Egg Hot: After a Night in Debtors Prison...

Sometimes I listen to Bob Dylan and wonder what future generations will know about him that we don't. After Dylan's eventual death, it's certain that biographical details will come out that will change the way we think of many of his songs. People a century from now will probably have trouble imagining us listening to the songs without knowing these things.

This is, after all, what happened with Dickens. Even if you just read the back of the books, not the whole introductions to them, it's hard to read all of the scenes in various books that take place in debtors prisons and imagine that people back in the day didn't realize Dickens's father had been in one. It's widely known now that David Copperfield is sort of a veiled autobiography, but no one except Dickens's very closest friends knew this at the time.

William Hogarth's illustration of the scene at a debtor's prison.
Note fancy bed in background.

Though having a father imprisoned for debt clearly weighed heavily on his psyche, Dickens has a tendency to make debtors' prison look like a real party pit. Debtors' prisons weren't exactly hard labor; the general atmosphere seems like like life in a cheap motel that you weren't allowed to leave. There was a "snuggery" (an agreeable name for a tavern), grounds on which one could wander around, and often times peoples' entire family would live in the prison cell with them.

Mr. Micawber, with whom young David Copperfield lives for a time, is perhaps the most entertaining debtor in all of Dickens - indeed, he's one of the most memorable characters in all of of the works. Micawber is always dodging creditors, and always with the threat of being arrested for debt hovering over his head, but, between bouts of misery, his motto is "Something will turn up." The same motto got me through some tough times. He is subject to dizzying switches between highs and lows, generally with a very verbose speech, even by Dickens standards. When he's finally arrested for debt, he remarks that "the God of Day had gone down forever upon him," but he's playing games in the prison courtyard by noon.

I like Micawber a lot. He's sort of a bum, but an agreeable one who reminds me more of myself than I should probably admit. Dickens describes him as "a thoroughly good-natured man, and as active a creature about everything but his own affairs as ever existed, and never so happy as when he was busy about something that could never be of any profit to him." 

David Copperfield goes to visit him in his cell, and finds him crying and repeating his famous statement that a man who earns twenty pounds a year and spends 19 pounds, 19 shillings, and six pence, he'll be happy, but that if he spends twenty pounds and six pence, he'll be miserable. This is a philosophy he's generally unable to live by himself. Immediately after repeating it he borrows a shilling from David for beer, then sends him to a cell above his own to borrow a knife and fork from one Captain Hopkins, who lives there with his family, so they can eat the leg of mutton Micawber's cell mate has scared up:

I thought it was better to borrow Captain Hopkins's knife and fork, than Captain Hopkins's comb. The Captain himself was in the last extremity of shabbiness, with large whiskers, and an old, old brown great-coat with no other coat below it.

David has to admit there's something charming about the shabby, but genial dinner and atmosphere, and spends the night at the cell before going back to Micawber's house, where he's living at the time, and where she makes him (still very much a minor) an alcoholic drink:

There was something gipsy-like and agreeable in the dinner, after all. I took back Captain Hopkins's knife and fork early in the afternoon, and went home to comfort Mrs. Micawber with an account of my visit. She fainted when she saw me return, and made a little jug of egg-hot afterwards to console us while we talked it over.

So...egg hot. Another Victorian drink with an egg in it, but one said to cheer one up. David's in a bad place at this point. Micawber, the closest thing he has to a father figure, is in jail, and he's spending his days working a crappy factory job, having been pulled out of school (again, it's hard to imagine reading this without knowing that Dickens was really writing about his own childhood here). Pretty soon he'll run away, and Micawber will drift in and out of his life for some time. Mrs. Micawber, who constantly tells everyone that "No, I shall never leave Mr. Micawber," as though she can just tell they're thinking she ought to, is about the most loyal human being in literature. The two of them actually adapt well to prison life for a while: "they lived more comfortably in the prison than they had lived for a long while out of it."

So, egg hot is a drink served by people like Mrs. Micawber to help you through a little crisis.  Sign me up.

