Rum Flip

You may remember from a previous entry that in Little Dorrit, a bishop gives a recipe for sherry flip and says that's a cure for depression. Ten years earlier, in Dombey and Son, another character gave the same recipe for the same ailment, then added a twist.

Dombey and Son was the first "late" Dickens book - for the first time, he actually sat down and planned the whole book out and made an effort at making a Novel (capital N). Reading it after Pickwick Papers, his first, is like going from Please Please Me to Rubber Soul. There's still a lot of fun to be had, but more of an attempt at art and creating a cohesive "whole" piece.

It seems like everyone I talk to quits reading Dombey and Son halfway through - I did so myself a couple of times before finally finishing it. The first quarter of the book is a complete story about the short life of Little Paul Dombey, and after (spoiler alert) he dies, it's hard to imagine what the hell the rest of the book will be about. You also sort of feel like an asshole, because by the time Paul finally kicks it, you're sort of ready for him to die. Tiny Tim works because he's only there for a few pages. Paul is essentially the same character, but lasts for 300 pages, occasionally ominously asking what it is that the waves are always saying as a means of foreshadowing his death (apparently the waves are saying "You die at the end of the 5th monthly number, kiddo!")

That sort of melodrama seems like Dickens trying too hard to be artsy to me, and one character, Captain Cuttle, is someone that Dickens clearly put a LOT of effort into, but who never quite works for me. He has his moments, but mostly he seems to me as though Dickens was trying very hard to make a Dickensian character.

But that's not to say that the book is bad. There are a lot of characters and long subplots in the second half that could have been lifted right out, really, but there's also Chapter 20, where Mr. Dombey rides on a train thinking about death and in which the prose is just colossal - one of many such sections where Dickens stops trying to be a genius and simply is one. And there's Dr. Blimber, Mrs. Pipchin, Major Bagstock, Mr. Toodles, Mr. Toots, Cousin Feenix, "Cleopatra," Mrs. MacStinger, and so many others characters that I just love. I particularly like Susan Nipper, the maid who speaks her mind, and is one of the most well-rounded women Dickens wrote (he had a tendency to make old women crazy and young women overly pious and innocent).  The use of the railway as a metaphor for the changing world is very good (and a few major points of it would be echoed by Booth Tarkington is his The Magnificent Ambersons a generation later with when he used horseless carriages the same way).

Major Bagstock, a pompous old asshole who speaks of himself in the third person, is a freaking riot, and I love the way Dickens describes him when he talks about going to boarding school:


     "None but the tough fellows could live through it, Sir, at Sandhurst. We put each other to the torture there, Sir. We roasted the new fellows at a slow fire, and hung 'em out of a three pair of stairs window, with their heads downwards. Joseph Bagstock, Sir, was held out of the window by the heels of his boots, for thirteen minutes by the college clock"     
      The Major might have appealed to his countenance in corroboration of this story. It certainly looked as if he had hung out a little too long.

There isn't a LOT of drinking in the book - most references to it refer to a bottle of very old madeira that Uncle Sol keeps for a special occasion, and I'm not likely to break out any old, old madeira for this blog anytime soon, though I did get some undated madeira for six bucks to use in a future recipe - can't be THAT recent, since it's a Paul Masson, and they sell no wine before its time.  It tastes like raisins.

But towards the end of the book (I finally made it!), Cousin Feenix gives his prescription for depression and illness:

 If my friend Dombey suffers from bodily weakness, and would allow me to recommend what has frequently done myself good, as a man who has been extremely queer at times, and who lived pretty freely in the days when men lived very freely, I should say, let it be in point of fact the yolk of an egg, beat up with sugar and nutmeg, in a glass of sherry, and taken in the morning with a slice of dry toast.

This, of course, is the Sherry Flip, which I covered a while ago. It tastes like custard, and Dickens himself used to drink it as a pick-me-up during intermission at his public readings.

