Burnt Sherry: A Drink That Never Was?

Two of my favorite characters in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens's last completed novel, are Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn, a couple of young, under-employed barristers-at-law who spend all day doing nothing in empty offices, then spend their evenings going to society gatherings that bore the crap out of them. They're a part of the upper-class world, but they aren't impressed by it, or the people in it, and drift through the parties casually making fun of everyone.  One of my favorite conversations between them comes when they're in a carriage leaving a party:




  'I hate,' said Eugene, putting his legs up on the opposite seat, 'I hate my profession.'     
    'Shall I incommode you, if I put mine up too?' returned Mortimer. 'Thank you. I hate mine.'     
     'It was forced upon me,' said the gloomy Eugene, 'because it was understood that we wanted a barrister in the family. We have got a precious one.'    
     'It was forced upon me,' said Mortimer, 'because it was understood that we wanted a solicitor in the family. And we have got a precious one.'     '

After a few more minutes of describing their dull jobs, they go on:
  
 'Then idiots talk,' said Eugene, leaning back, folding his arms, smoking with his eyes shut, and speaking slightly through his nose, 'of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce! Am I to rush out into the street, collar the first man of a wealthy appearance that I meet, shake him, and say, "Go to law upon the spot, you dog, and retain me, or I'll be the death of you"? Yet that would be energy.'     
    'Precisely my view of the case, Eugene. But show me a good opportunity, show me something really worth being energetic about, and I'll show you energy.'    
     'And so will I,' said Eugene.     
    And it is likely enough that ten thousand other young men, within the limits of the London Post-office town delivery, made the same hopeful remark in the course of the same evening.    

When these two heroes find themselves wrapped up in a murder case, the inspector takes them to the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, that smelly riverside tavern where the sailors and wharf rats go for port negus, purl, and dog's nose, which have already come up in this blog. It has to be the most versatile tavern in the whole of Dickens, where Lightwood and Wrayburn go undercover (even though no one is around to eavesdrop) by pretending to be lime merchants. They have a LOT of fun pretending to be lime merchants.

The inspector tells the two that "they burn sherry very well here," and they order up a bottle of burnt sherry. A man named Bob brings it out, and from the passage, we get a distinct idea that there's a real trick to burning sherry:


...although the jug steamed forth a delicious perfume, its contents had not received that last happy touch which the surpassing finish of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters imparted on such momentous occasions. Bob carried in his left hand one of those iron models of sugar-loaf hats, before mentioned, into which he emptied the jug, and the pointed end of which he thrust deep down into the fire, so leaving it for a few moments while he disappeared and reappeared with three bright drinking-glasses. Placing these on the table and bending over the fire, meritoriously sensible of the trying nature of his duty, he watched the wreaths of steam, until at the special instant of projection he caught up the iron vessel and gave it one delicate twirl, causing it to send forth one gentle hiss. Then he restored the contents to the jug; held over the steam of the jug, each of the three bright glasses in succession; finally filled them all, and with a clear conscience awaited the applause of his fellow-creatures.

The three men drink a toast to the lime trade.

This isn't the only time the drink appears in Dickens - Mr. Pickwick and his cell-mates drink some burnt sherry in the debtors prison, so it appears in both the first and last full Dickens novels.

But here's the thing: I could find no recipe for burned sherry. I asked the Dickens-L mailing list if it was just sherry served hot or what - the fact that a pub could be said to do it "very well" implied to me that it must have been spiced or something.

However, as far as anyone knows, "burnt sherry" wasn't really a drink at all - Dickens's references to it are just about the only evidence that anyone ever drank such a concoction at all.  "Burned" often just meant "hot" back in the old days - Falstaff refers to drinking "burned sack" when he's just talking about hot wine in Shakespeare - so it's probably just heated sherry. The reference to them burning sherry very well at the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters  simply refers to the neat way they have of heating it up in the sugarloaf hat-shaped pot and making it hiss.

I can say, though, that it DOES make some neat hissing noises when you heat it up.

Also, it can catch fire when you heat it. So there's that. I don't know if it's sheer luck that got mine to burn, or if starting the fire takes some skill that I haven't quite mastered, but I could see it making for a really good spectacle.



BURNT SHERRY

Ingredients:
1 glass of sherry

Heat the sherry. That's about it; this is as simple as recipes get. I used a cream sherry from Trader Joe's - a dry sherry might have been a bit closer to what they had at the Porters. If you really want to be "authentic," you can heat it up in your fireplace in a pot shaped like a sugar-loaf hat, which is also known as a "capotain" or "pilgrim hat" - they show up in one of the "Stupid Hats from History" sidebars in The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History, in which they're described as "a top hat that wasn't trying very hard."

Or, if you don't have a pot shaped like one of those, some say it was heated by putting a red hot poker into the tankard. Or, if you have no fireplace, poker, or pot shaped like a sugarloaf hat, you can do what I did the first time and just pour some sherry into a mug and put it in the microwave.