Recipes vary, and none really specify what kind of ale to use; there are dozens of options on the shelf these days. Seeing as how most of the furniture and household effects of the Micawbers have been pawned at this point in the book, I can't imagine it was anything fancy. Personally, I decided on Goose Island Nut Brown Ale. Not too fancy, but tasty on its own, and I thought a nuttiness would go well with the recipe for egg hot, which is:

1 bottle of ale

1 egg

a pat of butter

a tablespoon of sugar

pinch of cinnamon

pinch of cloves

Warm the butter, sugar, spices, and about 2/3rds of the ale in a saucepan until the butter melts. Beat the egg in a bowl, then add a bit of the cold ale. Mix, then slowly add a spoonful at a time of the warm ale into it, stirring all the while. This will temper the egg so it doesn't cook, which would leave you with a saucepan full of beer and scrambled eggs, which sounds like something you'd encounter in an early Tom Waits song.

Once you've got the egg mixed up to a nice brown slurry, pour it (and the rest of the ale) into the saucepan, stirring as you go. Warm up it without quite boiling it (which can be a bit tricky, since the ale is bubbling already). 

This drink is like nothing I ever tasted before, really. There are lots of flavored beers out there - pumpkin ales and what have you. But most of them just taste like beer with a few notes of flavor to me and my untrained palette. This is flavored beer the way a hazelnut mocha is a flavored coffee. It's definitely a beer drink - you can taste that - but it's a flavored beer. And the flavor is delicious. It's thicker and hotter than anyting beer-related that one normally tastes these days, but very tasty. Enjoyed!

Sherry Flip Will Cure What Ails You

There are some lessons that books and movies preach, but don't actually believe. Who in Hollywood really thinks that small towns are better and more wholesome than big cities? And who in the world thinks that it's better to be poor than rich?

Dickens wrote about the evils of money and greed all the time, but, in private, he loved the stuff. He was no miser - he was keeping up several households at once - but he was a shrewd businessman.

Many of his characters learned the hard way that money won't make you happy, including the small-but-pivotal Mr. Merdle from Little Dorrit. Merdle is one of those guys you run into in books from time to time who is rich, but miserable, and, secretly, not really all that rich. That his name derives from the French word for "shit" is probably no accident.

When Mr. Merdle gives a party, Mrs. Merdle soaks up all the society types, and Mr. Merdle himself just sulks around trying to avoid his butler, of whom he's scared out of his mind. Everyone seems to understand that there's something the matter with Old Merdle, but no one takes it very seriously. A physician at a party of his says that Merdle has:

"...the constitution of a rhinoceros, the digestion of an ostrich, and the concentration of an oyster."

Did you realize ostriches were known for their regularity? I sure didn't. You learn something new every day.

And in this same chapter, when discussing how to cure malaise and ennui and depression and al that, a bishop who is present offers up a little anecdote:

"Bishop said that when he was a young man, and had fallen for a brief space into the habit of writing sermons on Saturdays, a habit which all young sons of the church should sedulously avoid, he had frequently been sensible of a depression, arising as he supposed from an over- taxed intellect, upon which the yolk of a new-laid egg, beaten up by the good woman in whose house he at that time lodged, with a glass of sound sherry, nutmeg, and powdered sugar acted like a charm."

The bishop is describing a drink known as a "sherry flip," another drink that contains eggs. I had never had such a thing as alcoholic drinks with egg before I embarked on this blog, but now I'm starting to get the hang of them. I'd also never tried sherry before - it's a very sweet fortified wine, sort of nut-brown in color, that has a nutty, honey-like taste that reminds me somewhat of the bottle of "mead" someone passed me on the courtyard after hours at Dragoncon some years ago.  People in Dickens drink it all the time; wines such as madeira, port, and sherry, which are normally in the "Dessert Wines" section at the store now, figure prominently in these books.

Dickens did seem to believe that such a concoction could cure what ailed you; during his American reading tour, when his health was bad, he would drink a glass of sherry with  an egg beaten into it (he may have left out the powdered sugar and the nutmeg) during intermission, and this seemed to give him enough energy to get through the second half of the readings, which taxed him greatly. Now, my job as a ghost tour guide in Chicago is not that unlike the job of Dickens as a reader - for two hours or more, I stand up talking and telling stories, occasionally lapsing into other "characters" and "voices." I'm not an actor or anything, but in the course of telling all the gruesome murder stories that you get in a ghost tour, I'll use about 20 different voices when quoting other people. It's kind of like what Dickens did on readings.

