Mrs. Jarley's Tea and Brandy

It's odd how smells can come back to you after years and years. Now and then I walk into a room and realize that it smells exactly like my kindergarten classroom, or like the break room at my first job.  The first time I smelled lapsang suchong tea, I was immediately reminded of my grandparents' old garage, which I hadn't smelled in years.

The first time I tried to drink the stuff, I nearly gagged - it tasted like a it was brewed from the gunk scooped up after a forest full of old people slathered in unguent burned to ashes. But before I finished the first cup, I had acquired the taste to such an extent that I was licking the last drops from the bottom of the cup.

Lapsang is sometimes called "The whiskey of tea." I never thought to actually add booze to it, but when spiked tea came up in a Dickens book, and when research showed that lapsang was about as "accurate" a tea as I could probably get, it seemed like a natural. I really love The Old Curiosity Shop, which is the story of Little Nell and her awful grandfather running around the country while pursued by Quilp, the evil dwarf, and meeting a series of grotesques. At its best, it has a sort of hypnotic fairy tale vibe about it. It does, however, fall a bit into melodramatics. Oscar Wilde once said (spoiler alert) that you would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing. And he's right - that scene seems WAY over the top today. Little Nell herself is widely slammed for being obnoxiously sweet and innocent.

But this isn't really fair - she's fairly sheltered, but she's also pretty tough and able to take charge of most situations when her grandfather is drunk and gambling away the last of their money for the millionth time. And she thinks Punch and Judy shows, in which Punch kills his wife, his baby, and everyone else he meets, are hilarious.

Among the weirdos Nell and her grandfather meet on their travels is Mrs. Jarley, who runs Jarley's Wax Works, a traveling show of wax dummies of notorious murderers and their victims. She recruits Nell to be a sort of tour guide, in a scene dear to my heart, since it's so close to my own night job as a ghost tour guide.  When JArley shows Nell the wax works and teaches her the patter, you can tell Dickens is having fun:

             'That,' said Mrs Jarley in her exhibition tone, as Nell touched a figure at the beginning of the platform, 'is an unfortunate Maid of Honour in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, who died from pricking her finger in consequence of working upon a Sunday. Observe the blood which is trickling from her finger; also the gold-eyed needle of the period, with which she is at work.'
          All this, Nell repeated twice or thrice: pointing to the finger and the needle at the right times: and then passed on to the next.
        'That, ladies and gentlemen,' said Mrs Jarley, 'is Jasper Packlemerton of atrocious memory, who courted and married fourteen wives, and destroyed them all, by tickling the soles of their feet when they were sleeping in the consciousness of innocence and virtue. On being brought to the scaffold and asked if he was sorry for what he had done, he replied yes, he was sorry for having let 'em off so easy, and hoped all Christian husbands would pardon him the offence... Observe that his fingers are curled as if in the act of tickling, and that his face is represented with a wink, as he appeared when committing his barbarous murders.'
    When Nell knew all about Mr Packlemerton, and could say it without faltering, Mrs Jarley passed on to... the old lady who died of dancing at a hundred and thirty-two, the wild boy of the woods, the woman who poisoned fourteen families with pickled walnuts, and other historical characters and interesting but misguided individuals.

When they first come across Mrs. Jarley, she's drinking tea and spiking it with a bottle that she hides away and declines to share. According to The Convivial Dickens, it's a bottle of brandy.

When it came time to do a "Dickens drink" that involved tea, I tried to look up what sort of tea Mrs. Jarley might have been drinking in The Old Curiosity ShopThere's a lot that's been written about the "tea ceremony" that was becoming popular in England right around the time the book was first released, but it was very difficult to find what KIND of tea they were into. Obviously, most of the fruity and herbal teas on my shelf were probably not "authentic." But lapsang existed back then, so I went with that one. Really, I wanted to post about this drink just to quote the above passage, which is a favorite of mine. I wish there were a Chicago killer with a name as much fun to say as "Jasper Packlemerton" that I could talk about on the ghost tours.  MRS JARLEY'S TEA AND BRANDY
1 bag lapsang suochong tea
1 measure (a "tot") of brandy
1 cup or so of hot water

Not much to say about this drink - it really still just tastes like lapsang tea, only with a bit more of a kick and a bit more of a burn.  Not a tough enough cocktail to make as a normal cocktail, really, or as classy as the fairly similar whiskey toddy (which I'll get to eventually). Really, this is just a way to spike your tea if you have a drinking problem and can't imagine drinking anything that isn't spiked, which I suspect is the case with Mrs. Jarley.

