A Rocky Mountain Sneezer: Dickens's American Cure-All

Dickens giving a dramatic reading
of his works.

Here we have a drink encountered not in Dickens's novels, but in his letters.

When Charles Dickens came to America on a reading tour in 1867-68, it was a big event. People lined up overnight for tickets in cold New York weather. Some came in costume - I imagine that it wasn't unlike lining up for Star Wars tickets overnight (with one major difference being that we already had the tickets; the line was just for fun). He had previously been to America twenty-five years before and hated it - he found it to be a country full of swindlers, ruffians, and thugs, and savaged it both in his nonfiction "American Notes" and his under-rated novel, Martin Chuzzlewit.

Though there were audiences eager to see him across the country, he didn't get far out of the northeast (much to the chagrin of Chicagoans).  This was mainly due to his health; though his vigor seemed to return to him quite miraculously every time he stepped onto the stage, he spent much of his free time holed up in his hotels, suffering from a cold that he and his manager came to refer to as "The American Catarrh."

Dickens tried a cure-all, and wrote about it in a letter home:


My New York landlord made me a "Rocky Mountain sneezer," which appeared to me to be compounded of all the spirits ever heard of in the world, with bitters, lemon, sugar, and snow. You can only make a true "sneezer" when the snow is lying on the ground.

He noted in another that it was supposed to cure sneezing, but that it didn't seem to work for him.

Recipes for a sneezer can now be easily obtained, but I was wary of making a drink with actual snow, and would have imagined that Dickens would have been, too. After all,  how sanitary can it be to use snow from the streets of 19th century New York? Even if you picked some snow off the top, away from the horse poop on the ground and before a horse had a chance to poop on top of it, the very air was so filthy in big cities back then that eating anything off the ground strikes me as a bad idea.

Then again, maybe it was the filthy snow that gave it its flavor - sort of like how I suspect it's the Detroit water that makes Faygo root beer better than most other root beers.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN SNEEZER:

I tried this one twice twice. The first time was with artificial snow made in a Ninja blender from ice chunks, which was like drinking like a sour liquor snow cone  - it might have been good for what ailed me, but I couldn't see myself drinking it a second time.

Dickens and his manager,
George Dolby

When some proper snow fell, I tried it again, using fresh snow plucked from the top of a railing on my block, where I could be fairly sure no animal or person had ever taken a pee. The recipe was pretty simple:

- 1 part rum
- 1 part brandy
- a dash of bitters
- a bit of sugar
- a handful of snow

It proved hard to photograph, as the snow dissolved instantly, as seen in the video below:

The results, however, were really quite tasty. Much more of a kick than you get from most of the drinks on this blog, which were generally not designed to get you drunk unless you drank a TON of them. This one has a bit of sourness, a bit of bitterness, and a bit of sweetness all at once, with the cool of the snow mingling with the pleasant burning one gets from the spirits. Interesting drink, this. Not sure whether it really cures what ails you, ( I DID sneeze minutes after drinking some), but it DOES pack a punch. For a guy with a blog about drinking I'm an extremely light drinker; my Rocky Mountain Sneezer was a small one, far smaller than the  2oz each of brandy and liquor the recipes usually called for, and I was feeling the effects for quite some time.

Drink Like the Dickens book coming soon.

Drink Like the Dickens will soon be an ebook....

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Smoking Bishop... Wassail....Rum Flip... Port Negus...Egg-hot...Sherry Cobbler... The names alone conjure up a bygone era of cosy taverns, coaching inns, and Mr. Fezziwig's party. Author Adam Selzer talks about Dickens' works and the drinks contained therein, with recipes for more than a dozen of them, almost all of which can be made from stuff that can be purchased at Trader Joe's (though most any grocery store with a section for spirits will do). There's a punch that you set on fire (try NOT to be the life of the party after you make that!), sherry-based drinks that are said to cure what ails you, a cold cure made from booze and fresh snow, and so much more. They're the hit of every party, and a fun way to discover the great works of Charles Dickens. Selzer, author of THE SMART ALECK'S GUIDE TO AMERICAN HISTORY (Random House 2009), GHOSTS OF CHICAGO (Llewellyn 2013) and several other published books and novels talks about the books in which the drinks appear, muses about why THE PICKWICK PAPERS is sort of like CLERKS, how MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT is under-rated, and tells how to make the drinks and whether they're any good (most of them are, but, well, some actually contain gruel). More than 20,000 words of Victorian fun, even for novice mixologists who've never read a word of Dickens. You may want to after this! Coming soon!

