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.

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.

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.

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).