THE FLOWING BOWL,
by EDWARD SPENCER

A Memory of many Meals; the whole inter­spersed with var­i­ous Rec­i­pes, more or less orig­i­nal, and An­ec­dotes, main­ly ver­a­cious.

PREFACE

I claim no merit for the following pages, other than may attach to in­dus­try, appli­ca­tion, the gift of copying accurately, and the acqui­si­tion of writer’s cramp. The mechan­i­cal writ­ing is—to the great joy of the com­pos­i­tors who have dealt with it—every let­ter mine own; but the best part of the book has been conveyed from other sources. In fact the book is, as the old lady said of the divine tragedy of Hamlet, “full of quotations.” The hand is the hand of Gubbins, but the voice is, for the most part, the voice of the great ones of the past, including Pliny and Gervase Markham. The matter, or most of it—I am endeavouring to drive the fact home—is culled from other sources; and if this is the most useful and inter­est­ing work ever pub­lished it is more my for­tune than my fault.

The genial reception of my earlier effort, Cakes and Ale—which was condemned only by worshippers of Ala, who were not expected to applaud—together with the hope of earning something towards the purchase of a Bath Chair—have induced me to issue this little treatise on liquids, as a companion to my first cloth-bound book. And innate modesty—I stick to “innate,” despite the critics—compels me to add that I think the last is the better work. I will, however, leave a generous and discriminating public to decide that question for itself.

LONDON, CHRISTMAS EVE, 1898.

CONTENTS

“Wormwood!”—The little green fairy — All right when you know it, but  — The hour of absinthe — Awful effects — Marie Corelli — St. John the Divine — Arrack and bhang not to be encouraged — Plain water — The original intoxicant — Sacred beverage of the mild Hindu — Chi Chi — Kafta, an Arabian delight — Friends as whisky agents — Effervescent Glenlivet — The peat-reek — American bar-keeper and his best customer — “Like swallerin’ a circ’lar saw and pullin’ it up again” — Castor-oil anecdote — “Haste to the wedding!”

CHAPTER I THE OLD ADAM

I wish to state at the outset that this little work is not compiled in the interests of the sot, the toper, and the habitual over-estimator of his swallowing capacity. That the gifts of the gods, and the concoctions of more or less vile man, should be used with moderation, if we wish to really and thoroughly enjoy them, is a truism which needs no repetition; and although at the commencement of this work many “frightful {2} examples” of the evils of over-indulgence will be found mentioned, nothing but moderation will be found counselled in my book, from cover to cover.

In the past, drunkenness was not always regarded as a vice, and this is evident from much of the literature of former generations. In the course of my researches into the alcohol question I have come across a little book which bears the shameful and abandoned title of Ebrietatis Encomium, or the Praise of Drunkenness. And this book, which conveys such questionably moral aphorisms as “It is good for one’s health to be drunk occasionally,” and “The truly happy are the truly intoxicated,” claims to prove, “most authentically and most evidently, the necessity of frequently getting drunk, and that the practice is most ancient, primitive, and catholic.”

The author commences with what he calls “a beautiful passage out of Seneca:—

“The soul must not be always bent: one must sometimes allow it a little pleasure. Socrates was not ashamed to pass the time with children. Cato enjoyed himself in drinking plentifully, when his mind had been too much wearied out in public affairs. Scipio knew very well how to move that body, so much inured to wars and triumphs, without breaking it, as some nowadays do . . . ; but as people did in past times, who would make themselves merry on their festivals, by leading a dance really worthy men of those days, whence could ensue no reproach, when even their very enemies had seen them dance. One must allow the mind {3} some recreation: it makes it more gay and peaceful. . . . Assiduity of labour begets a languor and bluntness of the mind: for sleep is very necessary to refresh us, and yet he that would do nothing else but sleep night and day would be a dead man, and no more. There is a great deal of difference between loosening a thing, and quite unravelling it. Those who made laws have instituted holidays, to oblige people to appear at public rejoicings, in order to mingle with their cares a necessary temperament. . . . You must sometimes walk in the open air, that the mind may exalt itself by seeing the heavens, and breathing the air at your ease; sometimes take the air in your chariot, the roads and the change of the country will re-establish you in your vigour; or you may eat and drink a little more plentifully than usual. Sometimes one must even go as far as to get drunk; not indeed with an intention to drown ourselves in wine, but to drown our care. For wine drives away sorrow and care, and goes and fetches them up from the bottom of the soul. And as drunkenness cures some distempers, so, in like manner, it is a sovereign remedy for our sorrows” (Seneca de Tranquillitate).

Such sentiments were doubtless popular enough in Great Britain at the commencement of the present century—when Ebrietatis Encomium was published—when three and four bottle-men slept where they fell, “repugnant to command”; and malt liquor, small or strong, was the only known matutinal restorative of manly vigour. But my own experience is that {4} the sorrow and care which may be temporarily driven away by drowning them in the bowl are apt to return within a very few hours, reinforced an hundredfold, with their weapons re-sharpened, their instruments of torture put in thorough working-order, and with many other devils worse than themselves. A man, sound in body and mind, may really enjoy a certain amount of good liquor without feeling any ill effects next morning; but woe to him who seeks to drown that which cannot sink; to crush the worm which knows not death! The individual has yet to be born who can flourish, either in body or soul, on his own immoderation; and but for a chronic state of thirst in early youth I should not now be reduced to the compilation of drink statistics for a living.

But the ancients, in their heathen philosophy—which, by the way, was once rec­om­mend­ed to Christians to follow—took no thought for the morrow. “Carpe diem!” was the head and front of the programme of the Roman patricians, who used to cry aloud at their feasts, by way of grace before meat:—

This was probably the original version of “We won’t go home till morning,” and was sung, or shouted, at all bean-feasts and smart supper-parties. The ancient Egyptians made use of a very extraordinary, and a very nasty, custom in their festivals. They shewed to every guest a {5} skeleton, before the soup was served. This, according to some historians, was to make the feasters think on their latter end. But others assert that this strange figure was brought into use for a directly opposite reason; that the image of death was shewn for no other intent than to excite the guests to pass their lives merrily, and to employ the few days of its small duration to the best advantage; as having no other condition to expect after death than that of this frightful skeleton.

This was the idea of one Trimalchion, who, Petronius tells us, thus expressed himself on the subject: “Alas! alas! wretched that we are! What a nothing is poor man! We shall be like this, when Fate shall have snatched us hence. Let us therefore rejoice, and be merry while we are here.” The original Latin of this translation is much stronger, and had better not be given here. And the same Trimalchion on another occasion remarked: “Alas! Wine therefore lives longer than man, let us then sit down and drink bumpers; life and wine are the same thing.”

The Scythians undoubtedly used to drink out of vessels fashioned from human skulls, and probably had the same design in doing so as the Egyptians had in looking on their nasty skeletons.

In Virgil’s time, his contemporaries—and very probably the old man himself—drank deep; but instead of fighting, and breaking things, and jumping on their wives, and getting locked up, they brought their own heathen religion into their debaucheries. In more civilized circles, at this end of the most civilized century, the reveller {6} goes out “to see a man,” and sub­se­quent­ly “shouts for the crowd”; but in Virgil’s time a man who had a drink was said to be “pouring forth libations to the gods,” “making sacrifices”—more especially to Bacchus, the wine deity, whom nothing under the slaughter of a he-goat was supposed to propitiate. And the “Billy” was chosen for the sacrifice, because the tender shoots of the vine formed his favourite food, in a land in which there was neither brown paper, nor wall-plaster, nor salmon-tins, to nibble. And these sacrifices to the rosy god were “occasions” (as they say in the City) indeed! I have often wondered what the ancients did to cure a headache; and whether a man said to be “possessed of a devil” was in reality suffering from Alcohol, “the Devil in solution,” in the shape of delirium tremens in one of its many and objectionable forms.

In the time of Pliny, drunkenness and debauchery appear to have been the principal studies of the nations about whom he had information. A man was actually rewarded for getting drunk—tell it not in Vine Street, W.! The greatest drinker got the most prizes; and Pliny informs us that whilst the Parthians contended for the distinction of having the hardest heads and the longest swallows, they were simply “not in it” with the Milanese, who had a real champion in one Novellius Torquatus. This man, according to history, could have given a market-porter of the present day, a brewer’s drayman, or a stockbroker, any amount of start over the Alcohol course, and “lost” him.

This Novellius won the championship from all {7} pretenders, and “had gone through all honourable degrees of dignity in Rome, wherein the greatest repute he obtained was for drinking in the presence of Tiberius three gallons of wine at one draught, and before he drew his breath again; neither did he rest there, but he so far had acquired the art of drinking, that although he continued at it, yet was never known to falter in his tongue; and were it ne’er so late in the evening he followed this exercise, yet would be ready again for it in the morning. Those large draughts also he drank at one breath, without leaving in the cup so much as would dash against the pavement.”

Ah! We have nobody up to this form to talk about nowadays; and if men have improved in morality they must have deteriorated in capacity, or the occupation of gaolers and warders would be gone. And the poor old poet “Spring Onions,” with even a tenth part of the powers of endurance and swallow of Novellius Torquatus, might have escaped even one solitary conviction.

“If the antiquity of a custom,” writes the author of Ebrietatis Encomium, “makes it always good and laudable, certainly drunkenness can never deserve sufficient recommendation. Every one knows that Noah got drunk after he had planted the vine. There are some who pretend to excuse him, that he was not acquainted with the strength of wine. But to this it may very well be answered that it is not very probable so wise a man as Noah should plant a vine without knowing its nature and property. Besides it is one thing to know whether he got drunk at all: and another whether he had an intention to do so.” {8}

The amount of water previously experienced by Noah should surely be sufficient to purge him of the offence of making too free with the fruit of the vine!

“But,” continues the laudator of ebriety, “if we give any credit to several learned persons, Noah was not the first man who got fuddled. Father Frassen maintains ‘that people fed on flesh before the Flood, and drank wine.’ There is no likelihood, according to him, that men contented themselves with drinking water for fifteen or sixteen hundred years together. It is much more credible that they prepared a drink more nourishing and palatable. These first men of the world were endued with no less share of wit than their posterity, and consequently wanted no industry to invent everything that might contribute to make them pass their lives agreeably. Before the Flood men married, and gave their children in marriage. These people regaled each other, and made solemn entertainments. Now who can imagine that they drank at those festivals nothing but water, and fed only on fruits and herbs! Noah, therefore, was not the inventor of the use which we make of the grape; the most that he did was only to plant new vines.”

Procopius of Gaza, one of the most ancient and learned interpreters of Scripture, thinks it no less true that the vine was known in the world before Noah’s time; but he does not allow that the use of wine was known before the patriarch, whom he believes to be the inventor of it. As for the wine mentioned in the New Testament, we are now assured by modern commentators—total {9} abstainers every one—that it was unfermented, devoid of alcohol, and non-intoxicating. I had certainly always looked upon the wine which Timothy was enjoined to take for his “stomach’s sake,” as some form of brandy.

The Early Christians—like far too many of the late ditto—were terrible topers. Ecclesiastical history tells us that in the primitive church it was customary to appoint solemn feasts on the festivals of martyrs. This appears by the harangue of Constantine, and from the works of St. Gregory Nazianzen, and St. Chrysostom. Drunkenness was rife at those feasts; and this excess was looked upon as permissible. This is shewn by the pathetic complaints of St. Augustine and St. Cyprian, the former of which holy fathers thus delivered himself:—

“Drunken debauches pass as permitted amongst us, so that people turn them into solemn feasts, to honour the memory of the martyrs; and that not only on those days which are particularly consecrated to them (which would be a deplorable abuse to those who look at those things with other eyes than those of the flesh), but on every day of the year.”

St. Cyprian, in a treatise attributed to him, says much the same thing:—

“Drunkenness is so common with us in Africa that it scarce passes for a crime. And do we not see Christians forcing one another to get drunk, to celebrate the memory of the martyrs?”

Cardinal du Perron told his contemporaries “that the Manichæans said that the Catholicks were people much given to wine, but that they {10} never drank any,” which sounds paradoxical. Against this charge St. Augustine only defends them by recrimination. He answers, “that it was true, but that they (the Manichæans) drank the juice of apples, which was more delicious than all the wines and liquors in the world.” And so does Tertullian, who said the liquor press’d from apples was most strong and vinous. His words are: “Succum ex pomis vinosissimum.”

I trust that in quoting all those things I am not becoming wearisome, at the very commencement of my work; the main object being to show that all the drinking in the world is not done by the present generation of vipers.

But the Early Christians were excused for their habits of soaking, by Paulinus, on the grounds of the “excellence of their intentions”; which naturally reminds us of the celebrated excuse of the late Monsieur Thiers, on a much later occasion. The words of Paulinus are, when translated and adapted:—

Similar pleas are occasionally urged by roysterers nowadays, yet they are but seldom credited in their own parishes.

CHAPTER II MORE FRIGHTFUL EXAMPLES

Not even popes, saints, or bishops were exempt from accusations of loving the juice of the grape, or of the apple, too well. We read in the adages of Erasmus that it was a proverb amongst the Germans that the lives of the monks consisted in nothing but eating and drinking. One H. Stephens says on this subject, in his apology for Herodotus:—

“But to return to these proverbs, theological wine, and the abbot’s, or prelate’s, table. I say {12} that without these one could never rightly understand the beautiful passage of Horace:—

nor this other:—

Modern popes have always had a reputation for abstemiousness; but this same Mr. Stephens—who must have been somewhat of a slander-monger—in his same apology for Herodotus (what about the apology for Stephens?) mentions a popular little song of the day, which commenced:—

And I can recall a cheery, albeit most likely libellous, song, which some of us used to sing at school, beginning:—

It appears to be a fact that many former popes drank hard; and if Petrarch is to be believed, the long stay made by the court of Rome at Avignon was on account of the excellence of the French wines; and that it was merely for that {13} reason that they stayed so long in Provence, and removed with so much reluctance.

Now for the saints. Although the fact of his drinking deep has been denied, St. Augustine appears to have confessed to “a day out” occasionally, in some such words as these: “Thy servant has been sometimes crop-sick through excess of wine. Have mercy on me, that it may be ever far from me.”

Amongst the bishops one instance must suffice. “Pontus de Thiard,” as appears from an old translation of the works of an eminent Frenchman, “after having repented of the sins of his youth, came to be bishop of Chalons-sur-Soane; but, however, he did not renounce the power of drinking heavily, which seemed then inseparable from the quality of a good poet. He had a stomach big enough to empty the largest cellar; and the best wines of Burgundy were too gross for the subtility of the fire which devoured him. Every night, at going to bed, besides the ordinary doses of the day, in which he would not suffer the least drop of water, he used to drink a bottle before he slept. He enjoyed a strong, robust, and vigorous health, to the age of fourscore.” Dear old Pontus!

Of all other mighty men, Alexander the Great serves to best point the moral of the evils of intemperance. Wearied of conquering, this hero gave himself up to debauchery in its worst and wildest forms. He killed his foster-brother in a fit of drunkenness, and sub­se­quent­ly, at the bidding of “lovely Thais,” queen of the {14} Athenian demi-monde, set fire to, and burnt to the ground, Persepolis, the wonder of the world. What an awakening Alec must have had! Not that he was the first, nor yet the last, man to make a fool, or rogue, of himself, at the bidding of the (alleged) gentler sex. Cleopatra corrupted a few heroes, and as for La Pompadour  but those be other stories. Alexander the Great, who had lost most of his greatness by that time, died from the effects of chronic alcoholism; although they didn’t tell me as much as this at school.

Cambyses was but little removed from a sot. This prince, having been told by one of his courtiers that the people thought Cambyses indulged in too many “drunks” for the good of the nation, reached for his best bow and his sharpest arrow, and, the courtier having retired out of range, shot the courtier’s son through the heart; after which the prince enquired of the courtier: “Is this the act of a drunkard?” which reminds me of a more modern anecdote, of a Piccadilly roysterer. But some men can shoot straighter, and ride better, and write more poetically, when under the influence of the rosy god; and had this courtier been a man of the world he would not have touched on the subject of ebriation to his prince. For ebriates are but seldom proud of their weaknesses.

Darius, the first King of Persia, commanded that this epitaph, which is here translated, should be placed on his tomb: “I could drink much wine and bear it well.” Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, took too much wine on {15} occasion; to corroborate which fact we have the exclamation of the good lady whose prayer for justice he had refused to hear — this is a quotation beloved of members of Parliament—“I appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober.” Dionysius the younger, tyrant of Sicily, frequently had vine-leaves in his hair for a week at a time; he drank himself almost blind, and his courtiers, in order to flatter him, pretended to be blind too, and neither ate nor drank anything unless it were handed to them by Dionysius himself. Tiberius was called Biberius, because of his excessive attachment to the bowl; and, in derision, they changed his surname of Nero to Mero. Bonosus, according to his own historian, Flavius Vobiscus, was a terrible soaker, and used to make the ambassadors, who came from foreign parts, even more drunk than himself, in order that he might discover their secret instructions.

I cannot glean from the ancient records that any monarch who reigned over Great Britain was an habitual drunkard, an absolute and confirmed sot. But many of them were given to conviviality, notably Richard of the Lion Heart, Bluff King Hal — who had gout badly, and suffered also from obesity and other things—and the Merry Monarch. A story is told of the Second Charles, that when dining with the Lord Mayor, Sir Robert Viner, on one occasion—it was probably a 9th of November dinner at the Mansion House—the King noticed that most of the guests were uncomfortably uproarious, and, with his suite, rose to leave the banqueting chamber. Whereupon the Lord Mayor hastily {16} pursued him, caught hold of his robe, and exclaimed: “Sire, you shall take t’other bottle.” The King stopped, and with a graceful smile repeated a line of the old song, “He that is drunk is great as a king,” and with this compliment to his host, he returned, and took “t’other bottle.”