Wassail like Mr. Pickwick!

The Pickwick Papers is a romp through a lost world of cobblestone alleys and country roads leading to bucolic towns where they still practiced medieval holiday customs and all the locals gathered to listen to old men tell stories by the fire in taverns with names like The George and Vulture or The Magpie and Stump.  Entire books have been written about the inns and taverns in Pickwick.

The book linked to above came out in 1921, and the introduction says that "the immortal Pickwick Papers has maintained its place through generations, and retains it to-day, as the most popular book in our language- a book unexampled in our literature. There are persons who make a yearly custom of reading it; others who can roll off pages of it from memory; scores who can answer any meticulous question in an examination of its contents; and a whole army ready and waiting to correct any misquotation from its pages."  In other words, one could say that Pickwick was the Harry Potter or Star Wars of its day, and it held onto that level of popularity for decades. It's only been remarkably recently that reading it hasn't been a beloved rite of passage.

I've said before that Pickwick Papers is still funny today, but in an "I guess you had to be there" sort of way. People in the 1830s felt like they knew all of the characters and scenes the way my generation knew the people and places in Clerks and Mallrats. Maybe people in England still recognize their neighbors in Pickwick, but late Georgian England is another world to me now. Of course, that's part of the book's appeal - to read it is to take a trip back in time to a world where people still did things like wassailing.

Wassail comes with everything you see here; YOU put it together!

"Wassailing" is an old English custom from Saxon times - as with pretty much any holiday custom, one can find a lot of different stories as to the origin, and no two recipes are quite alike. Generally, though, wassail is said to contain apples, ale and spices, and "wassailing" was the practice of wandering around with a bowl, singing songs at people's houses and expecting them to fill your bowl or cup with wassail in return. Before drinking, one person would shout "wassail!" and the other would respond with "drinkhail!" Poems indicate that this customs goes back hundreds of years, and early 20th century books show that these customs were still alive in remote parts of England in those days - and certainly were still alive in Mr. Pickwick's day.

In the "Christmas at Dingley Dell" section of Pickwick, Mr. Pickwick and his friends go to visit their friends the Wardles and have what sounds like a wonderful old-fashioned Christmas-time, joined on Christmas day by Bob Sawyer, a hard-drinking medical student who talks about dissecting limbs at the breakfast table and keeps wanting everyone to let him bleed them. The description of the wassail they serve on Christmas eve is mouth-watering:


     When they all tired of blind-man's buff, there was a great game at snap-dragon, and when fingers enough were burned with that, and all the raisins were gone, they sat down by the huge fire of blazing logs to a substantial supper, and a mighty bowl of wassail, something smaller than an ordinary wash-house copper, in which the hot apples were hissing and bubbling with a rich look, and a jolly sound, that were perfectly irresistible.


    'This,' said Mr. Pickwick, looking round him, 'this is, indeed, comfort.'


"Snap-dragon," for the record, was a game in which you tried to snatch raisins out of a burning bowl of brandy. Sounds fun, but play that one at your own risk. Roasted raisins in brandy ARE pretty damned delicious.


Now, no two recipes for wassail are quite alike - in fact, they vary wildly, and probably have for centuries, so there's no "authentic" or "traditional" recipe. You can pretty much just heat up some spiced apple cider and add a bit of brandy or ale and get away with calling it wassail. Mine includes a recipe or two that's clearly not authentic but it's is made to taste about the way I imagine it would have tasted if there was a Trader Joe's at Dingley Dell, including apples hissing and bubbling with a rich look and a jolly sound.

