Caudle: Sweet, Nourishing Gruel!

Welp, I suppose it had to come to this sooner or later. I've come to a drink in which the main ingredient is "gruel."

There are little bits from Dickens that are still known even among people who've never read a word of 19th century literature, the way that people who know nothing about science fiction often at least know who Luke Skywalker's father is. Everyone knows that Tiny Tim said "God bless us, every one," and everyone knows that Oliver Twist wanted more gruel.

Twist isn't one of my favorites - the first third of it is GREAT, but after that it's sort of a mess. Most of Dickens's early books are sort of a mess, really; in those days he didn't plan his books out much in advance, and they tend to have a certain "slapdash" quality to them. Those early ones - Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop were his most popular in his lifetime, but his reputation today hangs entirely on his later books, like Bleak House and Great Expectations, which come off as far more modern and literary with their tighter plots and more accomplished prose. Switching from reading Pickwick, the first "early" novel, to Dombey and Son, the first "later" one, is like going from Please Please Me to Rubber Soul.

The last of the "early" novels was Martin Chuzzlewit, which is now a go-to novel to name when you want to mention an obscure Dickens book that no one reads anymore (though a quick search on Twitter shows that right now it's being read by many, many more people than are reading any of my books, so there's that). Really, I think this one is badly under-rated. It has a fairly coherent plot, lots of great characters, and some really dynamite scenes - the early section where he describes the neighborhood and boarding house known as "Todgers" is one of my favorite passages in Dickens. Here's an excerpt:

    You couldn't walk about Todgers's neighbourhood, as you could in any other neighbourhood. You groped your way for an hour through lanes and byways, and court-yards, and passages; and you never once emerged upon anything that might be reasonably called a street.....
    Several fruit-brokers had their marts near Todgers's; and one of the first impressions wrought upon the stranger's senses was of oranges — of damaged oranges — with blue and green bruises on them, festering in boxes, or mouldering away in cellars...
    There were churches also by dozens, with many a ghostly little churchyard, all overgrown with such straggling vegetation as springs up spontaneously from damp, and graves, and rubbish... Here, paralysed old watchmen guarded the bodies of the dead at night, year after year, until at last they joined that solemn brotherhood; and, saving that they slept below the ground a sounder sleep than even they had ever known above it, and were shut up in another kind of box, their condition can hardly be said to have undergone any material change when they, in turn, were watched themselves.
 


Like a lot of early Dickens, it doesn't seem like a well-planned book. It starts out being a plot about Martin Chuzzlewit, Sr, about to die and having all his far-flung relatives trying to be named his heir, then goes off on tangents, forgets where it's going, and circles around a few times. But it improves as it goes, I think, and largely abandoning the early part of the plot was a good idea in the end.

The "breakout" character of the novel, the one everyone remembers, is Mrs. Gamp, a nurse whose job is to sit up at night with sick people in their houses, where she spends most of her time drunk off her ass and eating all the food she can find. As one in her profession would have to be, she's very flippant about death; she wanders into new jobs, looks at the sick guy, and says "He'd make a lovely corpse!"

But being surrounded by death gives her a very good excuse to drink, as seen in this scene, in which she reports on a conversation between herself and Mrs. Harris, her imaginary friend, and explains that she needs a bit of liquor to get her through her depressing job:

'You have become indifferent since then, I suppose?' said Mr Pecksniff. 'Use is second nature, Mrs Gamp.'

'You may well say second nater, sir,' returned that lady. 'One's first ways is to find sich things a trial to the feelings, and so is one's lasting custom. If it wasn't for the nerve a little sip of liquor gives me (I never was able to do more than taste it), I never could go through with what I sometimes has to do.  "Mrs Harris," I says, at the very last case as ever I acted in, which it was but a young person, "Mrs Harris," I says, "leave the bottle on the chimley-piece, and don't ask me to take none, but let me put my lips to it when I am so dispoged, and then I will do what I'm engaged to do, according to the best of my ability." 

"Mrs Gamp," she says, in answer, "if ever there was a sober creetur to be got at eighteen pence a day for working people, and three and six for gentlefolks-- night watching,"' said Mrs Gamp with emphasis, '"being a extra charge--you are that inwallable person." 

