Rum Flip

You may remember from a previous entry that in Little Dorrit, a bishop gives a recipe for sherry flip and says that's a cure for depression. Ten years earlier, in Dombey and Son, another character gave the same recipe for the same ailment, then added a twist.

Dombey and Son was the first "late" Dickens book - for the first time, he actually sat down and planned the whole book out and made an effort at making a Novel (capital N). Reading it after Pickwick Papers, his first, is like going from Please Please Me to Rubber Soul. There's still a lot of fun to be had, but more of an attempt at art and creating a cohesive "whole" piece.

It seems like everyone I talk to quits reading Dombey and Son halfway through - I did so myself a couple of times before finally finishing it. The first quarter of the book is a complete story about the short life of Little Paul Dombey, and after (spoiler alert) he dies, it's hard to imagine what the hell the rest of the book will be about. You also sort of feel like an asshole, because by the time Paul finally kicks it, you're sort of ready for him to die. Tiny Tim works because he's only there for a few pages. Paul is essentially the same character, but lasts for 300 pages, occasionally ominously asking what it is that the waves are always saying as a means of foreshadowing his death (apparently the waves are saying "You die at the end of the 5th monthly number, kiddo!")

That sort of melodrama seems like Dickens trying too hard to be artsy to me, and one character, Captain Cuttle, is someone that Dickens clearly put a LOT of effort into, but who never quite works for me. He has his moments, but mostly he seems to me as though Dickens was trying very hard to make a Dickensian character.

But that's not to say that the book is bad. There are a lot of characters and long subplots in the second half that could have been lifted right out, really, but there's also Chapter 20, where Mr. Dombey rides on a train thinking about death and in which the prose is just colossal - one of many such sections where Dickens stops trying to be a genius and simply is one. And there's Dr. Blimber, Mrs. Pipchin, Major Bagstock, Mr. Toodles, Mr. Toots, Cousin Feenix, "Cleopatra," Mrs. MacStinger, and so many others characters that I just love. I particularly like Susan Nipper, the maid who speaks her mind, and is one of the most well-rounded women Dickens wrote (he had a tendency to make old women crazy and young women overly pious and innocent).  The use of the railway as a metaphor for the changing world is very good (and a few major points of it would be echoed by Booth Tarkington is his The Magnificent Ambersons a generation later with when he used horseless carriages the same way).

Major Bagstock, a pompous old asshole who speaks of himself in the third person, is a freaking riot, and I love the way Dickens describes him when he talks about going to boarding school:


     "None but the tough fellows could live through it, Sir, at Sandhurst. We put each other to the torture there, Sir. We roasted the new fellows at a slow fire, and hung 'em out of a three pair of stairs window, with their heads downwards. Joseph Bagstock, Sir, was held out of the window by the heels of his boots, for thirteen minutes by the college clock"     
      The Major might have appealed to his countenance in corroboration of this story. It certainly looked as if he had hung out a little too long.

There isn't a LOT of drinking in the book - most references to it refer to a bottle of very old madeira that Uncle Sol keeps for a special occasion, and I'm not likely to break out any old, old madeira for this blog anytime soon, though I did get some undated madeira for six bucks to use in a future recipe - can't be THAT recent, since it's a Paul Masson, and they sell no wine before its time.  It tastes like raisins.

But towards the end of the book (I finally made it!), Cousin Feenix gives his prescription for depression and illness:

 If my friend Dombey suffers from bodily weakness, and would allow me to recommend what has frequently done myself good, as a man who has been extremely queer at times, and who lived pretty freely in the days when men lived very freely, I should say, let it be in point of fact the yolk of an egg, beat up with sugar and nutmeg, in a glass of sherry, and taken in the morning with a slice of dry toast.

This, of course, is the Sherry Flip, which I covered a while ago. It tastes like custard, and Dickens himself used to drink it as a pick-me-up during intermission at his public readings.

