fractions of Scotch snuff components):

Tobacco 69 %
Water 14 %
Potash 11 %
Ammonium chloride (salmiak) 3 %
Salt 3 %

I actually gave it a whirl a couple of years ago:

Scotch

From left to right: 1) crumbs of stems and smalls; 2) finished scotch; 3) same scotch, dried-out and milled to fine; 4) scotch brown, i. e., 2) with extra water (total moisture content about 30%).

So, same base with different moisture and grind and gives three different plain snuffs.

Warning: this “extra salty” recipe gives very strong, ammonia-rich snuff with a very invigorating burn. Turned to brown, it takes an extra week to round-up (three weeks, in total).

5 Likes

The best way is to disolve potassium carbonate and ammonium chloride seperately and not one after another in the same volume of water, cause that gives a lot of foaming!

4 Likes

@snuffmiller, thank you for the spot-on elaboration!

2 Likes