I never drink during the tours (if I even use a water bottle that isn't clear, people assume I'm boozing it up), so I made myself a sherry flip about an hour my driver picked me up:

SHERRY FLIP:

1 egg

1 cup of sherry

1 tablespoon (or so) of powdered sugar

pinch of nutmeg.

Mix the sugar, egg and sherry into a wine glass, beating the egg vigoursly, then add grated nutmeg to the top.

I checked with some more knowledgable people about the egg here - one assured me that the salmonella comes from the shells, so I should be all right with a raw egg as long as I wash the shell first. I hope he's right.

The texture of the drink is...odd. It's thick, and now and then it gets thicker when you get a sip with more of the egg yolk in it; I'm getting the idea that Victorians were much more used to drinking "goopy" drinks than we are today. Serving an egg drink in a wine glass is a bit unusual, since they're usually served in earthenware (so you can't see how ugly they look).

But if you can get past the texture, this is one tasty drink - mine tasted like a very good glass of custard.

As for curing what ails you, well...after I downed my glass, I did feel, for a moment, as though I had the strength of ten men. I felt warmth and cheer all over my body. I was more than ready for a tour- I felt like I could go and move something heavy. I had the constitution of a rhino and the concentration of an oyster, and figured that the digestion would be sufficiently ostrich-like in the near future, though I'll spare you the details there.

But one way my job is different from the job Dickens did on readings was that he got to stand on a platform the whole time. Standing up at the front of a moving bus as it rolls through the pot-holed streets of Chicago is very different from standing on a platform. I had the sherry flip more than an hour before the tour time, so I certainly wasn't feeling the effects of the alcohol by then, but I did feel as though I could feel the egg yoke, reformed to its original un-beaten state, bouncing around in my stomach every time we hit a bump in the road. It's a tasty drink, sherry flip, but not something to drink before you go on a bumpy ride.

Tipping the Glass with Christopher Lord

Hi, all! This blog is on hiatus until winter - Dickens season - but I've made time to speak with Chirstopher Lord, author of the new book The Edwin Drood Murders. We're posting the conversation on our respective pages.

Christopher:  Adam, so great to “meet” you in cyberspace. I’ve been a fan of “Drink Like the Dickens” since I discovered it while researching Our Mutual Friend for a seminar I conducted earlier this year.  I served Purl, one of the favorite drinks at The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, to help my participants get into Dickens’s high-octane world. You are a man of catholic tastes. How did you first get into Dickens?

Adam:  I was working as a pizza delivery man, and after a while listening to music started to seem like a chore, so I downloaded a bunch of old radio shows. I particularly liked the mystery shows, like Inner Sanctum. One night I listened to a two-parter of The Mystery of Edwin Drood that Suspense did in the early ’50s, and I enjoyed it so much that I thought I’d read the real thing. SO that winter I ended up reading Drood, Great Expectations, andBleak House. After that I was hooked.

Last year I started up the Drink Like the Dickens blog, in which I try to make smoking bishop, athol brose, Micawber’s punch, and all those other odd drinks that pop up in the works. It’s stalled for the moment, and I’m actually running low on topics for it; most of time when they’re drinking in those books, it’s just brandy and water or something plain, like claret. I did pick up some Paul Masson madeira, which tastes like raisins and gives you a great excuse to impersonate those videos of Orson Welles drunk off his ass and trying to film a Paul Masson commercial.

Christopher: You must try a true Madeira, my dear. A solera that contains a teaspoon of a Madeira from the 18^th century. One of my favorite wines….but back to the interview. How do you blend your talent for writing contemporary young adult literature with a love of the putatively (not so putative in my book) greatest novelist of the nineteenth century?

Adam: There are Dickens shout-outs all over my books, though very few people ever notice them. Sparks was very, very loosely based on The Old Curiosity Shop, and you can also see a lot of Quilp in the villain in Extraordinary. For I Put a Spell On You I named a teacher Mrs. Boffin, and another character “Mutual” whose mother is always talking about tricks and manners. Not a lot of grade school kids are going to pick up references toOur Mutual Friend, but I always hold out hope that their teachers will get a kick out of it.

Christopher: I’m reading “around” Dickens these days—books he loved as a child (Smollett, Fielding, etc.) and his contemporaries (particularly Thackeray). You responded to a tweet I made about something that delighted me in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, a book I read this summer, but one that had been in my library since I was a teenager (I’m sure glad I didn’t read it when I was young). Besides Dickens and Smollett, who are other writers you admire (not all of them have to be “classic” writers)?