The immortal Pepys describes a Lord Mayor’s Feast which was given in 1663. It was served at one o’clock, and a bill of fare was placed, together with a salt-cellar, in front of every guest; whilst at the end of each table was a list of “persons proper” there to be seated. Pepys was placed at the merchant-strangers’ table, “where ten good dishes to a mess, with plenty of wine of all sorts.” Napkins and knives were, however, only supplied at the Lord Mayor’s table to him and the Lords of the Privy Council; and Pepys complains bitterly that he and those who were seated with him had no napkins nor change of trenchers, and had to drink out of earthen pitchers. He, however, took his spoon and fork away with him, as was customary in those days with all guests invited to entertainments. But as each guest brought his own tools, nobody was the worse for this custom. The dinner, says Pepys, was provided by the Mayor and two sheriffs for the time being, and the whole cost was between £700 and £800.

We are not told what was drunk at the Mansion House on that occasion, but I have a list before me of the potables served at the Lord Mayor’s banquet in 1782—more than a century later—which seems deserving of mention in this little work:— {17}

There be several remarkable features in the above list. I had imagined that a taste for claret had not been fully acquired by the British ratepayer until some years later than this; whilst the virtues of champagne could not have been fully recognized. Lisbon, I conceive to have been another sort of port, and this seems to have been neck-and-cork above all other vintages in popular favour. The taste for such mawkish stuff as malmsey must have been at vanishing point; whilst one is led to ask what, with only such a minute allowance of sack, did these feasters drink with their soup? Was the succulency of calipash and calipee known in those days; and if so, where was the harmless necessary milk-punch? But the most remarkable feature of all in the above catalogue is the meagre allowance of brandy for the crowd. The parable of the loaves and fishes would not appear more miraculous than that, in these later days, a multitude could be filled, after a big dinner, with four bottles of cognac! And this despite the fact of whisky having almost entirely usurped the place of the other strong-water. {18}

One hundred years ago, to be “drunk as a lord” was considered the height of human happiness. And at this period the Church had not severed its old connection with alcohol. In fact intemperance was encouraged by our pastors and masters; and in certain districts of England the churchwardens, at Whitsuntide, made collections of malt from the parishioners, and this was brewed into strong ale, and sold in the churches, the money so obtained being expended on the repairs of the sacred edifices; and it was a frequent and a saddening spectacle to see men who had drunk not wisely reeling about the aisles. Until as late as 1827—in which year the license was withdrawn—a church and a tavern were covered by the same roof, in the parish of Deepdale, a village between Derby and Nottingham; and a door which could be opened at will led from the altar to the tap-room.

A Romish priest wrote in praise of the bowl as follows:—

Which comforting and jovial sentiments were thus adapted for the use of colleges and private bars, by Dean Aldrich, D.D., the great master of logic at Oxford:—

There are, if I do rightly think,

Five reasons why a man should drink:

Good wine, a friend, or being dry,

Or lest you should be by and by 

Or any other reason why. {19}

But after all no nation ever did themselves so well, in the matter of wines, as the inhabitants of bad old ancient Rome.

“It was to excess of drinking,” wrote Whyte Melville, in The Gladiators, “that the gluttons of that period looked as the especial relief of every entertainment; since the hope of each seemed to be that when thoroughly flooded, and so to speak washed out with wine, he might begin eating again. The Roman was no drunkard, like the barbarian, for the sake of that wild excitement of the brain which is purchased by intoxication. No, he ate to repletion that he might drink in gratification. He drank to excess that he might eat again.”

Further on the same writer remarks: “Whilst marvelling at the quantity of wine consumed by the Romans in their entertainments, we must remember that it was the pure and unadulterated juice of the grape, that it was in general freely mixed with water, and that they imbibed but a very small portion of alcohol, which is the destructive quality of all stimulants.”

As to the Roman vintages being “in general freely mixed with water,” I have grave doubts. I have an idea that Maecenas would have made it particularly warm for that slave who might have dared to water his old Falernian; and, take them altogether, an amusement-loving, and playgoing public, for whom the legitimate drama took the form of certain brave men and fair women being torn and eaten by wild beasts, would hardly have been content with such drink for babes as “claret cold.” {20}

Ancient poets were not less backward than modern votaries of the muses; and it is related of the poet Philoxenus that he was frequently heard to express the wish that he had a neck as long as a crane’s, that he might the longer have the pleasure of swallowing wine, and of enjoying its delicious taste. I have heard the same wish expressed, during much more recent years.

One more old song, translated from a French chanson à boire, and I take my leave of the awful habits of the ancients (I trust) for ever. It is called

[Neither the air, nor the chorus, of this song is given in the old MS. But I would suggest the old air of “Wednesbury Cocking,” with a little “tol-de-rol” at the finish of each verse.]

CHAPTER III DRINKS ANCIENT AND MODERN

Pliny—whose works contain almost as much general information as Whitaker’s Almanack—tells us that the western nations got drunk with certain liquors made with fruits; and that those liquors have different names in Gaul and Spain, though they produce the same effect. Ammianus Marcellinus reports that “the Gauls having no wine in their country”—only fancy what a country France must have been to live in without champagne and claret, not to mention burgundy and cider—“though they are very fond of it, contrive a great many sorts of liquors which produce the same effect as wine.” The Scythians, too, had no wine, but got “for’ard” {23} just the same. One of their philosophers, upon being asked if they had nobody who played the flute in Scythia, replied that “they had not so much as any wine there.” Which seems to hint to flute-playing being a thirsty trade, even in those days.

The Babylonians were, according to Herodotus, habitual over-estimators of their swallowing capacity, and got merry after inhaling the fumes of certain herbs which they burned; which sounds like anything but a comfortable debauch, and must have choked some of them. Strabo tells all who care to read him that the Indians drank the juice of sugar-canes, which we now call rum; whilst according to Pliny and Athenaeus the Egyptians fuddled themselves with a drink made from barley; evidently undeveloped beer. And it is quite on the cards that Cleopatra occasionally drew, with her own fair hands, for her beloved Antony, a glass of “bitter,” with a head on it.

“Before it operates,” wrote a chronicler of the times, “they quarrel with one another, and give abusive language, without coming to blows; afterwards when the drug begins to have its {24} effect, then they also begin to make peace. One compliments in a very high degree, another tells stories, but all are extremely ridiculous both in their words and actions.” And after mentioning other liquors which they use, he adds, “It is difficult to find in Persia a man that is not addicted to one of these liquors, without which they think they cannot live but very unpleasantly.” Anything nastier than hot laudanum as a restorative I cannot imagine.

It sounds curious to read that France and Spain were censured by that universal provider of knowledge, Pliny, for their drunkenness with beer and ale, “wines not being in that age so frequent.” What was the world like before the invention of port wine, I wonder? For in Pliny’s time Italy exceeded all parts of the world for her luscious and curious vintages, being responsible for 195 different sorts of wines.

At a much later date, in the seventeenth century, Italy still held her own in the matter of the juice of the grape; and then, as now, their Chianti and Lachrymae Christi were justly celebrated. Strange to say at the same period the Germans, we read, “are much given to drunkenness, as one of their own countrymen writes of them; they drink so immodestly and immoderately at their Banquets that they cannot pour their beer {25} in fast enough with the ordinary Quaffing Cups, but drink in large Tankards whole draughts, none to be left under severe penalties; admiring him that will drink most, and hating him that will not pledge them.”

I once, in my salad days, assisted in the attempt to make a German “foxed.” There were some half a dozen of us, nice boys all, and we entertained this Teuton right royally. At the banquet table the champagne was decanted, and it was so arranged that our guest should imbibe at least twice as much as anybody else. Then we took him around the great city. At four the next morning the German sat facing me in the smoking-room of a little social club. Everybody else had gone home, more or less limp, or had come to anchor in some police-station. And I did not feel very well myself. And as the clock chimed four, and the grey dawn stole in through the venetians in streaks, that German uprose in all his majesty—he was six feet five inches and broad in proportion—smote me hard on the back, and enquired, in cheerful tones: “Now then! Vhere can ve go to haf some fun?” We never “took on” any more of the children of the Fatherland.

The Russians, Swedes, Danes, and other Northerners—also during the seventeenth century—we read, “exceed all the rest, having made the drinking of Brandy, Aqua Vitae, Hydromel, Beer, Mum, Meth, and other liquors in great quantities, so familiar to them that they usually drink our countrymen to death.”

“The Mahometans,” the same writer tells us, {26} “which possess a great part of the world, on a superstitious account forbear the drinking of much wine; because that a young and beautiful woman being accosted by two angels, that had intoxicated themselves with it”—an intoxicated angel surely takes the cake?—“taking the advantage of their ebriety, made her escape, and was for her beauty and wit prefer’d in Heaven, and the angels severely punished for their folly; for which reason they are commanded not to drink wine. Yet many of them, doubting of the divinity of that relation, do transgress that command, and liberally drink of the blood of the grape, which the Christians prepare out of their own vineyards; palliating their crime, in that they did not plant the tree, nor make the wine.” For the philosophy of the Mahomedan is like the ways of the Heathen Chinee, “peculiar.”

“The Chineses,” we are further told, “are the least addicted to ebriety, delighting themselves in Coffee, Tea, and such like drinks, free from those stupifying qualities; yet are they not without their carouses; and those of the intoxicating drinks prepared of Rice, Coco’s, Sugar, Dates, etc., equalling in strength and spirit any liquors in the world.”

With the “Chineses” must be of course included the gallant little Japaneses, with which nation English chroniclers had but a slight acquaintance three hundred years ago.

Without enquiring too closely into the nature of Red Falernian, Coan, Massic, or any of the Roman vintages at the time of dear old Horatius Flaccus, let us take a glance over the wine-lists {27} of our own country, from the Saxon period. And the first thing which will naturally strike the observer is the heavy, loaded nature of their dinner drinks. A little later on, Sack did duty for the “inferior sherry” of the Victorian era, although a Sack-and-Angostura was not a frequent demand amongst the young bloods of the period. On the festive boards of the Saxons appeared, besides ale of the strongest and cider of the roughest, home-made wines, mead, morat, metheglin, and more or less odoriferous pigments. In case any enterprising ratepayer should elect to give his guests

Take of spring-water what quantity you please, and make it more than blood-warm, and dissolve honey in it till ’tis strong enough to bear an egg, the breadth of a shilling; then boil it gently near an hour, taking of the scum as it rises; then put to about nine or ten gallons seven or eight large blades of mace, three nutmegs quartered, twenty cloves, three or four sticks of cinnamon, two or three roots of ginger, and a quarter of an ounce of Jamaica pepper; put these spices into the kettle to the honey and water, a whole lemon, with a sprig of sweet-briar and a sprig of rosemary; tie the briar and rosemary together, and when they have boiled a little while take them out and throw them away; but let your liquor stand on the spice in a clean earthen pot till the next day; then strain it into a vessel that is fit for it; put the spice in a bag, and hang it in the vessel, stop it, and at three months {28} draw it into bottles. Be sure that ’tis fine when ’tis bottled; after ’tis bottled six weeks ’tis fit to drink.

Fancy drinking Mead with your soup!

Morat was made of honey flavoured with mulberry juice; and Pigment—which might be drunk at the Royal Academy banquets—was a sweet and rich liquor evolved from highly-spiced wine flavoured with honey.

They take rasberries which grow in those parts (i.e. Swedeland, Muscovia, Russia, and as far as the Caspian Sea) and put them into fair water for two or three nights (I suppose they bruise them first) that the water may extract their taste and colour. Into this water they put of the purest honey, in proportion about one pound of honey to three or four of water. Then to give it a fermentation they put a tost into it dipp’d in the dregs or grounds of beer, which when it hath set the metheglin at work they take out again, to prevent any ill savour it may give; if they desire to ferment it long they set it in a warm place; which when they please to hinder or stop, they remove it into a cool place; after it hath done fermenting they draw it off the lee for present use; to add to its excellency they hang in it a little bagg, wherein is cinnamon, grains of paradise, and a few cloves. This may do very well for present drinking. But if you would make your metheglin of the same ingredients, and to be kept (time {29} meliorating any sort of drinks) you may preserve your juice of rasberries at the proper season. And when you make your metheglin, decoct your honey and water together, and when it is cold then add your juice of rasberries which was before prepared to keep, and purifie your metheglin by the means before prescrib’d, or ferment it, either by a tost dipp’d in yest, or by putting a spoonful of yest unto it, to which you may add the little bagg of spices before mention’d. Then let it stand about a month to be thorowly purified, and then bottle it, and preserve it for use, and it may in time become a curious drink.”

I should think so.

This is what Howell (Clerk to the Privy Council in 1640) wrote about metheglin:—

“Neither Sir John Barleycorn or Bacchus had anything to do with it, but it is the pure juice of the bee, the laborious bee, and the king of insects; the Druids and old British Bards were wont to take a carouse hereof before they entered into their speculations. But this drink always carried a kind of state with it, for it must be attended with a brown toast; nor will it admit but of one good draught, and that in the morning; if more it will keep a humming in the head, and so speak too much of the house it comes from, I mean the hive.”

M’yes. I question the advisability of any sort {30} of carouse before entering into speculations; more especially if Tattersall’s Ring be the scene of your speculations, and you intend getting back your losses.

There is no doubt that metheglin was the favourite drink of the Ancient Britons.

Mix the whites of six eggs with twelve gallons of spring-water; add twenty pounds of the best virgin honey and the peeling of three lemons; boil it an hour, and then put into it some rosemary, cloves, mace, and ginger; when quite cold add a spoonful or two of yeast, tun it, and when it has done working stop it up close. In a few months bottle it off, and deposit in a cool cellar.

If this liquor is properly kept, the taste of the honey will go off; and it will resemble Tokay both in strength and flavour. And the chief objection to this as to other ancient potations, appears to be the intolerable quantity of water, whether “spring” or “fair.”

We do not make Birch wine nowadays, although the Birch itself frequently makes small boys whine, after conviction of orchard-robbing, or train-wrecking. But it was a favourite tipple with our ancestors, who during the month of March were wont to cut the ends off the birch-boughs, and let the sap drip into bottles suspended from the boughs. For twopence or threepence a gallon the villagers would catch this sap for {31} their wealthier neighbours, regardless of the feelings, and the cartridges, of the owners of the trees. To every gallon of liquor was added a pound of refined sugar, the mixture being boiled for half an hour or so, then set to cool, with a little yeast added thereto, to make it ferment. The result was then put in barrels, together with a small proportion of powdered mace and cinnamon. A month afterwards it was bottled off, and when drunk was said to be “a most delicate, brisk wine, of a flavour like unto Rhenish.”

“The Vertues of the Liquor or Blood of the Birch-tree,” says the historian, “have not long been discovered, we being beholding to the Learned Van Helmont for it; who in his Treatise of the Disease of the Stone hath very much applauded its Vertues against the effects of the Disease, calling the natural Liquor that flows from the wounded Branches of the Tree, the meer Balsom of the Disease. Ale brewed therewith, as well as the Wine that is made of it, wonderfully operates on the Disease. It is also reputed to be a powerful Curer of the Ptisick.”

All the same you will hardly get the alumni of Eton and Harrow to love their birch.

The name Canary was formerly applied to dry, white wines, which were frequently seasoned with sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, roasted apples, and eggs.

To every quart of water put a sprig of rue, and to every gallon a handful of fennel-roots, boil these {33} half an hour, then strain it out, and to every gallon of this liquor—ugh—put three pounds of honey; boil it two hours, and scum it well, and when ’tis cold pour it off and tun it into a vessel, or such cask as is fit for it; keep it a year in the vessel, and then bottle it. ’Tis a very good sack.

And the butler who would place this on my table would get a good sack, too. Mustard-and-water is cheaper and swifter.

Canary and Rhenish were also drunk freely during the Elizabethan period—the English Sack recipe belongs to the Charles I. period—and long before that usquebaugh, or whisky in all its original sin, was in demand, although the Highlanders were no dabs at distillation until the sixteenth century. Usquebaugh, by the way, is derived from the old Gaelic Uisge-beatha, “Water of Life,” and under this name both Irish and Scotch whisky were originally known.

But this simple water of life was not tasty enough for some palates, therefore vile men invented a special blend for the benefit of the wealthy, and those who had not much work to do next morning.

It seems just the sort for Jubilee rejoicings and vestry meetings; but do not give it to the constable on fixed point duty.

In my pitiable ignorance, I once thought that Clary was the old English name for Claret. Not a bit of it. This is how the artistic used to make

Take three pounds of sugar, and three quarts of water, let them boil together, and scum it well; then put in six pounds of apricocks, pared and stoned, and let them boil till they are tender; then take them up, and when the liquor is cold bottle it up. You may, if you please, after you have taken out the apricocks, let the liquor have one boil with a sprig of flower’d clary in it.

Also, you may if you please—and you probably will please—add a little old brandy to the decoction.

CHAPTER IV SOME OLD RECIPES

“The Chineses,” says a very old work on liquid nourish­ment, “make ex­cel­lent Drink of Rice, which is very pleasant of taste, and is pre­ferred by them before wine.”

