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.