Ingredients:
- six small apples
- one orange
- whole cloves
- allspice berries
- cinnamon sticks
- about a cup of sugar
- three eggs
- about 1.5 liters of apple cider (I'm using Trader Joe's spiced cider, the best pre-spiced cider on the market, for my money. It's spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, orange peel and lemon peel, and I'll use a bit less of the other spices to compensate here).
- one good-sized bottle of ale.
- one can of ginger ale (optional if you're trying to be more authentic).
- 1 cup of brandy

 If you're making it for kids, omit the regular ale, use more ginger ale, and add brandy to individual cups. It'll be fine.

DIRECTIONS

Cut the apples in half and core them (perhaps using a mellon baller), then fill the hole with sugar. P rick a bunch of cloves - say, 15 or 20 - into the orange. Bake these fruits in a dish with a bit of water in it for about 35-45 minutes at 350 until they're wrinkled and tender. Your kitchen will smell wonderful just from the cloves in the oranges.

My attempt to make a Charles Dickens face with the
cloves came to nothing. 

While they're baking, put additional cloves and allspice into a tea ball or cloth, then pour the cider and  ginger ale into a large pot. Warm it up over medium heat, adding the tea ball and some cinnamon sticks.

Meanwhile (and here's the tricky part, which you're free to omit), separate the egg whites and yokes. Mix each well, whisking the whites for a good three or four minutes until they get thick and cloudy,  then fold the yokes into the whites. The eggs won't add too much to the taste, but if you mix them in correctly it'll give you a good frothy texture.

The trick is to temper the eggs. While whisking constantly, add a half cup or so of the warm mixture (pouring from a great height, which is lots of fun), then add a bit more at a time, whisking all the while, to heat up the egg without actually turning it into cooked scrambled eggs (which might still happen if you didn't whisk them enough).

I don't mind saying that I practiced this a few times with a single egg and a small pot of the cider until I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing - my first attempt came out like egg drop soup.  You'll know you're on the right track when the egg/drink mixture has a slurry-ish taste, as seen at the right. Pour it into the pot when the cider is warm, gradually and while whisking. I had a few tiny bits of egg to strain out, but not many.



Finally, add in the other liquids - the ale and the brandy and, if you wish, some ginger ale to give it a bit more zing. Heat it up but try not to boil it - if it DOES get to boiling, remove it from heat at once.

Float the apples and orange inside and carefully transfer over to a punch bowl. The longer you let the apples float, the tastier the wassail gets, but it WILL cool off. Unlike Mr. Pickwick, though, we have microwaves now that aid us in the purpose of re-heating a cool drink. It's tasty chilled, though, too!

Pour into warm glasses, and pass around. Shout out "wassail" and have everyone reply with "drinkhail!" before indulging. If you really want to get traditional, toast some bread to serve with it - they used to do this a lot to flavor drinks, and there are various accounts of early Christmas customs involving toast, wassail and trees.

The finished drink is delicious - basically a thick, hot spiced apple cider with a bit of a kick to it.

Look at me! I'm Mr. Pickwick!

Like most drinks on this blog, the actual alcohol content is relatively low - a glass shouldn't get you drunk, but will give you a rich, warm feeling that gets you ready for another mug full of the stuff, and you can keep drinking it all night without getting knocked out. Enjoy!

In the next few weeks, we'll try out some shrub, Mr. Micawber's punch, purl, dog's nose, and maybe even a Rocky Mountain Sneezer, which Dickens drank to aid a cold while on tour in New York.




                        

Smoking Bishop: from A Christmas Carol

If you know nothing else about Dickens, you probably at least know that Oliver Twist wanted more and Ebenezer Scrooge said "Bah humbug."

Old Fezziwig served negus at the ball.