But, like the Germans, the Chineses will eat and drink pretty nearly anything. And this is the cheering mixture which the Chineses sampled in the new German colony of Kiant-schan, according to the Frankfurter Zeitung:—

“Sitting under the poplars one can imagine oneself in the courtyard of an old German feudal castle. The hamper is opened, and the cold mountain stream flowing before the temple serves as an ice cellar. Once more the male population of the village puts in an appearance, standing {37} round the table in amazement at all the unheard-of things happening. The greatest success attends the uncorking of the Apollinaris bottles. The bottle is pointed at the onlookers, and the cork having been loosened it flies into their faces with a loud report. At first they are greatly alarmed, then they enjoy the joke hugely, and at last they all squat on the ground in a circle, and send a deputy to the table of the foreigners, bearing a teacup. The petition is granted, and in the teacup an exquisite brew is prepared. The drainings of all the beer bottles are collected, to which is added a little claret and a liberal proportion of Apollinaris, and then, in order to lend greater consistency to the beverage, some sausage skins are mixed with it. The teacup circulates amongst the Chinese, and each sips it with reverential awe. Some of them make fearful grimaces, but not one has the courage of his opinion, and it is evident that, on the whole, the drink is voted a good one, although, perhaps, its flavour is somewhat rare.”

Next, please. Oh, here is another, about some neighbours of the Chineses.

“In the Isle Formosa, not far from China, the Natives make a Drink as strong and intoxicative as Sack, out of Rice, which they soak in warm water, and then beat it to a paste in a Mortar; then they chew some Rice-meal in their mouths, which they spit to a pot till they have got about a quart of liquor, which they put to the paste instead of Leaven or Ferment. And after all be kneaded together till it be Dough, they put it into a great earthen pot, which they {38} fill up with water, and so let it remain for two months; by which means they make one of the most pleasant Liquors a man need drink; the older the better and sweeter, although you keep it five and twenty or thirty years.”

Weel—I hae ma doots.

Until reading “The English Housewife, containing the inward and outward Vertues which ought to be in a complete Woman, published by Nicholas Okes at the sign of the golden Unicorne, in 1631,” I had no skill in making

Draw out of a pipe of bastard ten gallans, and put to it five gallans of new milke, and skim it as before, and all to beat it with a parill of eight whites of egges, and a handfull of Baysalt and a pint of conduit-water, and it will be white and fine in the morning. But if you will make very fine bastard—which I, personally, have no ambition to do—take a white-wine hog’s-head, and put out the lees, and wash it cleane, and fill it halfe full and halfe a quarter, and put to it foure gallans of new milke, and beate it well with the whites of sixe egges, and fill it up with white-wine and sacke, and it will be white and fine.

Bastard had not much rest in the seventeenth century. The housewife who might wish “to helpe bastard being eager” had to follow these directions:—

Take two gallons of the best stoned honey, and {39} two gallons of white wine, and boyle them in a faire panne, skimme it cleane, and straine it through a faire cloth that there be no moats in it; then put to it one ounce of collianders (coriander seeds?) and one ounce of aniseeds, foure or five orange pils (pips?) dry and beaten to powder, let them lye three dayes; then draw your bastard into a cleane pipe, then put in your honey with the rest, and beate it well; then let it lye a weeke and touch it not, after draw it at pleasure.

In the present enlightened century such a recipe does not read like helping the possible consumer to be “eager.”

Nor does the following method of treating Malmsey sound promising, except for making its consumer particularly “for’ard”:—

If you have a good but of Malmsey, and a but or two of sacke that will not be drunke; for the sacke prepare some empty but or pipe, and draw it more than halfe full of sacke; then fill it up with Malmsey, and when your but is full within a little, put into it three gallons of Spanish cute, the best that you can get—where did they get it?—then beate it well; then take your taster, and see that it bee deepe coloured; then fill it up with sacke, and give it aparell, and beate it well. The aparell is thus: Take the yelkes of tenne egges and beate them in a cleane bason with a handful of Bay salt, and a quarte of conduit-water, and beate them together with a little peece of birch, and beate it till it be as short as mosse; then draw five or sixe gallons out of your but, then beate it againe, and then fill it up, and the next day it will be ready to be drawne. This aparell will serve both for muscadine, bastard, and for sacke. {40}

We are not told in history if the butt of Malmsey in which the Duke of Clarence shuffled off his mortal and sinful coil had been previously subjected to this “aparell” and castigation. In the interests of mercy, let us hope not.

Champagne has been made in England for a considerable period; but since the closing of the “night-houses” in Panton Street the trade therein has not been very brisk. During the present century champagne in this country—and I grieve to add in France as well—has been chiefly fabricated from apples, and other fruits; but here is a much older way of making

“Life without Ebulum,” writes a friend, an instructor of youth in the ingenuous arts, in forwarding me the recipe, “is a void to most people who have not cultivated the eringo root in their back gardens.” I have never tasted ebulum, preferring my ale neat and unadorned, but this is how to prepare

One of the quaintest beverages of which I ever heard, or read, is

I have frequently read of the giving of “body” to ale and stout, by means of the introduction of horseflesh; and an old song used to tell us that upon one of the paupers in a certain workhouse happening, in­ad­ver­tently, to fall head-fore­most into the copper,

which, on that account, in all probability so strengthened the con­sti­tu­tions of the other paupers as to render them impatient of work­house dis­ci­pline. The man who disap­peared mysteriously—this is Mr. Samuel Weller’s story—and who unwittingly furnished “body” for the sausages supplied to the neigh­bour­hood, was, after all, benefiting his fellow-men. But to put the rooster into the ale-cask smacks somewhat of barbarism; and thank goodness we do not work off our surplus poultry in that fashion nowadays. But these barbarians were not ashamed; for lo! facing me is “another way” for the man­u­fac­ture of rooster-beer.

Take an old red, or other cock, and boyle him {43} indifferent well; then flea his skin clean off, and beat him flesh and bones in a stone mortar all to mash, then slice into him half a pound of dates, two nutmegs quartered, two or three blaids of mace, four cloves; and put to all this two quarts of sack that is very good; stop all this up very close that no air may get to it for the space of sixteen hours; then tun eight gallons of strong ale into your barrel so timely as it may have done working at the sixteen hours’ end; and then put thereinto your infusion and stop it close for five days, then bottle it in stone bottles; be sure your corks are very good, and tye them with pack-thread; and about a fortnight or three weeks after you may begin to drink of it; you must also put into your infusion two pound of raisins of the sun stoned.

Holy Moses ! What a drink !

“It is necessary,” wrote a chronicler of the day, “that our English Housewife be skilfull in the election, preservation, and curing of all sorts of wines, because they be usuall charges under her hands, and by the least neglect must turne the Husband to much losse.”

This was written, I may interpolate, before the bicycle craze had set in, and before the era of ladies’ clubs. Fancy asking the New Woman to elect, preserve, and cure all sorts of wines!

“Therefore,” continues the same writer, “to speak first of the election of sweete Wines she must be careful that her Malmseys be full Wines, pleasant, well hewed, and fine; that Bastard be fat, and if it be tawny it skils not, for the tawny Bastards be always the sweetest. Muskadine must be great, pleasant, and strong, with a swete {44} sent, and Amber colour. Sacke, if it be Seres (Xerez?), which it should be, you shall know it by the marke of a corke burned on one side of the bung, and they be ever full gadge, and so are no other Sackes; and the longer they lye the better they be.”

Take six large lemons, pare off the rind, and cut the lemons and squeeze out the juice, and in the juice steep the rind, and put it to a quart of brandy—so far, brother, the court is with you—and let it stand in an earthen pot close stop’t three days, and then squeeze six more, and mix with two quarts of spring-water, and as much sugar as will sweeten the whole, and boil the water and lemons and sugar together, and let it stand till ’tis cool. Then add a quart of white wine and the other lemon and brandy, and mix them together, and run it through a flannel bag into some vessel. Let it stand three months and bottle it off. Cork your bottles very well, and keep it cool; it will be fit to drink in a month or six weeks. {45}

Cheer-oh ! This potion reads well, and I know a punch which bears some resemblance thereto. But why call it lemon wine? Do not the brandy and the white wine deserve some recognition in the nomenclature?

Take half a pound of French barley, and boil it in three waters, and save three pints of the last water, and mix it with a quart of white wine, half a pint of borage-water, as much clary-water, and a little red rose-water, the juice of five or six lemons, three quarters of a pound of fine sugar, and the thin yellow rind of a lemon; brew all these quick together, run it through a strainer, and bottle it up. ’Tis pleasant in hot weather, and very good in fevers.

Take six gallons of water and twelve pounds of white sugar, and six pounds of raisins of the sun cut small; boil them together one hour; then take of the flowers of elder, when they are falling and will shake off, the quantity of half a peck; put them in the liquor when ’tis almost cold, and next day put in six spoonfuls of syrup of lemons, and four spoonfuls of ale yeast; and two days after put it into a vessel that is fit for it, and when it has stood two months bottle it off.

“The Elstertune,” says my informant, “are best, you shall know it by the Fat, for it is double bard and double pinned”—I have not the faintest idea what he means, but those are his words; “the Barabant is nothing so good, and there is not so much good to be done with them as with the other. If the Wines be good and pleasant, a man may rid away a Hogshead or two of White wine, and this is the most vantage a man can have by them; and if it be slender and hard, then take three or four gallons of stone-honey and clarify it cleane; then put into the honey four or five gallons of the same wine, and then let it seeth a great while, and put into it twopence in cloves bruised, let them seeth together, for it will take away the sent of honey; and when it is sodden take it off, and set it by till it be thorow cold; then take foure gallons of milke and order it as before, and then put all into your wine, and all to beate it; and (if you can) role it, for that is the best way; then stop it close and let it lie, and that will make it pleasant.”

Possibly, but it seems a deal of trouble to take over a wine.

And now let us adjourn to a more familiar subject, for discussion in the next chapter.

CHAPTER V GLORIOUS BEER

As much poetry has been written in praise of John Bar­ley­corn as in praise of wine, woman, battles, heroes, Cupid’s darts, and patent med­i­cines. And one dear old song, which seems to ring in my ears as I write, proclaimed that in the opinion of the author the nectar which the gods imbibed from golden goblets on the top of Mount Olympus was in reality cool, re­fresh­ing pale ale, quaffed out of pewter tankards. Whether this was so matters not, but as to the antiquity of beer as a beverage there can be no question; and however much the demand for other liquors may have slackened during the rolling on of time, John Barleycorn is still growing in public estimation. Breweries keep on {49} springing up all over the country, and those who purchase shares in them receive, for the most part, sub­stan­tial div­i­dends. “Beer and the Bible” have won more elections than any other combination; the organ­i­za­tion of the brewers has hitherto proved powerful enough to withstand all the slings and arrows of the Prohibition party, whilst there has been an enormous increase in the value of houses licensed to sell fermented refreshment; and the name of Bass will “live on,” like Claudian, “through the centuries.”

There be more than one description of beer put before the public. I forget at this moment who was responsible for the “swipes” of my school days, which tasted like red ink—and I have sampled both—but I have always believed that the man­u­fac­turer—I do not believe him to have been a brewer at all—had a special spite against the rising generation, which he wished to die a lingering death. The “ninepenny” quaffed beneath the holy shade of Henry was good, sound, wholesome tipple; but I fancy an inferior brand was poured forth to us at “half time” in the football field. Since those days I have tasted pretty nearly all sorts and conditions of beer, from the “Number One” Bass drawn from the wood in pewter pots, in a little hostelry just off the Waterloo Road—the very best according to my taste—to the awful stuff tasted, and only tasted, one Sunday in a charmingly rural-looking little inn, with a thatched roof—a licensed house which apparently laid itself out to entrap the daring and enterprising “bona fide traveller,” and whose malt liquor was apparently composed for {50} the most part of vinegar and dirty water, in which had been soaked quassia chips, salt, bloater-heads, and some of the thatch from the roof.

Beer was the current name in England for every description of malt liquor before the introduction of “the wicked weed called hops” from the Netherlands in 1524. According to the Alvismal, a didactic Scandinavian poem of the tenth century, this malt liquor was called ale amongst men, and beer by the gods; and it was probably from this Scandinavian poem that the author of the anything-but-didactic poem quoted above got his ideas as to the real nature of the beverage partaken of on Olympus. In the Eastern counties of England, and over the greater part of the kingdom, ale signifies strong, and beer small, malt liquor, but in the West these names mean exactly the reverse—which must be confusing in the extreme to the intelligent foreigner on his travels in search of facts and—refreshment. As now used, ale is distinguished from beer—I am alluding to the more civilized parts of our country—chiefly by its strength, and by the quantity of sugar remaining in it undecomposed. Strong ale is made from the best pale malt, and the fermentation is allowed to proceed slowly, and the ferment to be exhausted and separated. This, together with the large quantity of sugar still left undecomposed, enables the liquor to keep long, without requiring a large amount of hops.

The last few lines may give the reader the impression that the writer served his time in Burton-on-Trent; but this is not the case. I {51} have conveyed the bulk of my technical knowledge of brewing from standard works on the subject.

It will be gathered from some previous remarks that all is not beer that’s bitter; and although it would seem impossible to find a cleaner, healthier, or more strengthening drink than the “pure beer” of commerce, brewed from good English or Scotch barley, Kentish hops, and fair spring-water, how about the wash sold in some licensed houses which is “fetched up” with foot-sugar, bittered with quassia, and mixed with salt and any nasty flavourer which is handy?

The old stories about the carcass of a horse placed in the London stout, to give it “body,” and the mysterious disappearance of an Italian organ-grinder, together with his monkey and infernal machine, just outside a high-class brewery, are probably apocryphal. And although the ancients undoubtedly put a red cock—the older the better—into ale, on occasion, the nineteenth century Briton, for the most part, if the rooster be too tough to serve as a boiled bonne bouche with parsley-and-butter, usually makes Cock-a-Leekie of him. And thereby hangs a tale.

When my firm was running a small chicken-ranche we once reared an unfortunate fowl, who had curvature of the spine, almost from the fracture of his shell. He was a weakling, and his brethren and sistren, after the manner of birds, beasts, and fishes, who “go for” the anæmic and infirm, persecuted him exceedingly, and peeked most of his feathers off. Being a {52} merciful, and withal a thrifty, poultry-farmer, I looked out an old parrot’s cage from the tool-shed, and in this cage installed the weakly cockerel. He was forthwith christened “Poor Richard,” and given little Benjamin’s share of the corn and wine, and cayenne pepper and—other things. And although his head was still slewed round to starboard, he thrived under his liberal nourishment and freedom from the assaults of his relatives.

Time flew on. I had been the “Northern Circuit,” in the pursuit of my then profession of reporter of the sport of kings. I returned home late on a Saturday night, and next day we had friends to dinner. So much North Country language, and so much travelling about had quite put our feathered and afflicted pensioner out of my head; and even the fact of our having the favourite broth of His Majesty King James the First for dinner did not suggest anything to my busy brain. But afterwards, when we were alone—she ought not to have done it—my life-partner confided to me that I had helped to eat “Poor Richard”! And I felt like a very cannibal; and mourned the bird as a brother.

Now for the brewing of strong Ale, because it is drinke of no such long lasting as Beere is, therefore you shall brew lesse quantity at a time thereof, as two bushels of Northerne measure (which is foure bushels or halfe a quarter in the South) at a brewing, and not above, which will make foureteene gallons of the best Ale. Now for the mashing and ordering of it in the mash-fat, it will not differ any thing from that of Beere; as for hops, although some use not to put in any, yet the best Brewers thereof will allow to foureteene gallons of Ale a good espen full of hops, and no more, yet before you put in your hops, as soone as you take it from the graines, you shall put it into a vessell, and change it, or blinke it in this manner: Put into the Wort a handfull of Oke-bowes and a pewter dish, and let them lye therein till the Wort looke a little paler than it did at the first, and then presently take out the dish and the leafe, and then boile it a full houre with the hops, as aforesayd, and then clense it, and set it in vessels to cook; when it is milk-warme, having set your Barme to rise with some sweete Wort; then put all into the guilfat, and as soone as it riseth, with a dishe or bowle beate it in, and so keepe it with continuall beating a day and a night, and after run it. From this Ale you may also draw halfe so much very good middle Ale, and a third part very good small Ale.

To a barrel of beer take two bushels of malt and half a bushel of wheat just crackt in the mill, and some of the flour lifted out of it; when your {54} water is scalding hot, put it in your mashing-fat; there let it stand till you can see your face in it; then put your malt upon it, then put your wheat upon that, and do not stir it; let it stand two hours and a half; then let it run into a tub that has two pounds of hops in it, and a handful of rosemary flowers, and when ’tis all run put it in your copper and boil it two hours; then strain it off, setting it a-cooling very thin, and set it a-working very cool; clear it very well before you put it a-working, put a little yeast to it; when the yeast begins to fall, put it into your vessel, and when it has done working in the vessel, put in a pint of whole wheat and six eggs; then stop it up, let it stand a year, and then bottle it. Then mash again, stir the malt very well in, and let it stand two hours, and let that run, and mash again, and stir it as before; be sure you cover your mashing-fat well up, mix the first and second running together; it will make good household beer.

I rather fancy the blend­ing of a lot of eggs (pre­sum­ably new-laid) with the mash, would “break” some of the smal­ler brewers. It could hardly be done at the price.

I will now give a few modern recipes for tasty beer-compounds. {55}

“Sir quod he,” is part of a conversation culled from an old MS., “Watsayll, for never days of your lyf ne dronk ye of such a cuppe,” which sounds as if the Watsayll was of a seductive and harmful nature. Nev­er­the­less here is the recipe, taken from “Oxford Nightcaps.”

Put into a bowl half a pound of Lisbon sugar (if you do not possess that brand, I have no doubt “best lump,” pulverized, will do as well), and pour on it one pint of warm beer; grate a nutmeg and some ginger into it; add four glasses of sherry and five additional pints of beer; stir it well and sweeten to taste; let it stand covered up two or three hours, then put three or four slices of bread cut thin and toasted brown into it, and it is fit for use. Sometimes two or three slices of lemon are introduced, together with a few lumps of sugar rubbed on the peel of a lemon. Bottle this mixture, and in a few days it may be drunk in a state of effervescence.