Adam:  Yeah, I have a really prissy guidance counselor who shows up in a bunch of my books; I thought it would be funny to name her Mrs. Smollett, because Clinker taught me a couple of words for excrement that I didn’t know yet. Stercoraceous effluvia. There should be a punk band called the Stercoraceans.

Daniel Pinkwater wrote The Snarkout Boys and The Avocado of Death in the 1970s, and I’ve sort of based my life around the teachings therein. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Phillip Roth; his latest, Nemesis, knocked me on my ass.

I, uh,  don’t really read much, though. Reading is for squares, isn’t it?

Christopher: Well, I can’t quite agree with you there, Adam. I’ve been a lifelong reader since I discovered Dickens (Our Mutual Friend, particularly) at age 14. But I’ve probably lived a more sedate life than you…I love that you do ghost tours (although I’m not certain that I’m a believer). I’ve read some paranormal novels (those pesky YA vampire books that sold a gazillion copies), and my protagonist, who only stocks books in his bookstore that he has actually read, even sells them, along with The Scarlet Letter: A Pop-up Book, which is a creation of my twisted imagination. How does the tour guiding fit in with your overall vocational plans?

Adam: Less than people would think! So far there’s been very little overlap between the novels and the tours. I get a lot of gigs doing Chicago history and ghostlore books, though, and I probably have about as many nonfiction books as novels out by now.  I do a lot of research to find primary sources for the ghost stories (I’d never confirm for anyone that a ghost is “real,” but we can at least try to get the history right). I did a couple of vampire satires back when paranormal romance was the thing to do (having Mrs. Smollett be a vampire who was born about 1850 explained a lot), but even then, the ghostlore and Chicago history stuff didn’t really fit into it.

We’ve got one Dickens site of interest here in Chicago; his no-good brother Augustus is buried in a north-side cemetery, along with his wife (who overdosed on morphine one bleak Christmas) and three kids, one of whom was named Lincoln. It was unmarked until recently. Surviving relatives in the area say they grew up thinking that if anyone found out they were related to Charles Dickens, they’d have to go sit on the porch with a bag over their heads. Charles never came here on his 1867-8 tour, and boy was the Tribune mad! It’s something I like to do when I travel, though; every time I’m in a city where he read, I try to figure out where the theatre was. It usually turns out to be an alley or something now, but I love that kind of scavenger hunt.

Christopher: I hadn’t thought of seeking out Dickens haunts from his US visits; I like that.

I’ve already finished the next book in my Dickens Junction series, The Our Mutual Friend Murders, which I hope will be published before year-end 2014. What else are you working on?

Adam: Actually, I’m working on a Dickens project of my own. The working title is I Beat Up Charles Dickens. I can only imagine what Harold Bloom would say about this.  I also have a couple more non-fiction projects in the hopper, including The Ghosts of Chicago, which was just released on September 10, and one about Abraham Lincoln ghostlore that’s been a lot of fun to research.  The next novel to be released is called Play Me Backwards; I’ve been joking that it’s a novel for young adults who worship the devil. It has a sort of Moby Dick theme running throughout it. Now that’s a weird book. I’m never sure if I’m supposed to take Ishmael seriously or not. Not unlike Esther in Bleak House, who I like a lot better than most people seem to, but whose “goody goody” thing is largely an act, I think.

Christopher: I did a six-week discussion group on Bleak House. The group was sharply divided about whether Esther’s persona is natural or feigned. One of the great things aboutBleak House is that a book so complex lends itself to lengthy and impassioned discussion, proof (at least to me) that Dickens is still relevant in the 21^st century…

Adam, I hope we’ll meet someday. I think we should celebrate over a bowl of one of the most famous alcoholic concoctions in all literature, “furmity” (or frumenty), which serves as the catalyst for the disastrous events in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

Adam: I am always down for some disastrous events. I’ve come pretty close to setting my apartment on fire a couple of times making Micawber’s punch. It’s much easier to get it to ignite indoors, so…

Christopher: Well, on that happy note…Check out Adam’s blog, “Drink Like the Dickens” at http://dickensdrinks.blogspot.com. Look for Play Me Backwards by Adam Selzer next year but, in the meantime, check out The Edwin Drood Murders by yours truly, out now from Harrison Thurman Books. Buy it at Pip’s Pages (if you’re in Dickens Junction), at your local independent bookstore, or online, available both in a trade paperback edition and ebook (Amazon.com only).