"Mrs Harris," I says to her, "don't name the charge, for if I could afford to lay all my feller creeturs out for nothink, I would gladly do it, sich is the love I bears 'em. But what I always says to them as has the management of matters, Mrs Harris"'--here she kept her eye on Mr Pecksniff--'"be they gents or be they ladies, is, don't ask me whether I won't take none, or whether I will, but leave the bottle on the chimley-piece, and let me put my lips to it when I am so dispoged."'

"I was never able to do more than taste it" my ass. She spends most of her time at work drinking, eating and collecting kickbacks from Mr. Mould, the undertaker she recommends when her charges inevitably die.

 She was such a popular character in her day that people started calling umbrellas "gamps" because she always carried one, and even today eBay is chock full of Mrs. Gamp figurines, salt shakers, spoons, tea cups, and plates. She was as well known a lush in her day as Barney on The Simpsons  is now. Come to think of it, she looks so much like him that she could just about be Barney's great grandmother.

There are a few things Mrs. Gamp is particularly fond of, such as cucumbers (she calls them "cowcumbers"), porter, and a particular drink that she mentions having made many times in a month known as caudle.

Dickens was familiar with caudle himself - he spoke in one of his "travelogue" books, The Uncommercial Traveler, of having seen it served at a wake that was held for stillborn quadruplets. It seems to have been a drink used to comfort people - it's probably from this drink that we get the word "coddled" and the even more insidious "mollycoddled."

Caudle is another spiced drink for which there are lots and lots of recipes, some going back to Shakespeare's day. Some use brandy or wine in place of ale, which is what I used. The one constant is that a major ingredient in them is gruel - a very thin oatmeal that was used to feed the poor (or, in the case of Ebenezer Scrooge, the cheapskates).

Really, spiced ale with oatmeal in it didn't sound so terrible to me. And most of the drinks in these books have turned out to be quite tasty. But you can't win them all.


Caudle

2 cups of gruel (2 cups water, about 1/4th cup of oatmeal)
1 tablespoon brown sugar
pinches of cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg
1 12oz bottle of ale


Boil the water, striring in the oatmeal and adding the dry ingredients, then, when the oatmeal is as cooked as it's going to get, mix in the ale. I thought it appropriate to use Ebenezer Ale, which is a dark brown nutty one from a brewery called Bridgeport.


This made for a reasonably tasty spiced ale drink, but the oatmeal dominated the affair, both in terms of taste and texture. As I've found from all these egg drinks, Victorians seem to have been far more used to goopy drinks than we are. Even now, the texture here may not be unfamiliar to those who are into, say, bubble tea. But I never quite saw the point of adding the oatmeal to this one. Not nearly as tasty as the fairly similar egg hot, which was sort of like this, but with an egg instead of gruel. When it comes down to choosing between eggs and gruel, pick the eggs.

I thought this one was pretty crappy on the whole. Without the oatmeal it would be a middling entry;  with it, it's just sort of odd, calling to mind the sensation one gets trying to down some Rice Krispies that have been in the milk long enough to eliminate all semblance of crisp.

Mrs. Gamp probably just made this stuff because it gave her the chance to drink while putting on a show of doing something healthy and comforting.   And, by the way, the idea that it could be used to comfort the bereaved doesn't hold up for me, either. It's bad enough that someone is dead, why make it worse by making people drink gruel? Perhaps other recipes are better.  When I tried it again using oatmeal water (straining out the oats and just using the water), it was more drinkable, but still not great. The oat taste still dominated.

I feel good about having tried it just just for the bragging rights. Now, when I'm in a room with men who are talking about hunting and camping and shooting stuff, I can nod, look all tough, and say, "Yeah. I've had gruel." But no, sir, I do not want some more.

Smoking Bishop: from A Christmas Carol

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

Old Fezziwig served negus at the ball.

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

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

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

What a smart ass!

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

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

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

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

But, anyway, onto the drink! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Serve in heated glasses and enjoy!

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

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

Mine, smoking!

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

Port Negus

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, my recipe is as follows:

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

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

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