On the festival of St. David, an immense silver-gilt bowl, the gift of Sir Watkin W. Wynne to {57} the college in 1732 is filled with this “swig,” and passed round, at Jesus College. And I should prefer to call the beverage “swig” instead of “wassail,” which should properly be a hot drink, if we are to believe the illustrated papers at Christmas-time. And there is no toast in the orthodox Wassail, but, instead, roasted apples. What does Puck say in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Dissolve a quarter of a pound of brown sugar in one pint of water, slice a lemon into it, let it stand a quarter of an hour, then add a small quantity of pulverised cloves and cinnamon, half a pint of brandy, and one quart of good strong ale; stir it well together, put a couple of slices of toasted bread in it, grate some nutmeg and ginger over the toast, and it is fit for use. Ice it well, and it will prove a good summer, warm it and it will become a pleasant winter, beverage. It is drunk chiefly at dinner.

Rather heavily loaded for a dinner drink, I should say.

Beat well together in a jug, four eggs with a quarter of a pound of sifted sugar; then add by degrees, stirring all the time, two quarts of old Burton ale, and half a pint of gin; pour backwards and forwards from one jug to another, and when well frothed serve in tumblers. Grate a little nutmeg atop of each portion. This is one of the best “nightcaps” I know—especially after you may have been badger-hunting, or burgling, or serenading anybody on Christmas Eve.

Such compound drinks, into which ale enters, as Shandy-gaff require no mention here. Suffice it to mention that this gaff has for many years been the favourite beverage of those who go up the river—there is but one river in England—in boats, whether schoolboys, or of riper years. In Stock Exchange circles champagne is occasionally substituted for ginger-beer, but this is a combination in which I have no implicit belief; although champagne and Guinness’s stout make an excellent mixture. Stout and bitter, otherwise known as

The following stanzas are taken from one of these contributions:— {60}

After all, the potion is simplicity itself:—

Three quarts of ale, sweetened with sifted sugar, and served up in a bowl with six roasted apples floating in it.

CHAPTER VI ALL ALE

In a speech made some years ago Sir Michael Hicks-Beach observed that nearly one million sterling’s worth of tobacco was wasted annually by throwing away cigarette-ends and the stumps of cigars. But what would you, Sir Michael? Are the lieges to cremate their lips and singe their moustaches by smoking on to the (literally) bitter end? Whether or no, it is tolerably certain that there is an enormous daily waste in the matter of in­tox­i­ca­ting drinks—without counting the wanton, although con­sci­en­tious, des­truc­tion made by teetotal magnates. According to statistics—I shall not madden my readers with many of these—more than £138,000,000 {62} are spent annually in Great Britain on spirituous liquors. Half of this sum, it may be fairly stated, is spent in the provinces. It may also be taken as read that 5 per cent of beer and stout is wasted, in the way of froth, spillings, and leavings, and 3 per cent of spirits. This brings us face to face with the calculation that the value of our daily waste in drinks is nearly £6500. Carbonic acid gas is undoubtedly answerable for a lot of this waste. In The Old Guard, a musical piece produced at the Avenue Theatre some years ago, Mr. Arthur Roberts in his instructions to Miss Phyllis Broughton—who made a very comely stage barmaid—particularly enjoined her, when drawing ale, to use her left hand to bring the handle down.

“The right hand,” he observed—of course it was all “gag”—“is for the froth.” And then he shewed her how to make half a pint of liquor fill a pint measure. Of course there be some professional imbibers who would object strongly and refuse to accept the froth programme; but on the other hand it pays the retailer, in the long-run. I am not going to re-tell the old story of the Quaker; but will only mention that in the early seventies the landlord of a favourite tavern in the Strand—a house of call for histrions, which has since then been transmogrified and adorned with much bevelled glass and carved walnut—once confided to me that he made every bit of £300 per annum out of his froth. His barmaids were all of angelic appearance, with most beautiful heads of hair (the girls wore plenty of it in those days) and a wealth of pretty prattle. And the {63} customers being susceptible, and liberal-minded, the rest was easy.

Egyptian manuscripts written at least 3000 years before the Christian era shew conclusively that even at that primitive period the man­u­fac­ture of an intoxicating liquor from barley or other grain was extensively carried out in Egypt. Probably the wretched Israelites got far more birch and bastinado than beer given them whilst engaged in brickmaking; but it is quite on the cards that Cleopatra, when fatigued with practising the spot stroke on her billiard-table, often commanded one of her slaves to draw her a pint of bitter with a head on it; and who knows but that her beloved Antony cooled his coppers with small ale?

Pliny—who would be a useful sort of man to have in a daily newspaper office nowadays—records that in his time a fermented drink made from “corn and water” was in regular use in all the districts of Europe with which he was acquainted. But in Britain little was known about beer before the Roman conquest, as the favourite beverages of our ancestors were mead and cider. But the Romans, although they never quite succeeded in subduing the stubborn dispositions of the “barbarians,” managed to teach them a bit of husbandry, and to shew them something about brewing. There were no means of making wine in those days, and—save in Wales—there were no grapes to make it with; but the Latins were not long in teaching the Britons—who were never slow to learn anything which might lead to revelry—that a very good {64} substitute for wine might be expressed from grain and water. Hops were undoubtedly known in England before the conquest, but do not appear to have been regularly used in brewing before the be­gin­ning of the sixteenth century. It is probable, therefore, that they were employed as medicine—and there is no better tonic than your hop. The Germans would seem to have brewed with the “wicked weed” before the Englanders did, according to the omniscient Pliny.

The horny-handed son of toil, who can put away his four or five gallons daily during harvest-time, without falling off the waggon, may not know it, but it is only the female hop which is used by the brewer of to-day. The char­ac­ter­is­tics of the he-hop are not known to the writer, or whether he plays any part in aiding to relieve the thirst of the lieges; but the female is said to exercise “a purifying, a preservative, and an aromatic influence over the wort.”

It used to be a popular fallacy that the beer made at Burton-on-Trent was brewed from Trent water, instead of, as was and is the case, from spring-water, which is eminently suited to the purpose. The chief industry at Burton was, originally, cotton-spinning, but fifty years ago this industry was discontinued owing to the triumphal march of John Barleycorn. Why spin cotton when the man­u­fac­ture of beer is not only a much healthier occupation but is far more lucrative? So Burton stuck to its beer-making, a trade which was originally established {65} there—in a very small way—in the sixteenth century. There appears to have been a demand for Burton ale in London, during the reign of Charles I.; although details are missing as to whether the demand extended to the royal palaces. It is certain, however, that more than one hundred years ago Burton-on-Trent did a considerable export trade with the Baltic. In 1791 there were nine breweries here, and in 1851 sixteen. But at the be­gin­ning of the present century, until the last-named year, when the great Exhibition attracted all the world and his wife to England, the breweries at Burton were not all in a flourishing condition; and I have more than once heard my grandfather—who spoke from personal knowledge—tell the story of how the late Mr. Michael Thomas Bass most magnanimously offered to “prop up” another large firm, with the remark, “There’s room enough for us both here!”

Bass

aforementioned that Burton-on-Trent in general, and the great firm of Bass are in their present flourishing condition. In the words of Shakespeare, “He was a man; take him for all in all we shall not look upon his like again.” Beginning as traveller to the firm, he was not long ere {66} he became its chief director. He was untiring in business, a man possessing the broadest views of men and things, a bit crotchety on occasion, but possessed of “that most excellent gift of charity,” in boundless supplies. Amongst his other benefactions was the building and endowment of St. Paul’s, Burton, and the gift of recreation grounds, a free library, and swimming-baths to the adjacent town of Derby. He also built and endowed another church on his own estate, at Rangemore; and his hand was never out of his cash-pocket when he could aid in a good work. He represented Derby, in the Liberal interest, from 1848 to 1883, and was a tower of strength to that party, albeit possessed of nothing like bigoted opinions. On the contrary, it was his custom through life, like Hal o’ the Wynd in The Fair Maid of Perth, to “fight for his own hand.” And as an instance of his energy and grit, it may be mentioned that after voting in the House of Commons for Mr. Gladstone’s Irish Church Disestablishment Bill—the division on which did not take place till 2 A.M.—he travelled by the “newspaper train” at 5 A.M. from Euston to Rugeley in order to hunt with Mr. Hugo Meynell Ingram’s hounds, later in the morning, changing his clothes on the way down. The meet was at Brereton Hayes, close to Cunnock Chase, and I well remember greeting him that morning, and receiving for a reply: “Thank you, I’m pretty well for an old ’un.” He was over seventy (I think) at the time. That was three decades ago; and since then the trade of Bass has increased enormously. {67} For the annual holiday of the staff I should be afraid to state from memory how many special trains are required to convey the great hive of workers to Brighton, and other far-distant watering-places, and back to Burton again. In short, it would be hard to find a spot in the inhabited world in which the name of Bass is not known and respected.

I mentioned further back Scotch and English barleys as being employed for malting purposes; but as a matter of fact the produce of many countries is used, in a blend, the whole being divided into two classes, heavy and light. And in making choice of barleys it is necessary that they should be thoroughly and equally ripened, well “got” or harvested, and as far as possible presented to the brewer in the perfect husk or envelope with which nature has furnished the kernel. Ancient and modern modes of thrashing and dressing to a greater or less extent damage both the husk and the kernel, and thus at the very threshold introduce one of the causes of disease. Whenever the grain is broken or bruised it is liable to be attacked when moist by a variety of moulds which lead to more or less serious disaster.

Of the different varieties of beer, “pale ale” or “bitter” is a highly-hopped beer made from the very finest selected malt and hops; whilst “mild ale,” or as it is called in Scotland “sweet ale,” is of greater gravity or strength, and is comparatively lightly hopped. “Old ale” is, naturally, the best stuff that can be brewed, in a state of maturity; and it is a peculiarity of ale {68} that, securely bottled, it will keep its strength far longer than any other fermented drink. In December 1889 some bottles of beer were found walled up in a cellar at Burton-on-Trent; and the records of the firm, as well as the shape of the bottles, shewed that the beer had been brewed nearly a hundred years before. It was as bright as a sunbeam, and quite drinkable, but had lost its bitterness, and assumed the character of sherry. But old ale, like old brandy, is of little value to the toper, in that it takes a very minute quantity to accomplish in him the desired effect—oblivion. “Audit” ales and “college” ditto require very delicate handling of the jug; and I have tasted ancient beer in Allsopp’s cellars in Burton, a wine-glassful of which would probably have put a coal-whipper on his back. It was the colour of mahogany and oh! so seductive.

Porter, as most people know, is a black beer, brewed in much the same manner as the other stuff, with roasted malt to give it colour; whilst stout is simply a superior kind of porter. As for the lager beer of the Fatherland it is fermented at a very low temperature, the fermentation being longer delayed. Some years ago great stress was laid on the German system of mashing called the “thick mash,” which consisted of boiling or cooking a portion of the mash, and running it back and remixing it with the portion left in the tun; but it is now found possible to brew the finest lager beer with a slight modification of our own mashing method.

The sons of Britannia for a considerable period held aloof from this lager, which was {69} pronounced by some to be mere “hogwash,” and by others to consist principally of the juice of fir-cones and onions mixed with snow-water. The fir-cone flavour is, I believe, accounted for by the “pitching” of the barrels in which the beer is stored; but I don’t know where the oniony flavour comes from. The prejudice against this beer has long since departed from our midst; in fact it has become quite a favourite summer drink. It is generally considered less intoxicating than its English cousin. In fact the German students are in the habit of putting huge quantities thereof out of sight, on the occasion of passing examinations, and public rejoicings; and these “beer-drinkings” are, apparently, fully sanctioned by the authorities.

It has been written that it is to Dean Nowell, “classed by Fuller among the worthies of England,” that we are indebted for the discovery of bottled beer. According to Fuller, “this worthy, who was an en­thus­ias­tic fish­er­man, was one day angling in the Thames; but at the very time when he was trying to catch perch to carry to the frying-pan, that benighted bigot Bishop Bonner was trying to catch him to tie him to the stake for pur­poses of cremation, to the glory of the old religion. The reverend gen­tle­man heard that he was ‘wanted,’ left his fishing, and fled as far from the Thames as he could, leaving untasted in a safe place a bottle of beer which he had filled in the morning. Bonner’s day did not last long, and Dean Nowell was soon able to return to his old haunts. Fishing as usual, he went to look after his bottle of beer, and {70} found that it had turned into a species of gun—it exploded its contents, when touched.” Thus Nature, which is ever kind, turned the martyrdom and misery of Bloody Mary’s reign to good—it brought about bottled beer. The Dean un­bos­omed himself of his great dis­covery to his clerical friends, and the clergy let it out gradually to the laity.

Gervase Markham, the aforementioned con­tem­po­rary of Shake­speare, gives the fol­low­ing directions to “the English House­wife” of 1631, for

Brewing of Bottle-Ale.

Touching the brewing of Bottle-ale, it differeth nothing at all from the brewing of strong Ale, onely it must be drawne in a larger proportion, as at least twenty gallons of halfe a quarter; and when it comes to be changed, you shall blinke it (as was before shewed) more by much than was the strong Ale, for it must bee pretty and sharpe, which giveth the life and quicknesse to the Ale: and when you tunne it, you shall put it into round bottles with narrow mouthes, and then stopping them close with corke, set them in a cold sellar up to the wast in sand, and be sure that the corkes be fast tied in with strong packe-thrid, for feare of rising out, or taking vent, which is the utter spoyle of the Ale.

Now for the small drinke arising from this Bottle-ale, or any other beere or ale whatsoever, if you keep it after it is blinckt and boyled in a close vessell, and then put it to barme every morning as you have occasion to use it, the drinke will drinke a great deale the fresher, and be much more lively in taste. {71}

I confess that the above directions are somewhat vague to my untutored mind, which is quite a blank upon the subject of “blinckt and boyled” ale. Nor do I imagine for one moment that the “English Housewife” of the year 1899 will cumber herself with brewing or bottling, any sort of malt-liquor, as long as there be bonnets to be chosen, bicycles to be ridden, or golf to be played.

Wholesome as may be the beer in itself, its surroundings are not always hygienic. The system of pumping up the glorious fluid from the cellar through leaden pipes neither improves the flavour nor renders it more valuable as a morning “livener.” And there is a story—which I believe to be strictly true—told of a night cabman in London who used to call at the nearest tavern to his stand, the first thing in the morning, and swallow the first glass of beer drawn for the day. His end was lead-poisoning.

CHAPTER VII A SPIRITUOUS DISCOURSE

“What is a pound?” was a favourite query of the great Sir Robert Peel. “What is brandy?” is a question asked now and then; and the answer thereto should be an ambiguous one. Brandy is supposed, by good easy people who trouble not to enquire too closely into the composition of their daily food, to be a liquid obtained by distilling the fermented juice of the grape. The red wines are preferable, although in the seventeenth century the best French brandy was made entirely from white ones. The original distillation is clear and colourless, but when placed in casks the liquid dissolves out the colouring matter of the wood, brown sugar and other pigments being also added. {73}

But if you want the best French brandy, distilled from the luscious grape, see that you get it; and let your vision be in thorough working order. With the exception of the good, conscientious spirit-distillers, all French houses import potato-spirit in large quantities from Germany, and re-ship it to the home of the brave and free as superior cognac. This alone would seem sufficient excuse for another invasion of France; although these evil-minded distillers seek to justify their actions by blaming the phylloxera, a little insect which has laboured more assiduously in the cause of temperance—by destroying the main source of intemperance—than Sir Wilfrid Lawson himself. “The ravages of the phylloxera,” say the distillers, in effect, “compel us to employ other matériel, in order to fulfil our cognac contracts with the merchants of the perfidious isle.” It is related of a theatrical “property-man” that, upon being rebuked by the tragedian for making a snowstorm out of brown, instead of white, paper, he replied curtly: “It was the only paper I had; and if you can’t snow white you must snow brown.” This excuse is on a par with that urged on behalf of the German potato-spirit.

Phylloxera vastatrix (why not devastatrix?) has cost France, it is said, a pecuniary loss far exceeding that of the Franco-Prussian war. The little monster was discovered in North America in 1854, and whether the discoverer or one of his friends brought the vine-killer on a holiday-trip to Europe, or whether it worked its own passage will never be known. But certain it is that the {74} little monster made its first appearance on this side in the year 1863. Striking an attitude, with the exclamation, “Hallo! here’s a vine, let’s have the first suck,” the phylloxera commenced a long starring engagement (to borrow another metaphor from the theatres), which in another fifteen years’ time had developed into an enormous success, as far as the vastatrix was concerned. Naturally, it is the she-phylly who does the harm. From August to October Madam lays her little eggs on the vine-leaves, beneath the surface. The ova develop late in autumn into males and females, who migrate to the stem of the vine. There each bold, bad female lays an egg, under the bark. This egg lies dormant, after the manner of pesky little insect-nuisances, through the winter, and develops in April or May into a wingless, voracious, merciless little “vine-louse,” with power to add to its number. “The rest,” as the mechanical engineers tell us, just before our brains go, “is easy.” The vine-louse attacks the roots, without waiting, the silly idiot, for the grapes to ripen, the vine dies, and the potato reigns in its stead. Without burning the plant, or drowning it, it is impossible to eradicate the phylloxera, without spending three times as much cash, in chemicals, as the vine is worth. This is the true story of France’s great trouble.

