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.

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.