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.

Drink Like the Dickens book coming soon.

Drink Like the Dickens will soon be an ebook....

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Smoking Bishop... Wassail....Rum Flip... Port Negus...Egg-hot...Sherry Cobbler... The names alone conjure up a bygone era of cosy taverns, coaching inns, and Mr. Fezziwig's party. Author Adam Selzer talks about Dickens' works and the drinks contained therein, with recipes for more than a dozen of them, almost all of which can be made from stuff that can be purchased at Trader Joe's (though most any grocery store with a section for spirits will do). There's a punch that you set on fire (try NOT to be the life of the party after you make that!), sherry-based drinks that are said to cure what ails you, a cold cure made from booze and fresh snow, and so much more. They're the hit of every party, and a fun way to discover the great works of Charles Dickens. Selzer, author of THE SMART ALECK'S GUIDE TO AMERICAN HISTORY (Random House 2009), GHOSTS OF CHICAGO (Llewellyn 2013) and several other published books and novels talks about the books in which the drinks appear, muses about why THE PICKWICK PAPERS is sort of like CLERKS, how MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT is under-rated, and tells how to make the drinks and whether they're any good (most of them are, but, well, some actually contain gruel). More than 20,000 words of Victorian fun, even for novice mixologists who've never read a word of Dickens. You may want to after this! Coming soon!

Wassail like Mr. Pickwick!

The Pickwick Papers is a romp through a lost world of cobblestone alleys and country roads leading to bucolic towns where they still practiced medieval holiday customs and all the locals gathered to listen to old men tell stories by the fire in taverns with names like The George and Vulture or The Magpie and Stump.  Entire books have been written about the inns and taverns in Pickwick.

The book linked to above came out in 1921, and the introduction says that "the immortal Pickwick Papers has maintained its place through generations, and retains it to-day, as the most popular book in our language- a book unexampled in our literature. There are persons who make a yearly custom of reading it; others who can roll off pages of it from memory; scores who can answer any meticulous question in an examination of its contents; and a whole army ready and waiting to correct any misquotation from its pages."  In other words, one could say that Pickwick was the Harry Potter or Star Wars of its day, and it held onto that level of popularity for decades. It's only been remarkably recently that reading it hasn't been a beloved rite of passage.

I've said before that Pickwick Papers is still funny today, but in an "I guess you had to be there" sort of way. People in the 1830s felt like they knew all of the characters and scenes the way my generation knew the people and places in Clerks and Mallrats. Maybe people in England still recognize their neighbors in Pickwick, but late Georgian England is another world to me now. Of course, that's part of the book's appeal - to read it is to take a trip back in time to a world where people still did things like wassailing.

Wassail comes with everything you see here; YOU put it together!

"Wassailing" is an old English custom from Saxon times - as with pretty much any holiday custom, one can find a lot of different stories as to the origin, and no two recipes are quite alike. Generally, though, wassail is said to contain apples, ale and spices, and "wassailing" was the practice of wandering around with a bowl, singing songs at people's houses and expecting them to fill your bowl or cup with wassail in return. Before drinking, one person would shout "wassail!" and the other would respond with "drinkhail!" Poems indicate that this customs goes back hundreds of years, and early 20th century books show that these customs were still alive in remote parts of England in those days - and certainly were still alive in Mr. Pickwick's day.

In the "Christmas at Dingley Dell" section of Pickwick, Mr. Pickwick and his friends go to visit their friends the Wardles and have what sounds like a wonderful old-fashioned Christmas-time, joined on Christmas day by Bob Sawyer, a hard-drinking medical student who talks about dissecting limbs at the breakfast table and keeps wanting everyone to let him bleed them. The description of the wassail they serve on Christmas eve is mouth-watering:


     When they all tired of blind-man's buff, there was a great game at snap-dragon, and when fingers enough were burned with that, and all the raisins were gone, they sat down by the huge fire of blazing logs to a substantial supper, and a mighty bowl of wassail, something smaller than an ordinary wash-house copper, in which the hot apples were hissing and bubbling with a rich look, and a jolly sound, that were perfectly irresistible.