That made for a tasty drink, but the next time I tried it, I "burned" it on the stove in a metal saucepan. It began to hiss splendidly before it even started to bubble, and then, to my surprise and utter delight, caught fire right there in the pot, without me doing anything to ignite it. It was pretty awesome, but I couldn't get it to work again, and, hence, lack photos to prove it. But if the guy with the hat-shaped pot had gotten it to catch fire, then twirled it around, I can certainly imagine that it would look very impressive.

I wish I had better photos, if only because people may not believe me at it catching fire. People thought I was mad to say that the 40 proof rum in the punch would ignite, and this stuff is only 36 proof. But it caught fire, and without me even adding a flame - one might even say that it spontaneously combusted, like Mr. Krook in Bleak House. Even attempts to add flames to it since then have come up short. Perhaps it was just some grease in the pan that started it up?

As to the drink itself, first thing I noticed about burnt sherry upon pouring a glass was the smell - the fumes seemed particularly strong. It did, as Dickens said, "Steam forth a delicious perfurme," which worked its way right into my nostrils and made me think it might be a wise drink to order when you're in a tavern right next to a really smelly river. Being by the river, after all, was a dangerous proposition in those days, when there were not yet any embankments and the river was full of raw sewage, not to mention the dead bodies that some patrons of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters fished out of it for a living. At high tides, the water probably game right up to the door of the place. Dickens describes this happening to an affluent house in Dombey and Son:


    Sir Barnet and Lady Skettles, very good people, resided in a pretty villa at Fulham, on the banks of the Thames; which was one of the most desirable residences in the world when a rowing-match happened to be going past, but had its little inconveniences at other times, among which may be enumerated the occasional appearance of the river in the drawing-room, and the contemporaneous disappearance of the lawn and shrubbery.

Anyway, it's a tasty drink; the stovetop version that had caught fire was thicker than the microwave version, and featured prominent raisin notes (which is fancy wine talk for "it tasted like raisins.") It was also a bit darker in color after "burning."

Thanks to the readers of Dickens-L for weighing in on the topic. Burnt sherry is a tasty, warming drink that'll probably keep the smell of sewage out of your nostrils very well, and gives you the added thrill of knowing that you might just set fire to your apartment when you make it. I haven't had a chance to actually test its powers against the smell of the Victorian Thames, but, well, really, that's just as well.

Purl and Dog's Nose

When I lived in Georgia, it was common to meet people who believed that no one questioned organized religion until about 1964. Now I think young people there have moved that up until about 1998 or so. A friend of mine teaches college level courses on gothic fiction, and there are always a few students who see The Rocky Horror Picture Show and assume it must be a very recent film, because it's too "out there" to be very old. 

They'd never believe me if I told them that the guy who wrote A Christmas Carol seldom darkened the door of a church. Dickens was reasonably religious privately - he wrote a little volume called The Life of Our Lord for his children - but doesn't seem to have cared much for the church as an institution, or for religious loudmouths. I can't think of a single preacher, reverend, bishop, or particularly religious person in all of Dickens who isn't mostly just comic relief.

My favorite of his hypocritical preachers is Reverernd Chadband from Bleak House, who gives long speeches that make no sense and acts as though it makes him all holy. 

Chadband: windbag

     Mr. Chadband is a large yellow man with a fat smile and a general appearance of having a good deal of train oil in his system...(he) moves softly and cumbrously, not unlike a bear who has been taught to walk upright. He is very much embarrassed about the arms, as if they were inconvenient to him and he wanted to grovel, is very much in a perspiration about the head, and never speaks without first putting up his great hand, as delivering a token to his hearers that he is going to edify them.

    “My friends,” says Mr. Chadband, “peace be on this house! On the master thereof, on the mistress thereof, on the young maidens, and on the young men! My friends, why do I wish for peace? What is peace? Is it war? No. Is it strife? No. Is it lovely, and gentle, and beautiful, and pleasant, and serene, and joyful? Oh, yes! Therefore, my friends, I wish for peace, upon you and upon yours.”

This is just him saying hello. Think how dull his sermons must have been!

Another such humbug is Rev. Stiggins in Pickwick Papers. Sam Weller's stepmother has fallen into the thrall of an anti-booze preacher called "The Shepherd," and Sam and his father go to pull pranks on one of the meetings. Naturally, the reverend and most of his followers are secretly big boozers. The secretary at the meeting reads one of their recent success stories:

Sam Weller's dad beats the crap out of
Stiggins, and there is much
rejoicing.

'H. Walker, tailor, wife, and two children. When in better circumstances, owns to having been in the constant habit of drinking ale and beer; says he is not certain whether he did not twice a week, for twenty years, taste "dog's nose," which your committee find upon inquiry, to be compounded of warm porter, moist sugar, gin, and nutmeg (a groan, and 'So it is!' from an elderly female). Is now out of work and penniless; thinks it must be the porter (cheers) or the loss of the use of his right hand; is not certain which, but thinks it very likely that, if he had drunk nothing but water all his life, his fellow-workman would never have stuck a rusty needle in him, and thereby occasioned his accident (tremendous cheering). Has nothing but cold water to drink, and never feels thirsty (great applause).