Beetroot-spirit is also largely used in making cognac, the coarse spirit being flavoured with œnanthic æther, cognac-oil (made from palm-oil) and—other things. Also of late years the French have discovered that almost as good wine can be made from raisins as from the uncooked {75} article, provided they use enough raisins; three pounds being required to make a gallon of liquor. A good deal can also be done, in the way of imitation wine, by chemicals; it being quite possible to make sherry which will fetch at least four shillings per bottle, for the ridiculous sum of fourpence for the same quantity. And it is also a fact that a large quantity of alleged claret which (mainly through the endeavours of the late Mr. W. E. Gladstone) we are able to import on the cheap from the other side of the water, is made from currants and raisins steeped in water and mixed with cheap Spanish wine.

And what is to be said of British brandy? A country which can man­u­fac­ture superior Dorset butter from Thames mud, and real turtle-soup from snails and conger-eels, is not likely to get “left” in a matter of dis­til­ling. A great deal of brandy is, therefore, made in the tight little island from ordinary grain alcohol, by adding Argol—I’ll tell ye what this is presently—bruised French plums, French wine-vinegar, a little—a very little—good cognac, and redistilling. I believe that it is also possible to extract a good midnight sort of brandy—specially rec­om­mend­ed for roysterers—from coal-tar and paraffin.

The Americans make brandy from peaches and other stone-fruits, good wholesome liquor, but their French cognac is not to be rec­om­mend­ed. For it is nothing more nor less than the common whisky which America has exported to France, sent back again, after the necessary treatment. Fact. {76}

Argol, mentioned just now, is a crude variety of cream of tartar which forms a crust within wine-vats and bottles. Originally it exists in the juice of the grape, and is soluble therein; but during the fermentation of the juice, and as it passes into wine, much alcohol is developed, which remaining in the fermenting liquor, causes the precipitation of Argol. Thus the “crust” of port wine is Argol, the principal uses (and abuses) of which are in the preparation of (besides cognac) cream of tartar and tartaric acid. And malicious people say that you have only to scratch French brandy to find the Tartar.

A few years ago a German chemist discovered that a very drinkable brandy can be made from sawdust—whether deal sawdust or any description of dust does not appear; and under the heading, “A New Danger to Teetotalism,” an American journal published the following effusion:—

“We are a friend of the temperance movement, and want it to succeed; but what chance can it have when a man can take a rip-saw and go out and get drunk with a fence-rail? What is the use of a prohibitory liquor law if a man is able to make brandy-smashes out of the shingles on his roof, or if he can get delirium tremens by drinking the legs of his kitchen chairs? You may shut up an inebriate out of a gin shop and keep him away from taverns, but if he can become uproarious on boiled sawdust and desiccated window-sills, any effort must necessarily be a failure.”

I can believe in the ability of most German chemists to do most things; and possibly {77} sawdust is used in the Fatherland for the man­u­fac­ture of lager beer, Rhine Wine, and—but ’tis a saw subject.

The pure brandy at Cognac is divided into two principal classes—“champagne” brandy, from grapes grown on the plains, and “bois” brandy, the product of wooded districts—I am not alluding now to sawdust—and the last-named variety is subdivided into many different names. It takes eight and a half gallons of wine to furnish one gallon of spirits; and the ravages of the vine-louse have made a terrible difference in the supply. In fact, the amount produced in 1897 was about one-tenth of the amount produced twenty years previously. But thanks to beet-root, potatoes, and—other things, the distiller manages to “get” there just the same. But the man who wrote in 1889, prophesying the speedy disappearance of pure eau de vie from the market, was probably not far wrong. “It would seem on the whole,” he wrote, “that unless the phylloxera be stamped out, pure brandy will soon be a thing of the past.” But they do not tell you this in saloon-bars, and places where they drink.

It was stated by Mr. Dewar last year (1898) that there were 89,000,000 gallons of whisky lying idle in bond because sufficient suitable water to dilute it to the orthodox strength could not be found. This statement is calculated to give a moderate drinker the gapes; whilst Sir Wilfrid Lawson and others must have longed for permission to set fire to every bonded warehouse in the Kingdom. But the same great authority {78} on the wines of bonnie Scotland made another statement at the same time which is eminently calculated to remove all fears lest whisky, like brandy, be on the down line. “The serpent Alcohol,” remarks a writer in the Daily Telegraph, in discussing Mr. Dewar’s speech, “may have been scotched”—was this meant for a joke?—“but it is far from having been killed.” According to the Ex-Sheriff’s statistics the distillation of Irish whisky, despite its diminishing popularity, has increased during the last fourteen years by about thirty per cent; while in Scotland during the same period the increase has been at the rate of nearly eighty per cent. Ireland, that is to say, which produced eleven million gallons in 1884, now produces fourteen million and a half gallons; while the Scotch output, which was eighteen million gallons in the former year, had risen in 1898 to the enormous figure of thirty-three millions and a half. Hech sirs! these be braw figures indeed.

Yet let not the British be held up to reprobation as hard drinkers, as long as France is a going concern. Statistics prove that in Scotland, the land o’ the barley bree, the consumption of spirits during the year 1892–93 averaged a little more than twelve and a half pints per month, which is little more than the proportion of spirits required by the Parisians, without wine, absinthe, and—other things. The boulevardiers are called “temperate,” although they drink as much spirits as do the Scots, and thirty times as much wine, not to mention cider and beer.

Distilling in Britain dates from the eleventh {79} century, but in the be­gin­ning it was worked solely in the monasteries by the jovial monks. What a good time those monks of old would seem to have had! According to the popular prints they were usually engaged either in fishing, eating oysters, drinking out of flagons, catching beetles, confessing pretty women, or being shaved; and we know that their abiding-places were built, for the most part, on the banks of a river which absolutely swarmed with salmon or trout, in the midst of a district teeming with game. Any how the monks made spirits, or “strong waters” as they were called in those days, first.

Pure malt whisky is, and has been, made almost exclusively in Scotland. In Ireland they use about one-third of malt to two-thirds of oats and maize. In England they make whisky of pretty nearly everything, including German spirit, petroleum, and old boots; whilst in gallant little Wales—well the only acknowledged Welsh whisky I have tasted was excellent in quality, and apparently made from pure malt. Distilling, as a trade, commenced in England during the Tudor period, and from the reputation bluff King Hal bore for feathering his nest, it is probable that the industry was fully taxed. In 1579 Scotch distilleries were taxed for the first time. In Ireland as far back as the eleventh century the natives made uisge beatha—now called potheen—without interference from landlord or gauger, and continued at it until the sixteenth century, when licenses were enforced in the cases of all but the gentry, and to run an illicit still was {80} punishable with death and dismemberment. But they ran ’em just the same; for in those days an Irishman was never really happy unless he were drinking, fighting, or being sentenced to death. But whether it was English, Scotch, Welsh, or Irish whisky, or French brandy, or Dutch gin, smuggling and illicit distilling were rampant through the centuries, and the Inland Revenue officer was no more respected or worshipped than at the present day. Still there has not been much blood shed over those differences of opinion; except in Western Pennsylvania at the close of the last century—a period when the greater part of the universe was fighting about something—when it took 15,000 soldiers from Washington to quell a riot amongst a populace discontented with the Excise regulations.

Blending and diluting whiskies are for the most part done in the bonded warehouses. “All commercial spirit,” says an authority on the subject, “however pure, contains a small proportion of impurities” (which sounds Irish) “or by-products of distillation known as fusel-oil.” It will relieve the minds of some to know that fusel-oil is merely a by-product of distillation, and not the “low-flash” stuff which causes the accidents with the cheap lamps. It used to be thought that during the “maturing,” or “ageing,” of whisky the constituents of fusel-oil underwent decomposition; but my good friend Doctor James Bell, C.B., the chief Government analyst at Somerset House (he retired some three years ago), utterly refuted this theory by analysis.

Whisky is, like brandy, naturally white, and {81} takes its trade colour, and, to a certain extent, flavour, from the sherry-casks in which it is matured. It is also coloured by the direct addition of caramel (burnt sugar), or a maturing wine.

In America, Rye or Bourbon whisky is made from wheat or maize grown in the Bourbon country, Kentucky, and some of it would kill at forty yards. The chief distillery states on the other side of the Atlantic are Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, New York, and Pennsylvania. At the Cape, and through­out South Africa, there is decent whisky procurable, as also a pernicious compound known as “Square-face” or “Cape smoke,” and in much favour with the dusky races of the country. On the Congo, palm-wine—similar to the fermented toddy of the East Indies—was for centuries the only livener, but with the march of civilization have come the whiskies of Great Britain, more or less adulterated; and whereas in the past death by the sword, or the club, was the only known punishment for the subjects of the native tyrants who are so fond of thinning out the population, a well-fuselled whisky is now freely employed for the same purpose.

Although whisky is now freely partaken of all over Great Britain, it was comparatively speaking despised in England until the first half of the present century had slipped by. This fact is apparent from a perusal of contemporary literature. And in no country has “malt” had such a rise in public estimation as in the great continent of Hindustan, where “John Exshaw” and “John {82} Collins”—the last named a seductive compound of gin, limes, Curaçoa, and soda-water—have been almost knocked out by John Barleycorn and Jean Pomme-de-terre. Until the visit of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, brandy was almost the sole potation of the heroes who helped to hold the big wonderland, the old-fashioned brandi-pani gradually giving place to the brandy diluted with Belati pani, or “Europe water.” Thirty years ago a “peg” meant a brandy-and-soda; but whisky has now usurped the proud position once occupied by the products of John Exshaw, Justerini and Brooks, and others.

CHAPTER VIII OTHER SPIRITS

We now come to Rum, “superior old Jamaica pine-apple,” otherwise known as “sailors’ tea”—the spirit in question having from time im­me­mo­rial been held in high esteem by mariners both afloat and ashore. Rum is probably one of the easiest beverages to make, being, simply, fermented and distilled cane-sugar. Occasionally pine-apples and guavas are thrown into the still, but in making this spirit on a large scale no attempts are made to add to its flavour and thereby deduct from the profits to be made on the commodity. It is coloured with caramel, and the longer you keep it the better and, therefore, the more valuable, it becomes. In the city {84} of Carlisle in the year 1865 some rum known to be 140 years old was sold for £3 : 3s. per bottle.

This is not the brand served out to our army and navy; although the “tots” issued periodically to Tommy Atkins and Ben Bowline consist of good, sound liquor, wholesome enough, save for gouty subjects—and a sailor with the gout would be of about as much use to his Queen and country as a watch without works—and writing from past experience I can aver that every drop of liquor, whether ale or rum, supplied in a regimental canteen had to be previously passed by a committee of “taste.” In many ships, nowadays, no rum or other intoxicant is served out; and as no equivalent is given, it might appear as though the owners made a good thing out of the temperate habits of their crews. But I do not believe in total abstinence as an aid to work; and I have never seen a sailor the worse—on board ship—for his “tot.” On the other hand, in the old days of “Green’s” troop-ships, the old sailing-vessels which made the voyage to India round the Cape of Good Hope, it was by no means infrequent for a soldier to be “overcome” by the cane-spirit, of which he occasionally got rather more than his orthodox allowance.

How was this managed? The thrifty seafarers were in the habit of selling their grog allowance to the “swaddies”; and as soon as the ship’s captain found this out, he issued stringent regulations which it might have been expected would put a stop to this practice. When all hands were piped to grog a ship’s officer was {85} stationed by the tub, to see that each sailor drank his allowance. Still there was intoxication amongst the troops, and it was discovered that many of the sailors’ pannikins had false bottoms, and that in this way the rum was concealed. After that the ship’s officer was enjoined to see that each sailor partook of his tot; but even this precaution failed; for the rum would be ejected from the men’s mouths into a bucket in the fo’c’sle, and then sold—a disgusting practice which merited severe punishment, and frequently obtained it.

We English do not make nearly as much use of rum in cookery as do our lively neighbours. One of the most approved of entremets is an omelette au rhum, a truly grateful dish, if the omelette be properly made, although rum be spelt with an “h.” But it is a mistake to use rum-sauce with plum-pudding, as do the French; for brandy is a far better digestive of the cloying materials of which the pudding is composed. As mentioned in Cakes and Ale, rum-and-milk is said, by the chief English authority on dietetics, to be the most powerful restorative known to man. This may, or may not, be true; I am prepared to back a judicious dose of “the Boy”—not limited to a “split pint,” either. But of all horrible mixtures, defend me from rum-and-ale, which used to be a potion much in favour with the dangerous classes of our metropolis, in the days when I went “slumming” in search of plain unvarnished facts. A steaming tumbler of rum and hot water, with a piece of butter melted therein, was, in my younger days, in vogue as an infallible {86} specific to eject a cold from the head. Nowadays, I prefer the cold.

Gin is supposed by students, who do not make practical test of their learning, to be distilled from malt, or from unmalted barley, or from some other grain, and afterwards rectified and flavoured. And just as it was (according to Mr. Samuel Weller) the seasoning which did it in the case of the cheap pies, so is it the rectifying, and the flavouring which do it, in the matter of gin. Occasionally “rectifying” is hardly the right word to use. That there is such a thing as wholesome, tolerably-pure gin is more than probable; but there is also a very undesirable fluid sold to the poorer classes, and esteemed by their vitiated palates, known under different pet names, of which “blue ruin” and “white satin” are two. This brand of gin is flavoured more or less with oil of turpentine and common salt. No wonder thirst stalks abroad next morning!

“In one well-known hostelry,” observes a writer in a daily newspaper, “situated not a stone’s throw from the Bank of England, you can, if you be so minded, ask for and obtain a farthing’s worth of gin. It is served in tiny liqueur-glasses, and the custom dates from the time when the purchasing power of the coin in question was far greater than it is now, and when consequently, a farthing’s worth of gin was considered to be a sufficient quantity for any respectable citizen. Another public-house, in Bishopsgate Street, is also compelled, by the terms of its license, to supply a farthing’s worth of either ‘gin, rum, or shrub,’ to any customer requiring {87} it; while not far away is a hostelry which is permitted to carry on the dual businesses of liquor-dispensing or pawnbroking. Yet another City public-house possesses a sort of annexe where medicines are retailed. Handy, this, for the unhappy sufferer from swelled head.”

I suppose as the above has appeared in a newspaper, it is strictly true. But how sad! Although my knowledge of London is “peculiar” I cannot say I am acquainted with the licensed house in which drawing drinks and taking in pledges are combined; but I have seen farthing’s worths of “Old Tom” dispensed in more than one hostelry, to slatternly women, before my own breakfast hour, and I have shuddered at the sight. But why stop short at selling medicines in the annexe of a dram shop? I should have thought an undertaker, in another compartment, might do a fairish trade.

These are some of the ingredients put into gin, to give it “body,” and make it “bite”—gin without teeth being notoriously inferior tipple and altogether unfit for the consumption of the good ladies who are, sad to say, by far the best customers of the gin retailer:—roach-alum (this sounds fishy), salt of tartar, oil of juniper, cassia, nutmeg, lemon, fennel, and carraway and coriander seeds, cardamoms, capsicums, and sulphuric acid. All these, mind ye, besides the afore-mentioned oil of turpentine, and the afore-mentioned potato-spirit, which last would seem to enter into most drinks of the day.

The word “Gin” is really an abbreviation of “Geneva,” under which name the spirit was at {88} one time known. Not that it is principally man­u­fac­tured in picturesque Switzerland, where the watches come from; but “Geneva” is a corruption of the old French word genevre, the juniper. I used to read, in childhood’s days, that

but those ingredients—or the berries, at all events—would seem to be only regularly used in Holland, nowadays.

“Dirty” gin, of which we used to hear so much, was, I believe, as pure as any other geneva, and not less clean. Plymouth gin is said to be the healthiest form of the article, but ’tis an acquired taste, and “Old Tom” is certainly more toothsome. In entering as fully into details as I have above I have no wish to discourage the consumption of gin proper, especially when blended with ginger-beer (an excellent summer beverage), or doing duty in a cock-tail, a sling, a punch, or a John Collins. But I am not a “gin man” myself. And to my mind a “nip” less calculated to promote appetite than any other is a “gin-and-bitters.”

“Kosher” rum, i.e. rum treated according to instructions laid down in the Mosaic Law, is in high favour with the Jews; and in some of the taverns which abut on the Israelitish quarters which are about Aldgate there are recognized “rum-rooms.” There used to be, and probably is at the present day, a considerable amount of card—playing (spieling) or throwing of dice for wagers, carried on in these apartments; and I once knew a son of Judah who was heavily fined {89} by the stipendiary magistrate, for gambling on licensed premises. To the day of his death this Jew protested his innocence of the crime.

He told me the whole story, interlarded with tears and gesticulations.

The rozzers (detectives) raided the rum-room one afternoon, and created considerable commotion. Some of the imbibers managed to make their escape, but my informant was not so fortunate. He was seized by one minion of the law, and shortly afterwards another officer cried:

“See where he has hidden the dice in his tumbler of Old Jamaica!”

“And, may I die,” added the poor Yid, “if the gonoph (rascal) hadn’t placed ’em there himself—don’t yer beliefe me?”

Of course I did.

Here is another way of employing rum; but you will not be able to shine at solo-whist afterwards.

But sans rum whence the Rum Booze? Port Wine is sometimes substituted for white wine, but is not considered so palatable. This liquor should be drunk when quite hot. If the wine be poured boiling hot among the eggs, the mixture will become curdled.

Without the rum the mixture is one form of Egg Flip.

When treating of gin I should have mentioned that at one well-known City hostelry, “The Olde Cheshyre Cheese” in Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, gin is never known by any other name than “rack.” Why, I know not. But in the same old tavern should you require Scotch Whisky you must call for “Scotch,” without mentioning the word whisky; and if Irish, “Cork” is the password.