Cousin Feenix goes on to add a twist:

Jackson, who kept the boxing-rooms in Bond Street ... used to mention that in training for the ring they substituted rum for sherry. I should recommend sherry in this case, on account of my friend Dombey being in an invalided condition; which might occasion rum to fly - in point of fact to his head - and throw him into a devil of a state.

So, had Rocky taken place a century or so before, he would have added rum, sugar, and nutmeg to his bowl full of raw eggs. Boxers still drink raw eggs, as I understand it - it's an "old school" gym trick for getting your protein quickly. The boxers at Jackson's boxing-rooms probably should have included the egg whites, too, but, as Cousin Feenix doesn't specify that they did, I'll stick to his recipe for rum flip, which will, apparently, get you in shape and cure what ails you, though it may also fly to your head and throw you into a devil of a state.

RUM FLIP
1 egg yoke
1 heaping tablespoon of sugar
1/2 cup of rum or so
nutmeg to taste.
Hot water (optional)

Another simple one - separate the yoke from the egg by passing the yoke back and forth between your hands, letting the white part fall away into the sink. Add the sugar and rum, then mix well with a fork until the egg is fully blended into the liquid, and top with some nutmeg.

This is the recipe as Cousin Feenix gives it, and it tastes a lot like drinking the batter to a Betty Crocker spice cake. Tasty, spicy, and thick, but I couldn't help but feel as though I ought to be baking it, not drinking it.

However, I then added a cup or so of hot water, and hit paydirt - the drink was now drinkable, and delicious, not unlike the hot spiced butter-rum that I once had at Trader Vic's. Tasty! Didn't make me feel like getting into a boxing match or anything, but maybe if I drank one every day I'd be in fighting shape.

Egg Hot: After a Night in Debtors Prison...

Sometimes I listen to Bob Dylan and wonder what future generations will know about him that we don't. After Dylan's eventual death, it's certain that biographical details will come out that will change the way we think of many of his songs. People a century from now will probably have trouble imagining us listening to the songs without knowing these things.

This is, after all, what happened with Dickens. Even if you just read the back of the books, not the whole introductions to them, it's hard to read all of the scenes in various books that take place in debtors prisons and imagine that people back in the day didn't realize Dickens's father had been in one. It's widely known now that David Copperfield is sort of a veiled autobiography, but no one except Dickens's very closest friends knew this at the time.

William Hogarth's illustration of the scene at a debtor's prison.
Note fancy bed in background.

Though having a father imprisoned for debt clearly weighed heavily on his psyche, Dickens has a tendency to make debtors' prison look like a real party pit. Debtors' prisons weren't exactly hard labor; the general atmosphere seems like like life in a cheap motel that you weren't allowed to leave. There was a "snuggery" (an agreeable name for a tavern), grounds on which one could wander around, and often times peoples' entire family would live in the prison cell with them.

Mr. Micawber, with whom young David Copperfield lives for a time, is perhaps the most entertaining debtor in all of Dickens - indeed, he's one of the most memorable characters in all of of the works. Micawber is always dodging creditors, and always with the threat of being arrested for debt hovering over his head, but, between bouts of misery, his motto is "Something will turn up." The same motto got me through some tough times. He is subject to dizzying switches between highs and lows, generally with a very verbose speech, even by Dickens standards. When he's finally arrested for debt, he remarks that "the God of Day had gone down forever upon him," but he's playing games in the prison courtyard by noon.

I like Micawber a lot. He's sort of a bum, but an agreeable one who reminds me more of myself than I should probably admit. Dickens describes him as "a thoroughly good-natured man, and as active a creature about everything but his own affairs as ever existed, and never so happy as when he was busy about something that could never be of any profit to him." 

David Copperfield goes to visit him in his cell, and finds him crying and repeating his famous statement that a man who earns twenty pounds a year and spends 19 pounds, 19 shillings, and six pence, he'll be happy, but that if he spends twenty pounds and six pence, he'll be miserable. This is a philosophy he's generally unable to live by himself. Immediately after repeating it he borrows a shilling from David for beer, then sends him to a cell above his own to borrow a knife and fork from one Captain Hopkins, who lives there with his family, so they can eat the leg of mutton Micawber's cell mate has scared up:

I thought it was better to borrow Captain Hopkins's knife and fork, than Captain Hopkins's comb. The Captain himself was in the last extremity of shabbiness, with large whiskers, and an old, old brown great-coat with no other coat below it.