Just about everyone knows the story of A Christmas Carol from a million adaptations and parodies, which are so pervasive that I don't think people realize just how good the book really is. In 1861, a review of Great Expectations said that Dickens had finally mastered a gift that had previously mastered him. That's an apt description, but I think he had mastered it with A Christmas Carol, as well. It has all the things one expects in Dickens - memorable characters with great names, cozy Englishness, biting humor, social commentary, and pathos all told in prose that occasionally gets stunning, with a lot more humor than you'd think, and, for the first time, all in the form of a tight, concise narrative.  It works partly because it's short - Little Paul Dombey, a similar character in Dickens's next novel, gets so saccharine and grating (at least to modern readers) after 300 pages that one realizes how wise Dickens was not to give Tiny Tim too large of a role. There's pathos in Christmas Carol, but it doesn't really have enough time to get too over-the-top. 

What people particularly forget is that it's funny as hell. Consider my favorite line from the beginning, which almost never gets into adaptations:

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for.

What a smart ass!

The prose in the book is really quite stunning. Here's another bit just from the first few pages:

The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already: it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. 

It is, quite simply, a little book containing a lot of passages that are Dickens at his best. It's the ideal place to start reading Dickens - it's short enough that sitting down with it isn't as big a commitment as, say, David Copperfield, and there's probably no danger that you'll lose track of the plot, since you probably already know it. Occasionally the bigger ones get hard to follow. 

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol because he needed some money. His latest serial novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, wasn't selling very well, and writing up a "Christmas special" seemed like it would be a quick way to make a buck. But if you compare it to most of his other Christmas books, it's hard not to think that he must have been truly inspired when writing Christmas Carol. I think his work on Martin Chuzzlewit even improved after the manic burst of creativity that brought about Carol.

But, anyway, onto the drink! 

Being a shorter book, there's not as much eating and drinking here as there is in some of the longer books - Scrooge actually eats gruel in his house. There's negus at Fezziwig's, and steaming bowls of punch here and there, but the reference to a drink everyone wonders about comes right at the end, when Scrooge is making things right with Bob Cratchit:

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!”

One forgets that this doesn't take place on Christmas, but on December 26th, the day after the day when Scrooge wakes up a changed man. It has to be - Scrooge would have had to start working on the smoking bishop the day before. It takes a day to make. 

Smoking Bishop is one of a number of clerical drinks that were big among the Victorians - any drink with "pope" in the name contained burgundy, "cardinal" contained rye or champagne, and "bishop" meant port. Smoking bishop is a hot, spiced wine, spiked with port and flavored with extra fruit. It takes a bit of prep:

- First, take five seville orange. If you can't get seville oranges (and you probably can't), take four normal oranges and one grapefruit. Cut them in half and bake them for about 30 minutes or until they get a bit brown. Some recipes say not to cut them in half until the next day, but I went ahead and did it now (like most Victorian drinks, there are MANY recipes for this).

- Prick five whole cloves into each piece of fruit. This'll make your whole kitchen smell terrific. 

- Put the baked, clove-infused fruits into an earthenware bowl (your crock pot will do) and add a bottle of red wine 1/4 cup of sugar. Cover it up and leave it sitting there for 24 hours.

- Squeeze the juice out of the fruits and into the wine; you can either keep the fruits floating in the bowl or discard them. Most recipes call for passing the whole thing through a sieve at this point, but I think it looks neater with the bits of fruit floating in there.

- Add the bottle of port, then heat it up without actually boiling (again, using a crock pot comes in handy here). 

- Serve in heated glasses and enjoy!

Naturally, there are many variations here - some recipes call for two bottles of wine for each bottle of port, some call for cinammon, anise, ginger or nutmeg. Mine came out a bit more bitter than I imagined, so I wound up adding a bit more sugar than I initially put in, and a bit more cinnamon. Even with the bitterness, it was tasty and warmed me right up after a walk through the cold December wind. It would taste even better if I was drinking it with someone who told me he was doubling my pay, though.