CHAPTER IX CUPS WHICH CHEER

It is probable that there are almost as many recipes for claret cup as there are letters in Holy Writ, or acres in Yorkshire. This is the late Mr.

Nobody who has not tried it can understand how much the addition of a little sparkling Moselle improves a claret cup.

In Evelyn’s Acetaria it is written:—“The {95} sprigs of borage in wine are of known virtue, to revive the hypochondriac, and cheer the hard student.”

Salmon’s Household Companion, 1710, told us: “Borage is one of the four cordial flowers; it comforts the heart, cheers mel­an­choly, and revives the fainting spirits.”

“Borage,” wrote Sir John Hill, M.D., “has the credit of being a great cordial; throwing it into cold wine is better than all the medicinal preparations.”

“The leaves, flowers, and seeds of borage,” says the English Physician, “all or any of them, are good to expel pensiveness and mel­an­choly.”

“Balm is very good to help digestion and open obstructions of the brain, and hath so much purging quality in it, as to expel those mel­an­choly vapours from the spirits and blood which are in the heart and arteries, although it cannot do so in other parts of the body” (Ibid).

After all this information, let not the garden of the mel­an­choly vapourer be searched in vain for balm and borage.

One quart of syrup of orgeat (to make this vide next recipe), one pint and a half of old brandy, two wine-glasses of maraschino, one pint of old rum, {96} two large and one small bottles of champagne, three bottles of Seltzer water, half a pound of sifted sugar, and the juice of five lemons. Peel the lemons and put the thin rind in a mortar with the sugar. Pound them well, and scrape the result with a silver spoon into a large bowl. Squeeze in the juice of the lemons, add the Seltzer water, and stir till the sugar is quite dissolved. Then add the orgeat, and whip the mixture well with a whisk, so as to whiten it. Add the maraschino, rum, and brandy, and strain the whole into another bowl. Just before the cup is required, put in the champagne and stir vigorously with a punch ladle. The champagne should have been previously well iced, as no apparent iceberg is allowable in this mixture.

Do not make too free with this mixture, if you are about to ride the favourite for an important race, or you will be seeing five winning posts, like the late “Jem” Snowden.

Blanch and pound three quarters of a pound of sweet almonds, and thirty bitter almonds, in one tablespoonful of water. Stir in by degrees two pints of water and three pints of milk. Strain the mixture through a cloth. Dissolve half a pound of loaf-sugar in one pint of water. Boil and skim well, and then mix with the almond water. Add two tablespoonfuls of orange-flower water and half a pint of old brandy. Be careful to boil the eau sucré well, as this concoction must not be too watery. {97}

A Crimean Cup for a much smaller party can be made, without the addition of orgeat, as follows:—

Put the peel of half a lemon or orange into a bowl, add a tablespoonful of sifted sugar, one small glassful of maraschino, half that quantity of curaçoa, and a wine-glassful of old brandy. Mix well together, and add two bottles of aërated water, one bottle of champagne, and a block of ice.

Rub the rind of two oranges on loaf-sugar and put the sugar into a bowl; add half a pint of brandy, the juice of one lemon, one-third of a pint of orange juice, and one pint of water. Add more sugar if required, and ice well.

I don’t know if the above is the way the Loving Cup at the Mansion House is made; {98} but probably one recipe is as good as another, when all you have to do is to sip the liquid and pass it on.

The ancients knew not “cups”; simply because they knew not the virtues of Wenham Lake ice, or its imitations; whilst the “strong-waters” and alleged wines of the past did not blend particularly well, and there was no soda-water. Fearful and wonderful beverages were their compound drinks, however, many of which have already been analysed in these pages. But the recipe for

Put into a bowl two bottles of sparkling Catawba, two bottles of sparkling Isabella, and one bottle of Sauterne; mix well, then add two wine-glasses of maraschino and two wine-glasses of curaçoa; ice well, and add some strawberries, or a few drops of extract of peach or vanilla.

Mind, I, personally, do not believe in the blend­ing of malt liquor with wine or spirits; and the above reads like a bile-provoker of the most persistent type. But compared With the next recipe—which some of my readers may think should come, for choice, under the heading of “Strange Swallows”—it is harmless indeed. {100}

One more cup, and I have done with this part of my subject. This is a ladylike concoction, as its name would seem to imply.

CHAPTER X PUNCH

In Cakes and Ale, grave doubts are expressed as to whether the usually-accepted derivation of punch is the correct one. Why Asia should be raked to find a name for a purely European concoction, is beyond my powers of argument; and, as observed in another place, in the concoction of this seductive brew it is by no means necessary to limit oneself to five ingredients.

It may be news to the adopters of the panch (five) theory to read that punch was at one time {102} called “pale-punts,” why or wherefore de­po­nent sayeth not; here is the extract from a work published A.D. 1691:—

“Pale-punts, here vulgarly known by the name of Punch; a drink compounded of brandy or aqua vitæ, juice of lemons, oranges, sugar, or such like; very usual amongst those that frequent the sea, where a bowl of punch is an usual beverage.”

But it was “usual” only in the days of sailing-ships and long voyages; and with fast steamers and whole evenings devoted to the beauties of poker, or selling pools, a more usual modern mari­time drink is a mod­i­cum of whisky diluted with aërated water.

“The liquor called Punch,” writes another professional authority, “has become so truly English, it is often supposed to be indigenous to this country, though its name at least is Oriental. The Persian punj, or Sanscrit pancha, i.e. five (vide Fryer’s Travels), is the etymon of its title, and denotes the number of ingredients of which it is composed. Addison’s ‘fox-hunter,’ who testified so much surprise when he found that of the materials of which this ‘truly English’ beverage was made only the water belonged to England, would have been still more astonished had his informant also told him that it derived even its name from the East.”

But did natives of the East drink it? Tell me that.

“Various opinions are enter­tained respect­ing this com­pound drink. Some au­thors praise it as a cool­ing and re­fresh­ing beverage, when drunk {103} in mod­er­a­tion; others con­demn the use of it as prejudicial to the brain and nervous system. Dr. Cheyne, a celebrated Scotch physician, author of an essay on ‘Long Life and Health,’ and who by a system of diet and regimen reduced himself from the enormous weight of thirty-two stone to nearly one-third, which enabled him to live to the age of seventy-two, insists that there is but one wholesome ingredient in it, and that is the water. Dr. Willich, on the contrary, asserts that if a proper quantity of acid be used in making punch, it is an excellent antiseptic, and well calculated to supply the place of wine in resisting putrefaction, especially if drank cold with plenty of sugar; it also promotes perspiration; but if drank hot and immoderately it creates acidity in the stomach, weakens the nerves, and gives rise to complaints of the breast. He further states that after a heavy meal it is improper, as it may check digestion, and injure the stomach.

“Rennie states that he once heard a facetious physician at a public hospital prescribe for a poor fellow sinking under the atrophy of starvation a bowl of punch. Mr. Wadd gives us a prescription:—

“ ‘Rum, aqua dulci miscetur acetum, et fiet ex tali fœdere nobile Punch.’

“He also states that toddy, or punch without acid, when made for a day or two before it is used, is a good and cheap substitute for wine as a tonic, in convalescence from typhus fever, etc.”

It is here worthy of note that what is meant by “punch” in Ireland is, and has been for at least two centuries, whisky, sugar, lemon, and {104} the less water the better. A very old way of concocting it is to melt the sugar within the tumbler (which should be covered, pro tem.) with the smallest quantity of water sufficient for the purpose, the thin lemon-rind having been previously added. Then comes the whisky; “and,” according to the old formula, “the laste dhrop o’ wather” added atop of the “crathur” will spoil the punch. But in all English works in which punch has been mentioned—previous to the early seventies, at all events—by the active ingredients of punch should be understood either rum, brandy, or gin.

The sugar being melted with a little cold water, the artist squeezed about a dozen lemons through a wooden strainer, and then poured in water enough almost to fill the bowl. In this state the liquor goes by the name of sherbet, and a few of the connoisseurs in his immediate neigh­bour­hood were requested to give their opinion of it—for in the mixing of the sherbet lies, according to the Glasgow creed at least, one half of the whole battle. This being approved by an audible smack from the lips of the umpires, the rum was added to the beverage, I suppose in something about the proportion of one to seven .

Hech sirs ! Or, does it mean seven of rum to one of the spring?

Last of all the maker cut a few limes, and running each section rapidly round the rim of his bowl, squeezed in enough of this more delicate acid to flavour the whole composition. In this consists the true tour-de-maître of the punch-maker.

Extract the juice from the rind of three lemons, by rubbing loaf-sugar on them. The peeling of two Seville oranges and two lemons, cut extremely {106} thin. The juice of four Seville oranges and ten lemons. Six glasses of calves’-feet jelly in a liquid state. The above to be put into a jug and stirred well together. Pour two quarts of boiling water on the mixture, cover the jug closely, and place it near the fire for a quarter of an hour. Then strain the liquid through a sieve into a punch bowl or jug, sweeten it with a bottle of capillaire (the recipe for this follows), and add half a pint of white wine, a pint of French brandy, a pint of Jamaica rum, and a bottle of orange shrub; the mixture to be stirred as the spirits are poured in. If not sufficiently sweet, add loaf-sugar, or a little more capillaire. To be served either hot or cold.

In making the punch limes are sometimes used instead of lemons, but are not so wholesome; in fact Arbuthnot, in his work on aliments, says: “The West India dry gripes are occasioned by lime-juice in punch.” And nobody wants them.

Ignorant servants sometimes put oxalic acid into punch, to give it a flavour; but unless the throats of the drinkers be lined with brass, this acid is of no real service. And the host who would entrust the making of any sort of punch to a subordinate, must be either very ignorant, or very careless of the comfort of his guests—and possibly both. Cups, punches, and salads should always be concocted by somebody who will make personal trial of their merits.

• 1. Warm two quarts or water and one of new milk, then mix them well together, and sweeten with a sufficient quantity of loaf-sugar. Rub a few lumps of sugar on the peel of a lemon, put them into a jug with the above, and half a pint of lemon juice, stirring the mixture well as it is poured in. Then add one quart of old brandy. Strain and bottle off, and in cold weather it will keep a fortnight.

• 2. Dissolve two pounds and a half of sugar in one gallon of cold spring-water; add thereto a quarter of a pint of orange-flower water, with the juice of twenty limes and eight oranges. Stir well together; pour one quart of boiling milk into it, and then add three bottles of old brandy, and a like quantity of orange brandy shrub. Strain and bottle off.

• 3. Cut the peeling of six Seville oranges and six lemons very thin. Pound in a stone mortar. Add one pint of brandy and let the mixture stand six hours, covered. Then squeeze in the juice of six Seville oranges and eight lemons. Stir well, and add three more pints of brandy, three pints of rum, and three quarts of water. Make two quarts of milk boiling hot, and grate a nutmeg into it; mix this gradually with the other ingredients, and add a sufficient quantity of loaf-sugar to sweeten it—about two pounds. Stir till the sugar is dissolved; let the mixture stand twelve hours, then strain through a jelly-bag until quite clear. Bottle off, and it will keep in any climate for any length of time.

• 4.

  • Three bottles of rum.
  • One bottle of sherry.
  • Three pounds of loaf-sugar.
  • The rind of six lemons and the juice of twelve.
  • One quart of boiling skim milk.

  Mix together, and let the mixture stand eight days, {109} stirring it each day. Strain and bottle, and let it stand three months. Then re-bottle, and let the bottles lie on their sides in the cellar for two years, to mature. The flavour will be much better than if drunk after the first period of three months.

• 5. For a solitary drink.

  Put into a small tumbler a teaspoonful of sugar, half a wine-glassful of old brandy, half a wine-glassful of old rum, and fill up with boiling milk.

• 6. Put into a bottle of rum or brandy the thinly-pared rinds of three Seville oranges, and three lemons. Cork tightly for two days. Rub off on two pounds loaf-sugar the rinds of six lemons, squeeze the juice of the fruit over the two pounds sugar, add one quart of boiling water, and one of boiling milk. Mix well till the sugar is dissolved, and grate a little nutmeg over the mixture. Pour in the rum or brandy, stir, and strain till clear: bottle off.

• 7. Cut off the thin yellow rind of four lemons and one Seville orange, taking care not to include even a fragment of the white rind, and place in a basin. Pour in a bottle of old rum, and let it stand, covered over, for twelve hours. Then strain, and mix with it one pint of lemon juice, and two pints of cold water, in which one pound of sugar-candy has been dissolved; add the whites of two eggs, beaten to a froth, three pints more of rum, one pint of madeira, one pint of strong green tea, and a wine-glassful of maraschino. Mix thoroughly, and pour over all one pint of boiling milk. Let the punch stand a little while, then strain through a jelly-bag, and either use at once (as you will naturally feel inclined) or bottle off for festivals.

It is assumed, by the compiler of this little volume, that the best materials only will be used by the concocters of these compound drinks. {110}

• 8, and last. The best recipe for milk punch extant. Over the yellow rinds of four lemons and one Seville orange pour one pint of rum. Let it stand, covered over, for twelve hours. Strain and mix in two pints more of rum, one pint of brandy, one pint of sherry, half a pint of lemon juice, the expressed juice of a peeled pine-apple, one pint of green tea, one pound of sugar dissolved in one quart of boiling water, the whites of two eggs beaten up, one quart of boiling milk. Mix well, let it cool, strain through a jelly-bag, and drink, or bottle off.

Extract the juice from the peeling of one Seville orange and one lemon; the juice of six Seville oranges and six lemons, six glasses of calves’-feet jelly in a liquid state, and about half a pound of loaf-sugar; put the whole into a jug, pour on it one quart of boiling water, and then add one pint of old brandy. Stir well together, and use.

The above will act as a restorative after a hard day’s hunting. Later in the evening the true sportsman may feel ready and willing to tackle a glass or two of the celebrated {114}

Do not, oh ! do not boil the above before serving, as did some Cleveland friends of mine, on the night of a certain Ebor Handicap. The result of this was a considerable amount of chaos.

The above was the favourite tipple of the Prince Regent at the be­gin­ning of the present century.

CHAPTER XI STRANGE SWALLOWS

“Wormwood!” — The little green fairy — All right when you know it, but  — The hour of absinthe — Awful effects — Marie Corelli — St. John the Divine — Arrack and bhang not to be encouraged — Plain water — The original intoxicant — Sacred beverage of the mild Hindu — Chi Chi — Kafta, an Arabian delight — Friends as whisky agents — Effervescent Glenlivet — The peat-reek — American bar-keeper and his best customer — “Like swallerin’ a circ’lar saw and pullin’ it up again” — Castor-oil anecdote — “Haste to the wedding!”

We will now proceed to consider certain weird potations, some of which I have personally tested, others of which not all the wealth of Golconda, Peru, and Throgmorton Street would induce me to sample of my own accord, and all of which bring more or less trouble in their wake.

Gall and wormwood have been closely allied from time im­me­mo­rial; and it is in accordance with the eternal fitness of things that the consumption of

Absinthe

should be almost entirely confined to France. And what is absinthe? Merely alcohol, in {116} which have been macerated for a week or so the pounded leaves and flowering tops of wormwood, together with angelica root, sweet-flag root, star-anise, and other aromatics. The liquor is then distilled, and the result is the decoctions sacred to the “little green fairy,” who has accomplished even more manslaughter than the Mahdi, the Khalifa, and the Peculiar People, put together. Of all the liqueurs absinthe is the most pernicious; and with many other sins it occupies some time in taking possession of its victim. Like Mr. Chevalier’s hero, you “have to know it fust,” and after that the rest is easy. Like golf, “scorching,” and gambling, once you “get” absinthe, it gets you, and never leaves you whilst you last; and there is a weird, almost tragic, look about the milky liquid, when diluted with water, as to suggest smoke, and brimstone, and flames, with a demon rising from their midst. But it is only “the little green fairy”; who is, however, as deadly and determined as any demon.

The best absinthe is made in the canton of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and is not made entirely from Wormwood proper, but from a mixture of plants related to it—such as Southernwood (“Old Man”), and another which takes its name from the invulnerable Achilles. But the merry Swiss boy knows a trick worth two of drinking absinthe; so the French get the most of it, whilst some goes to America, and some to the foreign quarters of our great metropolis. The French soldiers learnt to appreciate it, from drinking it as a febrifuge, during the Algerian campaign, 1832–47, and it afterwards became, {117} gradually, a popular drink on the boulevards, where the five o’clock gossip-hour at the cafés came to be known as “the hour of absinthe.” Its use is now forbidden in the French army and navy, and no wonder. The evil effects of drinking it are very apparent: utter derangement of the digestive system, weakened frame, limp muscles, pappy brain, jumpy heart, horrible dreams and hallucinations, with paralysis or idiocy to bring down the curtain.

In that seductive, though gruesome book, Wormwood, Marie Corelli gives a most graphic picture of an absintheur, once a gay young banker, who, through trouble of no ordinary kind, gradually came under the spell of the “green fairy.” I forget how many murders he committed; but his awful experiences and hallucinations will never leave anybody who has read the book. He is haunted for some days by a leopard who accompanies him on his walks abroad, and who lies down at the foot of his bed at night-time—the “jim-jams,” in fact, in their worst form.

“There are two terrible verses,” says a writer on the subject, “in the Revelations of St. John.

“And the third angel sounded his trumpet, and there fell a great star from the heavens, burning like a lamp, and it fell upon a third part of the rivers and upon the fountains of waters. And the name of the star is called Wormwood; and the third part of the waters became Wormwood, and many men died of the waters because they were made bitter.”

Which seems a very appropriate quotation; {118} yet will men drink of the waters, for although absinthe makes the heart grow blacker, and the pulse more feeble, men—and, occasionally women—will continue, as long as there is a world, to do the thing they ought not to do. With which moralising let us pass to the next objectionable drink,

Arrack.