David has to admit there's something charming about the shabby, but genial dinner and atmosphere, and spends the night at the cell before going back to Micawber's house, where he's living at the time, and where she makes him (still very much a minor) an alcoholic drink:

There was something gipsy-like and agreeable in the dinner, after all. I took back Captain Hopkins's knife and fork early in the afternoon, and went home to comfort Mrs. Micawber with an account of my visit. She fainted when she saw me return, and made a little jug of egg-hot afterwards to console us while we talked it over.

So...egg hot. Another Victorian drink with an egg in it, but one said to cheer one up. David's in a bad place at this point. Micawber, the closest thing he has to a father figure, is in jail, and he's spending his days working a crappy factory job, having been pulled out of school (again, it's hard to imagine reading this without knowing that Dickens was really writing about his own childhood here). Pretty soon he'll run away, and Micawber will drift in and out of his life for some time. Mrs. Micawber, who constantly tells everyone that "No, I shall never leave Mr. Micawber," as though she can just tell they're thinking she ought to, is about the most loyal human being in literature. The two of them actually adapt well to prison life for a while: "they lived more comfortably in the prison than they had lived for a long while out of it."

So, egg hot is a drink served by people like Mrs. Micawber to help you through a little crisis.  Sign me up.

Recipes vary, and none really specify what kind of ale to use; there are dozens of options on the shelf these days. Seeing as how most of the furniture and household effects of the Micawbers have been pawned at this point in the book, I can't imagine it was anything fancy. Personally, I decided on Goose Island Nut Brown Ale. Not too fancy, but tasty on its own, and I thought a nuttiness would go well with the recipe for egg hot, which is:

1 bottle of ale

1 egg

a pat of butter

a tablespoon of sugar

pinch of cinnamon

pinch of cloves

Warm the butter, sugar, spices, and about 2/3rds of the ale in a saucepan until the butter melts. Beat the egg in a bowl, then add a bit of the cold ale. Mix, then slowly add a spoonful at a time of the warm ale into it, stirring all the while. This will temper the egg so it doesn't cook, which would leave you with a saucepan full of beer and scrambled eggs, which sounds like something you'd encounter in an early Tom Waits song.

Once you've got the egg mixed up to a nice brown slurry, pour it (and the rest of the ale) into the saucepan, stirring as you go. Warm up it without quite boiling it (which can be a bit tricky, since the ale is bubbling already). 

This drink is like nothing I ever tasted before, really. There are lots of flavored beers out there - pumpkin ales and what have you. But most of them just taste like beer with a few notes of flavor to me and my untrained palette. This is flavored beer the way a hazelnut mocha is a flavored coffee. It's definitely a beer drink - you can taste that - but it's a flavored beer. And the flavor is delicious. It's thicker and hotter than anyting beer-related that one normally tastes these days, but very tasty. Enjoyed!

Sherry Flip Will Cure What Ails You

There are some lessons that books and movies preach, but don't actually believe. Who in Hollywood really thinks that small towns are better and more wholesome than big cities? And who in the world thinks that it's better to be poor than rich?

Dickens wrote about the evils of money and greed all the time, but, in private, he loved the stuff. He was no miser - he was keeping up several households at once - but he was a shrewd businessman.

Many of his characters learned the hard way that money won't make you happy, including the small-but-pivotal Mr. Merdle from Little Dorrit. Merdle is one of those guys you run into in books from time to time who is rich, but miserable, and, secretly, not really all that rich. That his name derives from the French word for "shit" is probably no accident.