Given its similarity to the grogg I used to make in college, I'm tempted to put some raisins into each glass - they'll get all plump and delicious in the hot liquid.

Mine, smoking!

Now, can you take a shortcut here and just have the oranges in there for an hour or so, if perhaps you decided on Christmas morning to serve it to your family? Probably - I'd say that having the whole mixture on high in the crock pot, perhaps with some extra spices added, would probably be a reasonable short-cut version that I suspect would taste just fine. I believe the main reason you want it soaking is to get the oil from the orange peel, which was (and is) said to have some medicinal value - lots of old time writers talk about how the burning oil helps warm one up. Sounds like psuedoscience, but it's pretty taste psuedoscience, so I ain't complaining!

The Pickwick Papers: Hot Brandy and Pineapple Rum

Kevin Smith's first two films, Clerks and Mallrats, hit my generation pretty hard. Mallrats was a box office flop, but everyone I knew saw it, either in the theatre or on video. Part of the reason they were such a hit with it was that we'd all had customers like the ones in Clerks, we'd all spent time hanging around at the mall for no good reason, and we all knew people just like Jay, Dante, Randall, and Brody. Those two films captured a certain sort of suburban Americana that had never quite been put on film before - at least with all of the Star Wars references intact.

And this is also part of what made Charles Dickens's first novel, The Pickwick Papers, such a big hit. Everyone knew someone like Mr. Pickwick, or Sam Weller, or Mr. Jingle. It captured, in the words of Simon Callow, a certain sort of Englishness that had never really been captured before. For a good several decades, if you met five people on the street and asked them what the funniest novel ever written was, at least a couple of them probably would have said The Pickwick Papers.  Something like 80% of the people who could read bought the book when it came out, and people of all classes followed the original serial version. I particularly like Mr. Jingle:

    'Heads, heads—take care of your heads!' cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. 'Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children—mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look round—mother's head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—head of a family off—shocking, shocking!'

Today, it's still very funny -sometimes laugh-out-loud funny - but I can't help but think that, for much of the humor, you sort of had to be there. None of the characters or customs seem at all familiar anymore, and the book has lost some of its punch.

There's no plot to this book, exactly - Mr. Pickwick and his friends just wander around having adventures that read about like Laurel and Hardy farces today. Now and then, when Dickens was stuck for ideas, he would throw in a totally unrelated short story. Some of these stories are excellent - the one where a guy talks to a chair is pretty funny, "The Goblin Who Stole a Sexton" comes off as a prototype for A Christmas Carol (if it were written by Washington Irving) and "The Madman's Tale" seems like a prototype for everything Edgar Allan Poe would ever write.

But for a good portion of the book, the "Pickwickians" just wander around eating and drinking - there are nearly 250 references to drinking in the book, by one count, and I suspect it's higher. Perhaps the most commonly mentioned drink is brandy-and-hot-water, which is mentioned by name more than two dozen times. There's hardly a need for a proper recipe here - just take some hot water and add brandy to taste. It's a drink that occurs throughout Dickens books as the go-to drink at any tavern and a cure for what ails you. This is not strictly a fiction thing, either - doctors called for brandy and hot water when Abraham Lincoln was shot.

Sam Weller, Sancho to Mr. Pickwick's
Don Quixote. Or Rose Tyler to his Doctor.

Tastier still, though, is pineapple rum, which Sam Weller, Mr. Pickwick's wise-cracking assistant, encounters in a pub where his father hangs out when he wants to be brow-beaten by his wife. Weller was the "breakout character" of the book, given to jokes that came to be called "Wellerisms." For instance, when he directs a character known as "the fat boy" to the place where he might find some Christmas pies, he says "Wery good..stick a bit o' Christmas in 'em...there; now we look compact and comfortable, as the father said ven he cut his little boy's head off to cure him o' squintin.'"