There are a lot of great scenes in this book - particularly the comedic portions. The melodrama doesn't always hold up as well, but the fairy tale vibe tends to carry the Nell scenes as rural and suburban England begins to seem like a strange, enchanted land. Just read this portion from Chapter 45 and try not to feel sucked into an eerie sort of dream world:


      A long suburb of red brick houses, some with patches of garden-ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers; and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace.... a long, flat, straggling suburb passed, they came by slow degrees upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow...
     Advancing more and more into the shadow of this mournful place, its dark depressing influence stole upon their spirits, and filled them with a dismal gloom. On every side, and as far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air. On mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrinking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their agonies. Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fires, begged upon the road, or scowled half-naked from the doorless houses. Then came more of the wrathful monsters, whose like they almost seemed to be in their wildness and their untamed air, screeching and turning round and round again; and still, before, behind, and to the right and left, was the same interminable perspective of brick towers, never ceasing in their black vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting out the face of day , and closing in on all these horrors with a dense dark cloud.
   
 
    Man. Sounds like something out of The Care Bears and the Land Without Feelings.

Micawber's Punch: From Charles Dickens's own recipe

I spoke in the post about egg-hot how much I like Mr. Micawber, the suicidal bon vivant from David Copperfield. Micawber is dirt poor, in and out of debtor's prison, but lives in expectation that "something will turn up."

He is subject to dismal periods of misery, and is something of a windbag, but he's still the life of every party, always able to make a bad situation better, whether it's by making friends in prison or turning a badly burned dinner into a "devil" (ie, spicing up the burned roast and making it edible). His suggestion of doing this when David's hopeless young wife screws up the dinner gives a good sample of how Micawber talks: "If you will allow me to take the liberty of remarking that there are few comestibles better, in their way, than a Devil, and that I believe, with a little division of labour, we could accomplish a good one if the young person in attendance could produce a gridiron, I would put it to you, that this little misfortune may be easily repaired.”

Micawber is also an expert punch maker, as was Dickens himself. Punch was generally out of fashion in the Victorian era, but Dickens was often a traditionalist when it came to drinking, and often made a show out of making punch at parties. At the same party above, Micawber demonstrates, just after letting it be known that his own water supply has just been cut off:

To divert his thoughts from this melancholy subject, I informed Mr. Micawber that I relied upon him for a bowl of punch, and led him to the lemons. His recent despondency, not to say despair, was gone in a moment. I never saw a man so thoroughly enjoy himself amid the fragrance of lemon-peel and sugar, the odour of burning rum, and the steam of boiling water, as Mr. Micawber did that afternoon. It was wonderful to see his face shining at us out of a thin cloud of these delicate fumes, as he stirred, and mixed, and tasted, and looked as if he were making, instead of punch, a fortune for his family down to the latest posterity.

Micawber seems to be making punch from Dickens's own recipe, which he detailed in an 1847 letter:

Peel into a very strong common basin (which may be broken, in case of accident, without damage to the owner's peace or pocket) the rinds of three lemons, cut very thin, and with as little as possible of the white coating between the peel and the fruit, attached. Add a double-handfull [sic] of lump sugar (good measure), a pint of good old rum, and a large wine-glass full of brandy — if it not be a large claret-glass, say two. Set this on fire, by filling a warm silver spoon with the spirit, lighting the contents at a wax taper, and pouring them gently in. [L]et it burn for three or four minutes at least, stirring it from time to Time. Then extinguish it by covering the basin with a tray, which will immediately put out the flame. Then squeeze in the juice of the three lemons, and add a quart of boiling water. Stir the whole well, cover it up for five minutes, and stir again. At this crisis (having skimmed off the lemon pips with a spoon) you may taste. If not sweet enough, add sugar to your liking, but observe that it will be a little sweeter presently. Pour the whole into a jug, tie a leather or coarse cloth over the top, so as to exclude the air completely, and stand it in a hot oven ten minutes, or on a hot stove one quarter of an hour.  Keep it until it comes to table in a warm place near the fire, but not too hot. If it be intended to stand three or four hours, take half the lemon-peel out, or it will acquire a bitter taste.  The same punch allowed to cool by degrees, and then iced, is delicious. It requires less sugar when made for this purpose. If you wish to produce it bright, strain it into bottles through silk. These proportions and directions will, of course, apply to any quantity.

Most notable here, of course, is the part where you SET THE DRINK ON FIRE.  And did we ever!

Mr. Micawber's Punch:
1 pint of rum
1 wine-glass of brandy
1 cup of sugar
1 liter/quart of boiling water
3 lemons.


I was joined for this one by Michael Glover Smith, with whom I recently wrote a book, Flickering Empire, which is all about the silent film biz in Chicago; the first known film version of A Christmas Carol was made here (the book will be out this year from KWS press).  The two of us split the labor in peeling the lemons; a bowl of fresh lemon peel and sugar smells quite tasty. 

Into this bowl of lemon peel and sugar, one pours the brandy and rum. Dickens favored very fancy cognac for the brandy, but I can't imagine that young David Copperfield would have had that in stock. We used low-end brandy and Bacardi Gold rum, which didn't break the bank but still tasted good.

 Now comes the reall cool part - setting it on fire! 

The Missus made us take the bowl outside for this part. The recommended way to set a bowl of booze on fire is to scoop up a spoonful and set THAT on fire, then pour the flaming spoonful into the bowl. This didn't work for me - like mixing eggs into drinks without creating a tankard full of scrambled eggs, it's the kind of thing one has to practice a bit. Eventually, I set fire to some wax paper and just lowered it into the whole bowl. After a couple of tries, we had a flaming bowl that was, in a word, awesome. We probably could have done it indoors, really, though you can do this at your own risk (edit to add: just lighting some in a spoon then pouring it into the bowl worked like a charm indoors when we tried it again the next week).

It should be noted that no one I talked to thought this would burn - the rum and brandy were both 80 proof, and apparently you should have a higher alcohol content to set booze on fire. The lemon peel and sugar probably helped. In any case, the photo is living proof that the stuff WILL burn using 80 proof liquors. 
Leave it burning for 3-4 minutes (during which time I assure you the novelty does not wear off), then extinguish the fire simply by putting the lid onto the bowl (or crock, in our case), and take the whole thing back inside and brag to the Missus that you did, in fact, manage not to kill yourself or start another Great Chicago Fire. 

Add a quart or so of boiling water, and squeeze in juice from the lemons (I used large lemons, and, hence only used the juice of about half of them), allow it to simmer for a bit, then enjoy! 

This is a really delicious drink - it tastes like a lemony black tea. It has a bit of a kick to it, but one that sneaks up on you. After a few sips I was a bit concerned that maybe setting fire to it had burned away all the alcohol, and realized I'd have to figure out whether or not it had the old fashioned way - by drinking a few glasses and seeing if I felt the effects. I did, by the way.  It would be a fine drink for a party - fun to make, fun to drink! 


Mike remarked that one could taste every part of it - you could taste the sugar, the rum, the brandy and the lemon all distinctly. When I think of punch, I think strictly of Hawaiian punch and other such red drinks that taste delicious, but like nothing that occurs in nature. This was a whole new kind of punch for me, and a tasty one. We will be making this one again soon! Here we are, looking appropriately old-fashioned and enjoying the punch:

It is, in fact, also very good iced. There was some left over that I saved for the next day and poured over ice. It does get a little bit sweeter, making it seem like a very hard lemonade. I think the iced version would make a fine summer drink, but the hot version is perfect for winter.

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.

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.




                        

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.