Athol Brose from "The Holly Tree Inn"

I was heart-broken, it is true, and yet I was not quite so far gone as to wish to be frozen to death.

So says the "traveller" in The Holly Tree, one of Dickens's lesser-known "Christmas Books." After the success of A Christmas Carol, Dickens spent a few years writing a new Christmas story every year. The results were never as good as the first one, though Cricket n the Hearth and The Haunted Man are still adapted for stage and screen pretty regularly.  He eventually got fed up with the whole process and quit, though he did still put out big Christmas editions of the various magazines he edited, many with original material. By the mid 1850s, these "christmas specials" were collections of short stories that were vaguely connected by a story at the beginning and end that functioned as a framing device. Dickens would write the framing device and one of the stories, and friends such as Wilkie Collins would write the other stories.

Many of the short stories in these collections - even the ones Dickens wrote himself - are pretty bad, but there are some gems among them. The 1866 special, "Mugby Junction," featured a bunch of railroad stories, one of which was Dickens's own "The Signalman," which no less an authority than the ninth Doctor on Doctor Who said was the greatest short story every written. My own favorite of his stories from these is Doctor Marigold, the tale of a hilarious salesman who is one of Dickens's greatest creations. This year I read the 1855 collection, The Holly Tree, which is supposed to be a collection stories a nameless traveler collects from people at the inn.  The whole first several pages of The Holly Tree really just consist of the nameless traveler reminiscing about all the other sorts of inns and taverns he'd been to or heard about. He even remembers the first one he ever heard of: it was in a story his nurse, "a sallow woman with a fishy eye, and aquiline nose, and a green gown," told him  about an innkeeper who used to kill his customers and turn them into pies.  This sets the tone for the rest of the "First Branch," as the introduction is known.

For pages and pages, the guy just thinks about inns and the weirdoes he meets in them and the stories they've told him. It may sound dull, but the descriptions are so picturesque and inviting that they're a real pleasure to read, and the stories he relates of them are charmingly odd and gruesome.  There's a hotel room left haunted after a suicide, a parrot who says "wipe up the blood," a guy who's afraid of stonehenge, a guy who gets his head chopped off, and all sorts of wonderful things. I actually wish some of them were longer, which is sort of rare in Dickens.

 At one point, the traveler turns his mind to Welsh inns, and then to the Highland Inns in Scotland - "with the oatmeal bannocks, the honey, the venison steaks, the trout from the loch, the whisky, and perhaps (having the materials so temptingly at hand) the Athol brose."

So - Athol Brose. There we have a new drink. Like many of these old-fashioned drinks, no two recipes in circulation seem to agree on how to make it (even the spelling, Athol vs Atholl, has never become standardized - the 15th century nobleman for which it was named probably spelled his name both ways).  Some just make a simple mixture of liquor, honey and cream, but this is leaving out the "brose" altogether. "Brose" is a fancy word for oatmeal water - water that's been steeped in oatmeal for some time, then strained when it's good and oatmeal-flavored.

I didn't blame most modern mixers for leaving the oatmeal part out, after my experience with caudle, but a strained version seemed more drinkable, and it ain't brose without the brose. So I gave it a shot, combining a few recipes into one. It was cold night in Chicago, cold enough to make The Beacon tavern feel like The Highlands on a freezing winter's night. Good night for Athol Brose. Drink like Wilfred Brimley, yo.

ATHOL BROSE
1 part oatmeal brose (see below)
3/4 part heavy cream
1 part scotch
honey
nutmeg

Create the "brose" by soaking 1 part oatmeal and 3 parts water in a saucepan overnight or all day long, then straining it out, so you're left with a murky beige water that tastes like oats. Put this in a fresh saucepan and add some honey - about a tablespoon or so per cup of brose. I went with about half a cup of brass.

Bring the honey and brose to boil to mix the honey in, creating a sort of oatmeal/honey syrup, then remove from heat before strirring in the heavy cream. You don't want to boil the cream. Mix all of this well, put it into a sealed vessel, and refrigerate for some time.

When you're ready, remove it from the fridge. Take a whiff and you'll wonder what you've gotten yourself into this time. The brose and cream mixture smells pretty harsh.

Spoon the mixture onto the scotch in a nice goblet, then top with the nutmeg, if desired. It's meant to be served cold, which is odd for a winter drink, but you can try heating it up if you like, too. I found that it was best over ice, even though it was a chilling 7F outside at the time and I would have preferred something hot. It was a tasty enough drink - it reminded me of eggnog, but with a distinctly "breakfasty" feel, as if the Carnation had started making an eggnog flavor of their Instant Breakfast. Not bad.

This is one of only several drinks that appear in The Holly Tree. Early on the traveler stops at a place called the Peacock where everyone is drinking hot purl, and when he speaks of American inns, he mentions sling, cocktail, julep and cobbler, all of which also come up in American Notes, Dickens's diary of his first trip to America. All those are coming up here soon.

Very few editions of The Holly Tree one can find now include any of the other stories that were published in the collection - most copies of The Holly Tree contain just Dickens's introductory story of the traveler, the one story of a person at the inn he wrote himself ("The Boots"), and the conclusion of the traveler's own story. Google around and you can find the others, one of which was by Wilkie Collins,but most of them aren't really good enough to bother. "The Boots at the Holly Tree Inn," Dickens's own story for the collection, is a tale of young love which was popular enough in its day that Dickens performed it in is public readings. It's now often includedd in collections of Christmas stories. It's cute, but frankly it's nowhere near as much fun to read as the framing device in which the traveler tells gruesome stories and talks about inns and what everyone had to eat.

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.