Weller's stepmother ("mother-in-law," they called it then) is the proprietess of a pub called The Marquis of Granby in the town of Dorking (yep - I went there once strictly to stock up on postcards).

Dickens says of it:  The Marquis of Granby, in Mrs. Weller's time, was quite a model of a roadside public-house of the better class—just large enough to be convenient, and small enough to be snug."

In it, Weller finds a red-nosed man:

The fire was blazing brightly under the influence of the bellows, and the kettle was singing gaily under the influence of both. A small tray of tea-things was arranged on the table; a plate of hot buttered toast was gently simmering before the fire; and the red-nosed man himself was busily engaged in converting a large slice of bread into the same agreeable edible, through the instrumentality of a long brass toasting-fork. Beside him stood a glass of reeking hot pine-apple rum-and-water, with a slice of lemon in it; and every time the red-nosed man stopped to bring the round of toast to his eye, with the view of ascertaining how it got on, he imbibed a drop or two of the hot pine-apple rum-and-water, and smiled upon the rather stout lady, as she blew the fire."

Dickens himself was fond of pine-apple rum; there were five dozen bottles of it in his cellar when he died. The recipe is easy enough:

- 1 pint of dark rum
- 1 pint of pineapple juice
- sugar to taste

Simply add equal parts pineapple juice and dark rum. Some recommend freshly squeezing the juice from the pineapple, mixing it with the rum and leaving it in a jar with a few slices of pineapple for a few weeks, if you're into that sort of thing, and then bottling it, but you'll get a pretty good effect just by heating up some rum and adding pineapple juice and perhaps a bit of sugar.  I don't make whole bottles of this stuff at a time, after all. Just a cup or so of each (and perhaps some hot water to heat it up and make it last longer, as the red-nosed-man had) and I'm all set. After all, bottling and jarring this stuff was far more important in Dickens' own day - it was a winter drink, and pineapples would have been harder to get in the winter. Now we can get them year round.

Personally, for testing this one out, I took some frozen pineapple bits, added hot water, and blended them up, eventually pouring out one finger of rum and one finger of blended pineapple, with a teaspoon of sugar and some hot water just for the sake of matching what the red-fact man had. The result was really quite delicious - a pale-looking concoction (my rum wasn't all that dark), but with a hearty, refreshing taste.


The Pickwick Papers is the first Dickens novel some people read now - mainly those who insist on beginning at the beginning, since this was his first novel. But this is not really a great introduction - it made him a star, and it's still great fun, but if Dickens hadn't written anything else, no one would likely remember him now. The easiest introduction to Dickens is probably A Christmas Carol (it's short, you probably already know the plot, and the writing distills almost everything Dickens did well into one piece that you can read in one sitting), or perhaps Great Expectations. The madcap humor that characterizes his earlier works, like Pickwick, is better done in Nicholas Nickleby and the under-rated Martin Chuzzlewit.

But that's not to say Pickwick is bad - it's really a lot of fun. Besides Mr. Jingle, you get Bob Sawyer, the drunken medical student who delights in talking about dissections over dinner, and Bil Stumps, the semi-literate who creates a sensation by writing his name on a rock, a whole bunch of random old men who tell interesting stories, bar-maids and taverns by the score, the lawyers at Dodson and Fogg, a really hilarious trial scene, and a lot of good cheer. When it came out it was just the right book at just the right time, and, though it's not aged as well as Dickens' later work, it's still well worth reading. All the seeds of the best books are here.

Port Negus

Negus is a drink that comes up a lot in Dickens books - Fezziwig serves it at his party in A Christmas Carol, and Miss Potterson of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters (the delightfully dreary riverside pub in Our Mutual Friend) is a fan. 