When Mr. Merdle gives a party, Mrs. Merdle soaks up all the society types, and Mr. Merdle himself just sulks around trying to avoid his butler, of whom he's scared out of his mind. Everyone seems to understand that there's something the matter with Old Merdle, but no one takes it very seriously. A physician at a party of his says that Merdle has:

"...the constitution of a rhinoceros, the digestion of an ostrich, and the concentration of an oyster."

Did you realize ostriches were known for their regularity? I sure didn't. You learn something new every day.

And in this same chapter, when discussing how to cure malaise and ennui and depression and al that, a bishop who is present offers up a little anecdote:

"Bishop said that when he was a young man, and had fallen for a brief space into the habit of writing sermons on Saturdays, a habit which all young sons of the church should sedulously avoid, he had frequently been sensible of a depression, arising as he supposed from an over- taxed intellect, upon which the yolk of a new-laid egg, beaten up by the good woman in whose house he at that time lodged, with a glass of sound sherry, nutmeg, and powdered sugar acted like a charm."

The bishop is describing a drink known as a "sherry flip," another drink that contains eggs. I had never had such a thing as alcoholic drinks with egg before I embarked on this blog, but now I'm starting to get the hang of them. I'd also never tried sherry before - it's a very sweet fortified wine, sort of nut-brown in color, that has a nutty, honey-like taste that reminds me somewhat of the bottle of "mead" someone passed me on the courtyard after hours at Dragoncon some years ago.  People in Dickens drink it all the time; wines such as madeira, port, and sherry, which are normally in the "Dessert Wines" section at the store now, figure prominently in these books.

Dickens did seem to believe that such a concoction could cure what ailed you; during his American reading tour, when his health was bad, he would drink a glass of sherry with  an egg beaten into it (he may have left out the powdered sugar and the nutmeg) during intermission, and this seemed to give him enough energy to get through the second half of the readings, which taxed him greatly. Now, my job as a ghost tour guide in Chicago is not that unlike the job of Dickens as a reader - for two hours or more, I stand up talking and telling stories, occasionally lapsing into other "characters" and "voices." I'm not an actor or anything, but in the course of telling all the gruesome murder stories that you get in a ghost tour, I'll use about 20 different voices when quoting other people. It's kind of like what Dickens did on readings.

I never drink during the tours (if I even use a water bottle that isn't clear, people assume I'm boozing it up), so I made myself a sherry flip about an hour my driver picked me up:

SHERRY FLIP:

1 egg

1 cup of sherry

1 tablespoon (or so) of powdered sugar

pinch of nutmeg.

Mix the sugar, egg and sherry into a wine glass, beating the egg vigoursly, then add grated nutmeg to the top.

I checked with some more knowledgable people about the egg here - one assured me that the salmonella comes from the shells, so I should be all right with a raw egg as long as I wash the shell first. I hope he's right.

The texture of the drink is...odd. It's thick, and now and then it gets thicker when you get a sip with more of the egg yolk in it; I'm getting the idea that Victorians were much more used to drinking "goopy" drinks than we are today. Serving an egg drink in a wine glass is a bit unusual, since they're usually served in earthenware (so you can't see how ugly they look).

But if you can get past the texture, this is one tasty drink - mine tasted like a very good glass of custard.

As for curing what ails you, well...after I downed my glass, I did feel, for a moment, as though I had the strength of ten men. I felt warmth and cheer all over my body. I was more than ready for a tour- I felt like I could go and move something heavy. I had the constitution of a rhino and the concentration of an oyster, and figured that the digestion would be sufficiently ostrich-like in the near future, though I'll spare you the details there.

But one way my job is different from the job Dickens did on readings was that he got to stand on a platform the whole time. Standing up at the front of a moving bus as it rolls through the pot-holed streets of Chicago is very different from standing on a platform. I had the sherry flip more than an hour before the tour time, so I certainly wasn't feeling the effects of the alcohol by then, but I did feel as though I could feel the egg yoke, reformed to its original un-beaten state, bouncing around in my stomach every time we hit a bump in the road. It's a tasty drink, sherry flip, but not something to drink before you go on a bumpy ride.

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.