"Dog's Nose" is a variation on another popular drink of the day known as purl. Both are mainly just porter (beer) mixed with gin and served warm with various flavorings. The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters in Our Mutual Friend  is particularly known for its purl, though it's also said to serve dog's nose.  Purl is also whipped up by Dick Swiveller in The Old Curiosity Shop, who appears to be the template upon which P.G. Wodehouse based pretty much all of his funniest characters. Dick wouldn't drink bad drinks - he was broke, but always ate at the finest restaurants and drank at the best taverns (and kept a list of streets he couldn't go down anymore, because he'd run out on a check at some restaurant there). Old Curiosity Shop is the weirdest of the early Dickens books - the plot is basically innocent Little Nell traipsing through England and meeting a series of grotesques while on the run from Quilp, an evil dwarf who drinks his own gin straight. It's not a book that's totally held up, but Old Curiosity Shop is fascinating and hypnotic in its best parts, and Dick Swiveller is hilarious, and if he drinks something, I'll give it a shot. I didn't have all the gear needed, though, so I had to take a field trip.

I am not hard up for bars in my neighborhood; that "molecular gastronomy" bar they went to on Parks and Rec last week, the one where the whiskey comes in the form of hand lotion, was allegedly based on The Aviary, a place about 3 blocks from my apartment. But that doesn't strike me as the kind of friendly neighborhood place where one could walk in with an armload of spices without looking like a douchebag, so I drove out to Forest Park, which sits in the first layer of suburbs, and hit The Beacon, a bar tended by Stephanie Kuehnert, author of I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone and Ballads of Suburbia. We have the same agent, and sometimes meet up to talk about how miserable the life of a mid-list author is. I contacted her ahead of time to confirm that they had to means to throw these drinks together at the Beacon - I had to bring my own brown sugar, spices and microwave-safe vessel, but she could provide gin and porter. 

While my own mixing and fire-setting skills may not qualify me to work at the Aviary, or perhaps even, say, the bar at Bubba Gump Shrimp,  Stephanie and I did manage to whip up some purl and dog's nose in a manner un-fancy enough that it could have actually been the sort made at the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, or on Dick Swiveller's stove. 

DOG'S NOSE

1 pint of porter

1 shot of gin

1 tablespoon of brown sugar

a dash of nutmeg  

This mostly follows the recipe given in Pickwick above; I used brown sugar because that was the recipe Cedric Dickens gave in his book, Drinking With Dickens. For all I know this is what they meant by "moist sugar" back then.   The recipe also recommends Guiness if porter can't be found - it seems that it wasn't easy to come across in the UK in the early 80s, when that book was written, because he's always offering substitutions for it. 

The porter was heated up, then the gin and brown sugar were mixed in, and nutmeg was put on top, which attracted a small crowd.  The resulting drink - of which everyone present had a taste - was really quite tasty; it had a sort of gingerbread taste about it, and as it cooled it started to taste a bit more like licorice to me.  It would be good in a tankard in front of a roaring fire at Christmas.

Here I am with Stephanie. Our Mutual Agent
warned us not to blow up the bar via twitter.
We didn't. 

PURL

1 pint of porter

1 shot of gin

1 teaspoon of ginger

a dash of nutmeg

Again going with a Cedric Dickens recipe, this one I didn't like much at all. It had a sharpness to it that put me in mind of the coffee I used to drink when I was 12 at The Playhouse, a theatre in Des Moines where I was in plays from time to time. There was generally an urn of coffee sitting around in the basement, and many of us "Playhouse Kids" had our first taste of coffee there. The thing is, though, by the time we got around to it, the coffee had usually been sitting at the bottom of the urn for hours and hours, and had taken on some of the taste of metal. It may have also had hallucinogenic qualities; one day after six cups (after learning to drink it fresh and hot), I went home and found myself convinced that that blanket brushing against my foot in the bed was a giant, mutant spider. This may, however, simply have been a side effect of having put about 9 things of sugar and 12 things of cream into the cup, as I did at the time. 

Now, personally, I grew up to like crappy truck stop (or basement of a theatre) coffee where you can taste the metal from the urn. But that taste works better for me in coffee than it does  in hot beer. This "bottom of the urn" taste brought back pleasant memories of my days at the Playhouse, but not enough so that I wanted to drink the entire glass or anything. All of the bar was in agreement that Dog's Nose was the tastier of the two by far.  Sorry, Dick Swiveller. 

Of course, this is just one of any number of ways to make purl - other recipes may be better. I actually understand that purl is making something of a comeback in the UK these days in bars that are more along the lines of The Aviary.  Perhaps I'll try again sometime.

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.