This is an East Indian name, derived from the Arabic, for all sorts of distilled spirits, but chiefly for the “toddy,” or palm-liquor obtained from the cocoa-palm, as also from rice, and the coarse brown sugar known to the natives as “jaggery.” “Toddy,” when fresh, is a delicious drink, and bears no sort of relationship to whisky-toddy. An almost nude male swarms up a cocoa-palm—assisted by a rope which encircles his ankles and the trunk of the tree—early in the morning, and fetches down the vessel which has been fastened up atop, overnight, to catch the sap which has dripped from the incisions made in the tree. That sap, in its raw state, is delicious—especially with a dash of rum in it, but it ferments rapidly, and usually turns sour in three or four days. Then the natives distil, and make “arrack” of it—a liquor which is sold in the bazaars and drunk on the occasion of a burra din, or festival. Nor is its use confined to natives. The British soldier drinks it, faute de mieux; and occasionally the British officer.

Poor B, who was in my old regiment, had fuddled himself into such a state of stupidity, that all liquor was forbidden him by the doctor’s {119} orders. I, who shared his bungalow, took particular care that these orders were carried out, and threatened his bearer and khitmugar with fearful penalties should they convey any surreptitious alcohol to the sahib. Still he managed to get it; and it took me a week to find out how. His syce (groom) used to smuggle arrack from the bazaar, and hide it under the horse’s bedding in the stable; and whenever I was away from the house, poor B used to creep over to the stable, and “soak” there!

An imitation arrack may be made by dissolving 10 grains of benzoic acid in a pint of rum; but arrack is just the sort of fluid which ought not to be imitated. Give me the honest, manly, simple, beautiful Bass!

Whether cold water ought to be drunk, or not, I am bound, as a tolerably truthful chronicler, to remark that very few folk who can obtain any other sort of tipple do drink it.

Pulque, which is the sap of the aloe, is the favourite drink of the Mexicans. In Kamtchatka the natives drink (or used to drink) birch-wine, which has been already described in these pages. The Russians, also, are very fond of birch-wine; and their’s effervesces, like champagne.

In the Caucasus district there be strange drinks made from mares’ milk, sparkling—such as Koumiss, or otherwise. But these beverages do not have a large sale in other districts.

“Very pleasant sensations” are, it is said, caused by this custom, and the effect is so invigorating that the Arab soldier who goes in steadily for Kafta can do “sentry go” all night without feeling in the least drowsy. Whether the soldiers of the Khalifa did much chewing on the night before the battle of Omdurman deponent sayeth not. Frequently the kat leaves are boiled in milk sweetened with honey, and the result is the same. The infusion is intoxicating, but the effect is not of long endurance; and at a synod of the most learned Mahomedans it was pronounced lawful for the faithful to chew, or drink Kafta, “as, whilst it did not impair the health nor hinder the observance of religious duties, it increased hilarity and good humour.” Sly rogues, these followers of the Prophet!

If a man wants to retain his old friends and {123} to make fresh ones let not that man take to selling wines or spirits on commission. Some years ago I gave an old schoolfellow an order for a case of Scotch whisky, which he declared upon oath to be absolutely the best procurable. Home came the whisky, and the first cork was drawn. Pop! The stuff was literally effervescent, like champagne, or Russian birch-wine. “My dear,” I observed to the partner of my joys and cares, “we had better not drink much of this.”

At the next Sandown Park race-meeting I met the whisky agent, who, I forgot to mention before, was a bit of a stammerer.

“And wh-wh-wh-what,” he asked, “d’you think of that wh-wh-wh-wh-whisky?”

Stammering is occasionally to be caught.

“I think,” was my reply, “it’s the d-d-d-dashedest m-m-m-muck I ever t-t-t-t-tasted.”

“Wh-wh-what’s the m-m-m-matter with it?”

“It f-f-f-fizzes like g-g-g-ginger p-p-p-pop.”

“My d-d-dear sir,” he protested, “that is no dr-dr-drawback. That’s the p-p-p-peat-r-r-reek.”

Peat-reek or no, that whisky was not used for household purposes-not even for the Christmas pudding; but was kept for the special benefit of such police-constables, Inland Revenue officers, process-servers, tax-gatherers, book agents, and retailers of certain winners, as might call around, with a thirst in them.

Strange whisky reminds me of the American story of the proprietor of a spirit-store in Arizona, who found the ordinary brand of “Rye” was not sufficiently attractive to his customers. So he fitted together a blend of his own, consisting of {124} essence of ginger, capsicums, croton oil, snuff, carbolic acid, pain-killer, turpentine, and a little very young and very potent spirit distilled from old junk. He placed a bottle of this on the counter, and the first customer who came along helped himself to a tumblerful, and, taking it “straight,” swallowed it at a gulp.

As soon as he had got his second wind, he gasped out: “That’s the best doggoned whisky I’ve sampled in this yer camp. Sonny, guess you’ve fixed me up to rights. It’s like swallerin’ a circ’lar saw and pullin’ it up again. So long.”

And with the tears pouring down his cheeks, and holding on to his diaphragm with both hands, he staggered into the open. The saloon-keeper watched him from the doorway, until he had passed the second block, and rounded the corner; and returned to his counter and his bottles, with the pious exclamation: “The Lord be praised.! He hasn’t died in our parish!”

No chapter on strange drinks would be complete without the following story, which, I confess at the outset, is one of the most venerable of “chestnuts.” It appeared in the Sporting Times four-and-twenty years ago, and I will not affirm that it was strictly original even then. It has since been translated into every known language; but it is just possible that some of the rising generation may not have heard it.

A well-dressed gentleman entered a chemist’s shop one morning, evidently in a violent hurry.

“Can you make me up a dose of castor-oil?”

“Certainly, sir,” said the dispenser, with a bow. {125}

Whilst he was going through the usual motions—no prescription can be properly made up until the chemist has overhauled every bottle on the top shelf, opened most of the empty drawers, and upset a tray of tooth-brushes—the customer was fidgeting about the shop, and fanning himself with a scented pocket-handkerchief.

“It’s infernally hot,” he said presently, “and I don’t think I ever felt so thirsty in my life. Can I have a bottle of lemonade?”

“Certainly, sir.”

More sorting of bottles. Presently “pop” goes a cork, and the sparkling lemonade is poured into a mammoth tumbler. The customer drains it at once.

“Ah-h-h!” he crowed, wiping his mouth. “I feel a bit better now.”

A pause. Presently he asked:—

“Have you made that up yet?”

“What, sir?” asked the chemist.

“Why that stuff—the castor-oil I ordered.”

“You’ve had it, sir.”

“Had it ! Wotty mean?”

“I gave it you in the lemonade, sir.”

“Great Scotland Yard !” exclaimed the customer. “I didn’t want it for myself—I’m going to be married in half an hour!”

CHAPTER XII “THE BOY”

sings Giroflé, in Lecocq’s opera; and although the sparkling liquor therein is described in the text as “punch”—which does not sparkle much as a rule—I have no doubt whatever that what Lecocq, or his librettist meant, was the grateful liquid which is described in different circles of society as “fiz,” “Simpkin” (the nearest approach a Mahomedan table-servant can make to “champagne”), “a bottle,” “golden pop,” and “the Boy.”

Here let me interpolate the commonly-received {127} interpretation of the last-named title. At a shooting party, a stout urchin of some fifteen summers was specially told off to carry the liquid refreshment for the shooters, which took the form of Perrier Jouët in magnums. And so frequent were the calls of “Boy!” that morning, that the youth threw up his situation before noon.

D’you believe it? Not a word of it? Same here. At least I never attended a “shoot” at which the gunners steadied their nerves by the aid of choice vintages—before luncheon, at all events; and I don’t mean to begin now. Champagne was probably called “the Boy” because of its free, happy, joyous, loose-and-careless char­ac­ter­is­tics. The sparkle represents youth, and the froth irresponsibility; whilst the whole  but never mind about the whole, just now.

The Champagne district, as some people know, lies on the chalk hills which surround the valley of the Marne. The townlets of Epernay, Ay, and Château Thierry owe their prosperity to these seductive wines, and Rheims has attained world-wide celebrity, as much from being the centre of the champagne industry as from being the seat of the premier ecclesiastic of France, the Archbishop of Paris. So far, guide-book.

The champagne-vines are short and stunted, the grapes being small, but most prolific of juice. A third, and even a fourth, crushing will yield a very delicious wine, to an uneducated palate; and this is the inferior liquor which is sold to tourists in Rheims at the equivalent of one shilling and fivepence per large bottle. It is a sweet—what {128} connoisseurs call a “lady’s” wine, which an expert would not taste a second time; and its aftermath, its effect on the imbiber the following day, is somewhat distressing. Somehow, notwithstanding the import duties, champagne—I am alluding now to the superior brands—is almost as cheap in London as in the best hotels in Rheims; but the experiment of drinking it in the land of its birth is not as risky as on alien shores. At least so say the natives of the district, who maintain that although work in the cellars is not the pleasantest in the world—the strong smell, which is even intoxicating, giving the workmen a distaste for the sparkling wine—it is quite possible for an outsider to drink a quantity of champagne of undoubted quality without feeling any bad after-effects.

“You may, in fact,” it was told me on the spot, “drink four bottles of Pommery ’84, and feel all the better for it next day.”

Possibly; but how about the inferior stuff which we used to sample, occasionally, in our salad days, when our green judgment led us to pass our early mornings in riotous junketings in the now staid and peaceful region of the Haymarket, S.W.? Much later than those days I have sampled alleged champagne—“extra sec,” it was called, though “extra sick” would have been more appropriate—on a race-course, in order to fitly celebrate some famous victory. But in my riper years, the victory (when it occurs) is honoured in more staid and seemly fashion. I was never nearer death by poison than one Friday morning in the ancient city of York, {129} after indulging somewhat freely in the “sparkling” proffered me on the previous day in a booth on Knavesmire. Do what I would—and I walked ten miles, went for a scull on the river Ouse, and then swallowed hot mustard-and-water—the distressing sensations, the great wave of depression which seemed to have swamped the heart, would not quit the body, until—and the idea came as a bolt from the blue—I had summoned up sufficient strength of mind to enter the coffee-room of the principal hotel, and demand a pint of Pommery. It was not a hair of the dog which had bitten me; the mangy brute from the attention of whose fangs I was suffering was no sort of relation to the highly-bred terrier who rooted out the anguish from my soul. And that small pint was so successful that another went the same way. And by that time I had been inspired with nerve enough to face a charging tiger, unarmed.

Many learned people, including one section of the medical profession, incline to the belief that consumption of champagne offers direct encouragement to gout. But there is no such idea amongst those employed in the cellars of Moet et Chandon, Geisler, Mum, Pommery, and other large firms. Not that these workmen are allowed to drink as much of their own foaming productions as they have a mind to. As a matter of fact the wine supplied to the ouvriers is the thin red stuff of the district, resembling inferior Burgundy, and not of a very elevating nature. It is not particularly attractive, this life of labour, for nine or ten hours a day, in a damp, cold {130} cellar some fifty yards below the level of the street pavements, with occasionally bottles bursting to right and left of you. These cellars are cut out of the calcareous rock, and were, many of them, inherited from the Romans; and champagne is such a sensitive, exacting sort of wine that it must be stored in the very bowels of the earth, where all is peace and quietude, and where neither motion nor vibration can reach the maturing vintages.

At least that is what they tell visitors; although the only time I have visited champagne cellars could hardly be called a peaceful experience, owing to the almost continuous bombardment of bursting bottles. And it is said that as a rule at least 10 per cent of the stored wine is wasted in this way; whilst in seasons of early and unusual heat the percentage may rise to as much as 20, and even 25.

Sparkling champagne—and we are not concerned with the still wine—is the result of a peculiar treatment during fermentation. During the winter months the wine is racked-off, and fined with isinglass; and in the early spring it is bottled and tightly corked. In order to collect the sediment in the necks of the bottles these are placed at first in a sloping condition, with the corks downward, for a term. In the second year this sediment requires to be disgorged, or dégagé-ed. This feat can only be learnt by long practice, and even then there be workmen who cannot be safely trusted to shift the sediment, without shifting a too-large proportion of the wine itself. {131}

May I confess to the belief that I should never make a good, reliable, valuable disgorger?

Of course there is art, or knack, in it. The degager takes a bottle, cuts the string of the cork, expels the sediment—occasionally without spilling more than a drop or two—and passes the bottle to his neighbour, who fills it up with a liqueur, composed of sugar-candy dissolved in cognac, and flavoured, and with some bright, clarified wine. The bottle is then recorked, by machinery, wired, labelled, and sent about its business.

The fermentation being incomplete at the first bottling of the wine, the carbonic acid gas generated in a confined space—this part comes unadorned, out of a book—exerts pressure on itself, and it thus remains as a liquid in the wine. When this pressure is removed it expands into gas, and thus communicates the sparkling property to champagne. Hence the bombardments.

How do I know all this? I once paid a visit to the cellars of Pommery et C^ie. ; and my dearest friend asked sub­se­quent­ly what sort of writ of ejectment had to be drawn up to rid them of my presence and thirst. But all joking apart the time was well spent, and the industry is deserving of all the encouragement which it receives. The head cellarman is, literally a host in himself, an old gentleman of aristocratic mien, and portly—or, rather, champagne-ly—presence; and one of the formulae to be gone through before quitting the premises is to drink a glass of the very best with that charming old gentleman, who I hope still flourishes amid his bottles and his {132} disgorgers. And when it is added that there are usually upwards of 15,000,000 bottles in the cellars at one time, the old heresy as to the district being unable to supply sufficient wine save for Russian consumption is at once exploded.

In fact some twenty-five millions of gallons of champagne are produced, annually, in the district. Of course not all of it is of the finest growth, and some of it a connoisseur would reject with scorn. In order to smash another old fallacy it is, perhaps, hardly necessary to add that champagne is not made from gooseberries—at all events in countries where grapes grow. And the reason for this is that gooseberry juice is far scarcer, and therefore more expensive than grape juice. Some few dozens may be made in England, but to make sufficient gooseberry champagne to be profitable would require more berries than are grown in the country. It would, in fact, require hundreds of tons of the fruit to pay the man­u­fac­turer.

Lest my readers should be wearied of the subject of French wines, I shall not particularize as to the burgundies, but confine myself to the clarets of the country which are by far the more popular wines in England—even when they are artificially man­u­fac­tured, in Spain, and elsewhere.

“The wines that be made in Bordeaux,” wrote Gervase Markham, in the middle of the seventeenth century, “are called Gascoyne wines, and you shall know them by their hazel hoopes, and the most be full gadge, and sound wines.”

Evidently adulteration’s artful aid was but little employed in those days. {133}

“See that in your choice of Gascoine wines,” continues Gervase, in his minute direction to the overwrought “housewife,” “that your Clarret wines be faire coloured, and bright as a Rubie, not deepe as an Ametist; for though it may shew strength, yet it wants neatnesse. If your Clarret wine be faint, and have lost his color, then take a fresh hogshead with his fresh lees which was very good wine, and draw your wine into the same, then stop it close and tight, and lay it a foretake for two or three daies that the lees may run through it, then lay it up till it be fine, and if the colour be not perfit, draw it into a red wine hogshead . . . and if your Clarret wine have lost his colour, take a pennyworth of Damsens ” ha! what is this?

“Or else blacke Bullesses, as you see cause, and stew them with some red wine of the deepest colour, and make thereof a pound or more of sirrup, and put it into a cleane glasse, and after into the hogshead of Clarret wine; and the same you may likewise doe unto red wine if you please.”

Ahem ! Evidently they did know something about adulteration in the seventeenth century.

It is a common idea that only a very few clarets are entitled to the prefix “Château.” The truth is very different. The district on the south bank of the Gironde simply teems with châteaux, of a kind. For miles you cannot go a few hundred yards in any direction without seeing or passing two or three; each with its vineyards and cellars and special labels, and more or less unblemished reputation. There is Château {134} Latour, and there is (or may be) the Château Smith. Did I choose to buy a cottage in that district, grow my own grapes, and make my own wines, I should be fully entitled to label them “Château Gubbins,” and incur no penalty by so doing.

But please do not pick the ripe grapes, although you may be sorely tempted by the sight of dozens of bunches separated from the vines by their sheer weight, and lying in the furrows. Plenty of people do commit this sort of theft, for there be hundreds of the rough element who visit the Médoc country. The “Hooligans” and gamins of Bordeaux drift here at picking-time just as the poor of London drift into the county of Kent during the hopping season. They are not loved, but they have to be endured. Somebody must pick the grapes, and after all a few depredations will not ruin the grower any more than do the strawberry-pickers in the south of England “break” the growers, by adopting their usual plan: “three in the mouth, one in the basket.”

The claret-cellars are not nearly as far beneath the earth as are those in the region about Rheims. Nor are they as amusing. There is no “pop, pop” down here, no danger of wounds and lacerations from flying splinters of glass. The principal objects of interest are the cobwebs which are piled up all over the place like dusky curtains. It is not well to sample too many glasses which may be offered you of the wine of the country. For the samples are taken from the new, immature wine, and are suggestive of {135} pains and disturbances below the belt. The head cellarman, portly and urbane like his brother of Rheims, will watch your face closely as you taste his novelties, and will invariably ask your opinion of it. But the wise visitor will not be too opinionative on the subject. I have noticed that the man who says the least is accounted the most knowing, whether he be inspecting the contents of a cellar, or of a stable. And believe me, there is as much rubbish talked about wine as about horses. Still, in sampling new champagne you may praise indiscriminately, without being accounted an absolute dunce; whilst with claret it is altogether different. The wine varies exceedingly with the vintage; and none but an expert and accomplished palate may dare to say what is good, what is bad, and what is mediocre.