    'This,' said Mr. Pickwick, looking round him, 'this is, indeed, comfort.'


"Snap-dragon," for the record, was a game in which you tried to snatch raisins out of a burning bowl of brandy. Sounds fun, but play that one at your own risk. Roasted raisins in brandy ARE pretty damned delicious.


Now, no two recipes for wassail are quite alike - in fact, they vary wildly, and probably have for centuries, so there's no "authentic" or "traditional" recipe. You can pretty much just heat up some spiced apple cider and add a bit of brandy or ale and get away with calling it wassail. Mine includes a recipe or two that's clearly not authentic but it's is made to taste about the way I imagine it would have tasted if there was a Trader Joe's at Dingley Dell, including apples hissing and bubbling with a rich look and a jolly sound.

Ingredients:
- six small apples
- one orange
- whole cloves
- allspice berries
- cinnamon sticks
- about a cup of sugar
- three eggs
- about 1.5 liters of apple cider (I'm using Trader Joe's spiced cider, the best pre-spiced cider on the market, for my money. It's spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, orange peel and lemon peel, and I'll use a bit less of the other spices to compensate here).
- one good-sized bottle of ale.
- one can of ginger ale (optional if you're trying to be more authentic).
- 1 cup of brandy

 If you're making it for kids, omit the regular ale, use more ginger ale, and add brandy to individual cups. It'll be fine.

DIRECTIONS

Cut the apples in half and core them (perhaps using a mellon baller), then fill the hole with sugar. P rick a bunch of cloves - say, 15 or 20 - into the orange. Bake these fruits in a dish with a bit of water in it for about 35-45 minutes at 350 until they're wrinkled and tender. Your kitchen will smell wonderful just from the cloves in the oranges.

My attempt to make a Charles Dickens face with the
cloves came to nothing. 

While they're baking, put additional cloves and allspice into a tea ball or cloth, then pour the cider and  ginger ale into a large pot. Warm it up over medium heat, adding the tea ball and some cinnamon sticks.

Meanwhile (and here's the tricky part, which you're free to omit), separate the egg whites and yokes. Mix each well, whisking the whites for a good three or four minutes until they get thick and cloudy,  then fold the yokes into the whites. The eggs won't add too much to the taste, but if you mix them in correctly it'll give you a good frothy texture.

The trick is to temper the eggs. While whisking constantly, add a half cup or so of the warm mixture (pouring from a great height, which is lots of fun), then add a bit more at a time, whisking all the while, to heat up the egg without actually turning it into cooked scrambled eggs (which might still happen if you didn't whisk them enough).

I don't mind saying that I practiced this a few times with a single egg and a small pot of the cider until I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing - my first attempt came out like egg drop soup.  You'll know you're on the right track when the egg/drink mixture has a slurry-ish taste, as seen at the right. Pour it into the pot when the cider is warm, gradually and while whisking. I had a few tiny bits of egg to strain out, but not many.



Finally, add in the other liquids - the ale and the brandy and, if you wish, some ginger ale to give it a bit more zing. Heat it up but try not to boil it - if it DOES get to boiling, remove it from heat at once.

Float the apples and orange inside and carefully transfer over to a punch bowl. The longer you let the apples float, the tastier the wassail gets, but it WILL cool off. Unlike Mr. Pickwick, though, we have microwaves now that aid us in the purpose of re-heating a cool drink. It's tasty chilled, though, too!

Pour into warm glasses, and pass around. Shout out "wassail" and have everyone reply with "drinkhail!" before indulging. If you really want to get traditional, toast some bread to serve with it - they used to do this a lot to flavor drinks, and there are various accounts of early Christmas customs involving toast, wassail and trees.

The finished drink is delicious - basically a thick, hot spiced apple cider with a bit of a kick to it.

Look at me! I'm Mr. Pickwick!

Like most drinks on this blog, the actual alcohol content is relatively low - a glass shouldn't get you drunk, but will give you a rich, warm feeling that gets you ready for another mug full of the stuff, and you can keep drinking it all night without getting knocked out. Enjoy!

In the next few weeks, we'll try out some shrub, Mr. Micawber's punch, purl, dog's nose, and maybe even a Rocky Mountain Sneezer, which Dickens drank to aid a cold while on tour in New York.




                        

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!