The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters is a riverside pub - in the days when the river was at its most disgusting - haunted largely by the kind of river scavengers who live about the banks of the Thames. Dickens' description of it is typically picturesque:


    The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floors and doors, of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, seemed in its old age fraught with confused memories of its youth. In many places it had become gnarled and riven, according to the manner of old trees; knots started out of it; and here and there it seemed to twist itself into some likeness of boughs. In this state of second childhood, it had an air of being in its own way garrulous about its early life. Not without reason was it often asserted by the regular frequenters of the Porters, that when the light shone full upon the grain of certain panels, and particularly upon an old corner cupboard of walnut-wood in the bar, you might trace little forests there, and tiny trees like the parent tree, in full umbrageous leaf.

He goes on to mention "red curtains matching the noses of the regular customers" (nice).  In those days, there were no embankments, so the back door of the place would have done right up to the water at high tide, as in the watercolor of the place above.

The book opens on the river, presumably within site of the tavern, with a chilling (and really rather funny) scene in which Gaffer Hexam and his daughter, Lizzie, are out on a rowboat, picking up dead bodies from the river. This was a real profession - bodies would be robbed of any jewelry or money they had on them, and the bodies could be sold to medical schools. Sometimes one would even get a reward for finding someone.  You weren't supposed to rob the body of any personal effects, though - when he's questioned, Gaffer notes that the body's pockets were turned out and empty, "but that's common. Whether it's the wash of the tide or no, I can't say."

Dragging the river for corpses was actually one of the least disgusting forms of river scavenging; the riverbanks were full of such scavengers in 1865, when the book was written, and besides those who dragged the river, some people would sift through it looking for coins and old silverware (though mostly they were sifting through garbage, refuse, and excrement).  These sorts of people are the general customers at the Six Jolly Fellowship Porter - they sit in a snug, dark little room called The Cosy and warm themselves at the fire with hot drinks like purl, dog's nose, and port negus.

 Mis Potterson makes a lot of interesting drinks that I'll be covering here in time - she mixes Jenny Wren (a minor) a glass of "shrub," purl is a specialty of the house and popular "eye opener" for the river people, and one man notes that they "burn sherry well" at the Porters. But her own drink of choice is the Port Negus - she usually has a tumbler of it nightly.

Port Negus is, at its heart, just a hot mulled wine drink, the kind very commonly found in Dickens. They're all pretty tasty, and the differences between them are frankly sort of minimal if you don't have a well-developed palatte (and frankly, I don't).  As with most of them, no two sources agree on quite what the recipe ought to be; an 1871 book of popular night-caps from Oxford University says that a main ingredient in most recipes is jellied calves feet. But they hasten to point out that this is omitted from the port version of negus  - apparently mixing port with calves feet jelly produces a disagreeable mixture that looks and tastes like mud. I'm glad someone else got to be the test subject for this one.

 Other recipes disagree on which spices to use (though all top it with nutmeg), whether or not to add a Seville orange, and how to get the taste of the lemon peel into it - some slice the peel very thin, others rub the lumps of sugar on the peel.  The Oxford people said that adding orange and lemon peel makes it a "warming" drink, because of the heating oil that you put in your stomach. 

Anyway, my recipe is as follows:

PORT NEGUS -One lump of sugar (about a tablespoon if you're just making a tumbler-ful)
-a bit of finely-grated lemon peel
- a dash of cinnamon and allspice
- equal parts port wine and and hot water
- juice of the lemon (one lemon per bottle of port used; I just used a small portion of the bottle, and hence just a bit of the lemon).
- grated nutmeg

Mix the port with with lemon peel, lemon juice, and spices (except the nutmeg), and allow it to sit for a while - up to an hour - then add hot water (about the same amount as you used for for the port). Top with grated nutmeg and enjoy!

What you're left with is a warm, very drinkable mixture that tastes about like any mulled wine-based drink, if a bit more lemony and a bit weaker than some (given that the port makes up less than half of the drink). As such, though, you can easily drink it in larger gulps (while it's hot) than one would take with a plain glass of wine, and it's a delightful mixture for a cold day! A hot mug full made me feel warm all over, and a whole tumbler-full would pack a punch, but not knock you out.