Cousin Feenix goes on to add a twist:

Jackson, who kept the boxing-rooms in Bond Street ... used to mention that in training for the ring they substituted rum for sherry. I should recommend sherry in this case, on account of my friend Dombey being in an invalided condition; which might occasion rum to fly - in point of fact to his head - and throw him into a devil of a state.

So, had Rocky taken place a century or so before, he would have added rum, sugar, and nutmeg to his bowl full of raw eggs. Boxers still drink raw eggs, as I understand it - it's an "old school" gym trick for getting your protein quickly. The boxers at Jackson's boxing-rooms probably should have included the egg whites, too, but, as Cousin Feenix doesn't specify that they did, I'll stick to his recipe for rum flip, which will, apparently, get you in shape and cure what ails you, though it may also fly to your head and throw you into a devil of a state.

RUM FLIP
1 egg yoke
1 heaping tablespoon of sugar
1/2 cup of rum or so
nutmeg to taste.
Hot water (optional)

Another simple one - separate the yoke from the egg by passing the yoke back and forth between your hands, letting the white part fall away into the sink. Add the sugar and rum, then mix well with a fork until the egg is fully blended into the liquid, and top with some nutmeg.

This is the recipe as Cousin Feenix gives it, and it tastes a lot like drinking the batter to a Betty Crocker spice cake. Tasty, spicy, and thick, but I couldn't help but feel as though I ought to be baking it, not drinking it.

However, I then added a cup or so of hot water, and hit paydirt - the drink was now drinkable, and delicious, not unlike the hot spiced butter-rum that I once had at Trader Vic's. Tasty! Didn't make me feel like getting into a boxing match or anything, but maybe if I drank one every day I'd be in fighting shape.

Micawber's Punch: From Charles Dickens's own recipe

I spoke in the post about egg-hot how much I like Mr. Micawber, the suicidal bon vivant from David Copperfield. Micawber is dirt poor, in and out of debtor's prison, but lives in expectation that "something will turn up."

He is subject to dismal periods of misery, and is something of a windbag, but he's still the life of every party, always able to make a bad situation better, whether it's by making friends in prison or turning a badly burned dinner into a "devil" (ie, spicing up the burned roast and making it edible). His suggestion of doing this when David's hopeless young wife screws up the dinner gives a good sample of how Micawber talks: "If you will allow me to take the liberty of remarking that there are few comestibles better, in their way, than a Devil, and that I believe, with a little division of labour, we could accomplish a good one if the young person in attendance could produce a gridiron, I would put it to you, that this little misfortune may be easily repaired.”

Micawber is also an expert punch maker, as was Dickens himself. Punch was generally out of fashion in the Victorian era, but Dickens was often a traditionalist when it came to drinking, and often made a show out of making punch at parties. At the same party above, Micawber demonstrates, just after letting it be known that his own water supply has just been cut off:

To divert his thoughts from this melancholy subject, I informed Mr. Micawber that I relied upon him for a bowl of punch, and led him to the lemons. His recent despondency, not to say despair, was gone in a moment. I never saw a man so thoroughly enjoy himself amid the fragrance of lemon-peel and sugar, the odour of burning rum, and the steam of boiling water, as Mr. Micawber did that afternoon. It was wonderful to see his face shining at us out of a thin cloud of these delicate fumes, as he stirred, and mixed, and tasted, and looked as if he were making, instead of punch, a fortune for his family down to the latest posterity.

Micawber seems to be making punch from Dickens's own recipe, which he detailed in an 1847 letter:

Peel into a very strong common basin (which may be broken, in case of accident, without damage to the owner's peace or pocket) the rinds of three lemons, cut very thin, and with as little as possible of the white coating between the peel and the fruit, attached. Add a double-handfull [sic] of lump sugar (good measure), a pint of good old rum, and a large wine-glass full of brandy — if it not be a large claret-glass, say two. Set this on fire, by filling a warm silver spoon with the spirit, lighting the contents at a wax taper, and pouring them gently in. [L]et it burn for three or four minutes at least, stirring it from time to Time. Then extinguish it by covering the basin with a tray, which will immediately put out the flame. Then squeeze in the juice of the three lemons, and add a quart of boiling water. Stir the whole well, cover it up for five minutes, and stir again. At this crisis (having skimmed off the lemon pips with a spoon) you may taste. If not sweet enough, add sugar to your liking, but observe that it will be a little sweeter presently. Pour the whole into a jug, tie a leather or coarse cloth over the top, so as to exclude the air completely, and stand it in a hot oven ten minutes, or on a hot stove one quarter of an hour.  Keep it until it comes to table in a warm place near the fire, but not too hot. If it be intended to stand three or four hours, take half the lemon-peel out, or it will acquire a bitter taste.  The same punch allowed to cool by degrees, and then iced, is delicious. It requires less sugar when made for this purpose. If you wish to produce it bright, strain it into bottles through silk. These proportions and directions will, of course, apply to any quantity.

Most notable here, of course, is the part where you SET THE DRINK ON FIRE.  And did we ever!

Mr. Micawber's Punch:
1 pint of rum
1 wine-glass of brandy
1 cup of sugar
1 liter/quart of boiling water
3 lemons.


I was joined for this one by Michael Glover Smith, with whom I recently wrote a book, Flickering Empire, which is all about the silent film biz in Chicago; the first known film version of A Christmas Carol was made here (the book will be out this year from KWS press).  The two of us split the labor in peeling the lemons; a bowl of fresh lemon peel and sugar smells quite tasty. 

Into this bowl of lemon peel and sugar, one pours the brandy and rum. Dickens favored very fancy cognac for the brandy, but I can't imagine that young David Copperfield would have had that in stock. We used low-end brandy and Bacardi Gold rum, which didn't break the bank but still tasted good.

 Now comes the reall cool part - setting it on fire! 

The Missus made us take the bowl outside for this part. The recommended way to set a bowl of booze on fire is to scoop up a spoonful and set THAT on fire, then pour the flaming spoonful into the bowl. This didn't work for me - like mixing eggs into drinks without creating a tankard full of scrambled eggs, it's the kind of thing one has to practice a bit. Eventually, I set fire to some wax paper and just lowered it into the whole bowl. After a couple of tries, we had a flaming bowl that was, in a word, awesome. We probably could have done it indoors, really, though you can do this at your own risk (edit to add: just lighting some in a spoon then pouring it into the bowl worked like a charm indoors when we tried it again the next week).

It should be noted that no one I talked to thought this would burn - the rum and brandy were both 80 proof, and apparently you should have a higher alcohol content to set booze on fire. The lemon peel and sugar probably helped. In any case, the photo is living proof that the stuff WILL burn using 80 proof liquors. 
Leave it burning for 3-4 minutes (during which time I assure you the novelty does not wear off), then extinguish the fire simply by putting the lid onto the bowl (or crock, in our case), and take the whole thing back inside and brag to the Missus that you did, in fact, manage not to kill yourself or start another Great Chicago Fire. 

Add a quart or so of boiling water, and squeeze in juice from the lemons (I used large lemons, and, hence only used the juice of about half of them), allow it to simmer for a bit, then enjoy! 

This is a really delicious drink - it tastes like a lemony black tea. It has a bit of a kick to it, but one that sneaks up on you. After a few sips I was a bit concerned that maybe setting fire to it had burned away all the alcohol, and realized I'd have to figure out whether or not it had the old fashioned way - by drinking a few glasses and seeing if I felt the effects. I did, by the way.  It would be a fine drink for a party - fun to make, fun to drink! 


Mike remarked that one could taste every part of it - you could taste the sugar, the rum, the brandy and the lemon all distinctly. When I think of punch, I think strictly of Hawaiian punch and other such red drinks that taste delicious, but like nothing that occurs in nature. This was a whole new kind of punch for me, and a tasty one. We will be making this one again soon! Here we are, looking appropriately old-fashioned and enjoying the punch:

It is, in fact, also very good iced. There was some left over that I saved for the next day and poured over ice. It does get a little bit sweeter, making it seem like a very hard lemonade. I think the iced version would make a fine summer drink, but the hot version is perfect for winter.

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.

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.