Is it necessary to state that claret was not drunk, on ordinary occasions, by the Ancient Britons? I trow not. And I fancy the wines of the noble old Romans partook more of the nature of burgundies than clarets. In England the wines of Médoc have never been fully appreciated until during the latter half of the present century, when the taste for port began to die out, with the good port itself. And as I writhe, occasionally, in the throes of gout, I bethink me of the merciless law delivered unto Moses, which provides that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon their descendants, even unto the third and fourth generation. For the good old three-and-four-bottle men of eighty years ago, and farther back than that, certainly laid {136} the foundations for much of the trouble at this end of the century. Still there be doctors who actually recommend port wine as a gout-fuge. And it is certainly safer to drink a little good port—matured in the wood, and innocent of beeswing—an you be a podagric subject, than some of the clarets which, thanks to the enterprise of the late Mr. W. E. Gladstone, are within the reach of the slenderest purse.

Do not smoke whilst drinking claret, or port, either. Nothing destroys the flavour of red wine so effectually as the flavour of a cigar.

One of the greatest “sells” ever experienced by an expectant party of claret judges—of whom I posed as one—was after this fashion. Our host had inherited a pipe of Château Lafitte ’64, which had been duly bottled off. We had enjoyed a nice plain little dinner—a bit of crimped cod, a steak, and a bird—in order the better to taste the luscious wine. After dinner bottle number one made its appearance; and as they sipped, and prepared to sing hymns of praise, the jaws of the guests fell. And a great cry uprose: “Pricked !”

CHAPTER: XIII THE OLD WINES AND THE NEW

On the decline and fall of port wine volumes might be written. At the same time I am not the man who is going to write them. According to early recollections, the conversation of my elders was limited to hunting, racing, and the wines of Oporto. The man who had “ ’20,” or “Comet,” port in his cellars was a man to be cultivated, and dined with; whilst “ ’34” and “ ’47” men were next in demand. And this was after the era of the three-and-four-bottle heroes, of whose deeds I have heard my father speak, almost with bated breath; how, after the retirement of the ladies, to discuss tea and scandal by themselves, the dining-room door would be locked by the host himself, who would {138} pocket the key thereof. Many of the guests slept where they fell, “repugnant to command,” like the sword of Pyrrhus, whilst others would be fastened in the interior of their chariots at a later hour. Even in the late fifties, the estimable divine with whom I was studying the beauties of the classics, would on the frequent occasion of a dinner-party provide one bottle of port per head, for his guests, in addition to hock, champagne, and sherry; and the writer, then a boy of fifteen, was included amongst the “heads.”

But as the stone age succeeded the ice age, as the iron age succeeded the stone age, and as the gold age, and the railway age, and the rotten company age succeeded the iron age, so have the whisky age, and the “small bottle” age, and the gin-and-bitters age almost wiped out the age when man drank, talked, and thought port. Our ancestors were im­mod­er­ate in their potations but, as far as wine went, these were but rarely indulged in until after sundown, although the Briton would frequently wash his breakfast down with ale of the strongest. And it is difficult to believe that the evil habit of “nipping,” at all hours of the day, which now prevails in some circles—a habit which is mainly due to the break-neck pace at which life is pursued—is either more conducive to health or intellectuality, or morality than the after-dinner debauch of a century ago.

The “hot and heady” wine is (or, rather, was) produced chiefly in a mountainous district of Portugal called Cima de Douro. The wine is largely mixed with spirit even during {139} fermentation, the proper colour being given by a mixture known as jeropiga, which is a preparation of elder-berries, molasses, raisin juice, and spirit.

The wine which is made within the Metropolitan Police District, for the special benefit of landladies, infirmaries, and she-choristers, is also treated with a similar mixture, with the addition of a little logwood-extract; but in fashionable quarters the mixture is not known as jeropiga, a name which would probably affect the sale.

Port wine was known in England before the year 1700, but was not in much demand. From the year mentioned till 1826 the export trade was a monopoly in the hands of English merchants. The effect of this monopoly was to increase the price in England, and to gradually deteriorate the quality. Exports from Oporto have decreased in a marked way for the last forty years or so; and although there is still some demand, and some decent wine left, the “hot and heady” concoction whether dry or fruity, a lady’s wine, or a military ditto, is gradually leaving us.

The pity of it ! And si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly with its de­par­ture comes the pro­nounce­ment of the medical pro­fes­sion that port (with the exception of the “old crusted” brand) does not encourage gout to abide within the human frame. I may fairly claim to have been a “port man” all my life, and never, when serving Her Majesty, overlooked my orthodox allowance of the “black strap” purchased with the Prince Regent’s allowance. Nev­er­the­less I am not going to recommend this description of wine as an ideal breakfast drink; although very early in {140} life I once made trial of it at nine o’clock one morning.

This was in the good town of Reading, in company with a schoolmate or two. We were on our way home for the holidays, and had been entrusted, for the first part of the journey, to the care of the French master. Him we had evaded for the time being—he was much interested in the man­u­fac­ture of sweet biscuits—and marching boldly into the best inn’s best room, we demanded bread and cheese and a bottle of the most expensive port on the wine-list. Schoolboy-like our fancy turned to quaintness in the matter of meals; and I am bound to add that the state of our health was not one whit improved by this weird breakfast. As for the French master, no sooner had he run us to earth, than  but that part of the story is too painful to tell.

One of the oldest winter beverages known to civilization is

Bishop,

a composition of port wine and spices of which it has been written:—

And an effectual luller is this Bishop.

Make several incisions in the rind of a lemon, stick cloves in the incisions, and roast the lemon at a slow fire. Put small but equal quantities of {141} cinnamon, cloves, mace, and all-spice into a saucepan, with half a pint of water; let it boil until reduced one-half. Boil one bottle of port wine; burn a portion of the spirit out of it by applying a lighted paper to the saucepan. Put the roasted lemon and spice into the wine, stir it well, and let it stand near the fire ten minutes. Rub a few lumps of sugar on the rind of a lemon, put the sugar into a bowl with the juice of half a lemon (not roasted), pour the wine into it, grate some nutmeg into it, sweeten to taste, and serve with the lemon and spices floating on the surface.

To sum up, the decline and fall of port in British estimation may be said to be due, mainly, to the following causes: inferiority of most of the modern vintages, the introduction of whisky, the present taste for lighter wines, such as the cheaper clarets and burgundies, with the wines of Germany and Italy, and a sort of “boom” in wines from Australia and California. These last-named, however, are but seldom seen at the tables of the wealthy; and thus far the demand for the productions of gallant little Wales have not been in any great request, although the demand is said to be equal to the supply.

Sherry, the “sack” which was said to cheer the heart of Sir John Falstaff and other of Shakespeare’s heroes, is, like port, a light of other days. Like the wine of Portugal, also, its exportation has for many years been in the hands of English settlers. The following startling statistics have been published about these exports, which statistics speak for themselves: The output to England in 1891 was 2,135,969 gallons, or sixty-four per cent {142} less than in 1873, which was the “record” sherry year. And although many efforts have been made to stem the ebb, the last seven years have shewn a steady decrease in the exports.

Yet, according to the best authorities, sherry is not only the purest, but the most wholesome of all wines. Of course, in making this statement the wine of Spain, the vino de Jerez is implied, and not the home-made productions for the malefit of those who study economy without due regard to digestion. Strictly speaking, sherry means Jerez (pronounced “herreth”) wine. But Manzanilla, a wine which is made at St. Lucas, and Montilla which comes from a town south of Cordova, may come under the same category. And with a view of shewing the wholesomeness of sherry it is stated, by no less an authority than the Lancet, that it is the only wine enjoined in the preparations of the wines of the British Pharmacopœia, with two exceptions—viz. vinum ferri citratis, and vinum quininae, which are made with orange wine. Therefore it is certain that the sufferer from gout, for whom vinum colchici is prescribed, may swallow a proportion of the juice of the grape, and, possibly, a hair of the dog which bit him. This naturally recalls the old story of the sherry which was sent to a former Lord Chesterfield as a panacea for his ailment, and the curt reply sent: “Sir, I have tried your sherry, and prefer the gout.”

There are several types of sherries, according to the different characters developed. These are known by several distinguishing terms {143} comprehending the characters and specific qualities of the wine from one end to the other of a scale ranging from delicate and light wines to rich, generous, and dark-coloured wines. Between a straw-coloured Vino de Pasto and the very fine Old East India Brown—the sherry which two decades ago was in enormous demand at such old-fashioned hostelries as the “Rainbow” in Fleet Street, ere the reign of gin-and-bitters—there is a vast difference, both in colour and flavour. Broadly, however, sherry may be divided into two classes—fino, a light-coloured, delicate light wine of the Amontillado type, and the oloroso, a full-bodied, highly-developed wine.

The sherry grapes are collected and placed in large panniers on the backs of mules and conveyed to the press-houses. The press is of very primitive construction, and is identical with those used in ancient history. It consists simply of a wooden trough about ten feet square, provided in the centre with a screw press, which is used after the treading by foot power is done, to get the last drop of juice out of the crushed mass. Rather less than a ton of grapes serves for one pressing, and the idea that this is done with the naked feet of the Spanish peasantry is a popular error. Sherry is not kneaded like German bread. Men clad in light clothing and shod with wooden clogs, with nails on the soles and heels, pointing in a slanting direction, proceed to tread the grapes in a most methodical manner, proceeding row by row, each row being of the width of the nailed sole of the clog.

After the grapes have been trodden over for {144} the first time, i.e. partly crushed and bruised, a measured quantity of sulphate of lime (Yeso) is sprinkled over the sticky mass—now I have gone so far perhaps ’twould be as well to complete the narrative, although it is not always wise to enquire too closely into the interior economy of wine presses, or kitchens. This sulphate of lime is a pure native earth, found in the neigh­bour­hood of Jerez, and is burnt before being mixed with the grapes. How many sherry drinkers, I wonder, know how largely mother earth enters into their pet tipple? The idea, certainly, does not seem a nice one, but this mixing of lime with sherry is a very ancient custom indeed.

Pliny—where should we modern bookmakers be without dear old Pliny?—mentions the custom as an ancient African one. And in days of yore it must be remembered that Africa was not entirely populated by cannibals and dervishes, but was the home of many who lived wisely and well.

“There’s lime in the sack!” is a sentence put into the mouth of Falstaff. In modern days the process has become known as “plastering,” from the fact that plaster-of-Paris consists principally of sulphate of lime or burnt gypsum.

“It is interesting,” says the Lancet, “to surmise the origin of this very ancient custom. That it had some intelligent basis admits of no doubt. Some think that it had its origin in the fact being noticed that when the grape juice was fermented in alabaster vessels or in marble tanks the wine was better, it clarified quicker, and {145} developed character more sat­is­fac­tor­i­ly. Others regard the addition of sulphate of lime as convenient from a mechanical point of view during the pressing; it was necessary when the grapes were wetter than usual in order to bind the residuary mass together. We do not incline to this view.”

As the Lancet devotes a considerable space to the exposition of the view to which it does incline I may be excused from quoting it in full—more especially as there be tables of percentages, and complicated mathematical calculations in said exposition. But it is proved to the satisfaction of the Lancet that “lime in the sack” is matter in the right place. And although to an uneducated mind lime suggests such terrifying developments of tarda podagra as chalk-stones, possibly the action of the grapes on the lime renders it innocuous.

It is a curious fact that sherry in keeping develops a slight increase of alcohol as the time advances. All spirit added to sherry, however, is obtained from wine itself, corn-spirit in Spain being quite a superfluity, since wine-spirit can be produced so cheaply and in unlimited quantity. Moreover the importation of German spirit into Spain is made practically impossible by a prohibitive duty. Still, unless rumour lies, some Spanish wines receive the German spirit after exportation; so Spain “gets there just the same.”

Here is an item of news which should inspire confidence in the sceptic.

“Good brandy—i.e. a genuine wine-distilled {146} spirit—is being produced in Spain in commercial quantities which it is to be hoped will successfully compete with the stuff erroneously called brandy, not to say Cognac, but of which not a drop has been derived from the grape.”

In my researches into the man­u­fac­ture of port and sherry, I have come across no mention of the phylloxera. I am, therefore, halting between the beliefs, either that the Spaniards and Portuguese understand vermin better than do the French, or that the “vine-louse” has her own reasons for keeping out of Spain and Portugal.

Forty years ago an estimable Irish nobleman was known as “Old Sherry,” from his partiality to that wine. And thirty years ago I was once seated at the table of a General of Division, up at Simla. My right-hand neighbour was a son of this same nobleman, but our host, apparently, did not know this—or had forgotten the fact. At all events, during a lull in the conversation, the General (who had a voice like sharpening a saw) rapped out: “By the way, Captains—you say you’ve been quartered in Ireland—did you ever meet ‘Old Sherry’ there?”

A subaltern can’t very well throw a dinner-roll at a General or stick a carving-fork into his leg; but that is what I, personally, felt like doing.

In mediæval times a sufficient quantity of wine for the needs of the inhabitants was made in gallant little Wales; and the idea of reviving the industry occurred to the Marquis of Bute, who has done so much for the welfare of Cardiff {147} and the neigh­bour­hood. The vineyards are on the site of the old ones, facing south, and the vines were planted twenty years ago, and are very hardy. There is no reason why they should not be propagated to almost any extent, and there is abundant scope for the extension of the vineyards and a proportionate increase in the yield of wine.

The vintages of 1885, 1890, and 1891 are marked in Messrs. Hatch, Mansfield and Co.’s list as “All sold,” and although the vintage of ’98, owing to the long spell of dry weather, does not promise particularly well, the Marquis is no more unfortunate in this respect than most other vine-growers.

Vintages.

As my readers may not all be connoisseurs in the matter of wines, a few words on the subject of vintages may be appropriate, at the close of this chapter.

With regard to cham­pagnes, the good years are ’65, ’68, ’74 (especially good), ’78, ’80, ’84, ’85, ’87 (some­what light in body), ’89, ’92, and ’93. All the other vin­tages since ’65 have turned out more or less badly; and there have been no good vin­tages since ’93.

One of the largest and best vintages of claret on record is that of ’75, which ranks with the older ones of ’48, ’58, and ’64. ’77 is fair, and between that year and ’88 there was no vintage of particular merit. ’93 wine is good, and this year furnished the largest yield since ’75. ’94 wine is exceptionally bad. During the five years {148} from ’82 to ’86 the merits of the wines were completely destroyed by mildew.

The burgundy vintages have been good since ’84. As for ports, the drinkable wines (since ’34) are those of ’41, ’47 (one of the finest wines ever known), ’51 (exceptionally good), ’52, ’53 (fine and fruity), ’54, ’58, ’63, ’68, ’70, ’72, ’75, ’78 (exceptionally fine), ’81, ’84, ’87 (the best since ’78), and ’96 which “shews promise.” The worst years are ’55, ’56, ’57, ’59, ’64, ’66, ’69, ’71, ’74, ’76, ’77, ’79, ’80, ’82, ’83, ’86, ’88, ’91, ’93 (exceptionally bad), ’94, and ’95.

The above statistics are also from Messrs. Hatch, Mansfield and Co.’s list.

CHAPTER XIV THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT

Our grandfathers knew not the Long Drink; the chief reason for this fact being that aërated water, and consequently large tumblers, had not been invented. And soda-water—one of the most ineffectual restoratives I know—was originally employed, under its pet name “sober water,” as a pick-me-up. The Long Drink came in, I fancy, with Cremorne. At primæval Vauxhall men still refreshed themselves with glasses of alleged sherry, and with rummers of brandy-and-water—a flat, stale, and unprofitable potion, which nobody who is in complete possession of his faculties thinks of imbibing nowadays.

Let us now run over a few recipes which require large tumblers to hold the drinks. And we will commence with “cobblers,” those seductive warm-weather importations from the United States. {150}

Dissolve one teaspoonful of sifted sugar in one tablespoonful of water in a tumbler; add two glasses of Catawba, or Asti, or champagne, and fill the tumbler with crushed ice. Shake, ornament with a slice of orange or pine-apple, and drink through straws.

But there is a sameness in the man­u­fac­ture of cobblers, in which almost every known wine, or strong water, may be used, with the other ingredients, ice, sugar, slices of lemon or orange, and water (not much water) added.

Most “cocktails” come under the heading of {151} “Short Drinks,” and will be found duly scheduled, farther on. Here, however, is a long ’un.

Although the mint julep is compounded and used principally in the continent of America, the original “julap” is a Persian word, signifying a sweet potion. John Quincey, the author of a dictionary on Physic, describes julap as “an extemporaneous form of medicine, made of simple and compound water, sweetened, and serves for a vehicle to other forms not so convenient to take alone.” {153}

The simple water is usually omitted nowadays. And here is one recipe for a Mint Julep.

Pound a quantity of ice quite fine, enough to half fill a large tumbler. Add two teaspoonfuls of sugar. Then add a wine-glass of old brandy, half a wine-glass of old rum, and two or three sprigs of mint. Stir well together, and drink through a straw.

Mint julep, it may be added, is supposed to have been introduced into England by Captain Marryat, the nautical novelist.

Large tumbler. Slice of pine-apple. The juice of half an orange, ten drops of maraschino, ten drops {154} of raspberry syrup, half a wine-glassful of gin; half fill the tumbler with crushed ice, shake well, and top up with champagne. Drink through straws.

“But the point of this is to tell you of a very decent drink, mixed by ‘Billy’ ”—presumably the burglar—“himself, on our journey—a most acceptable ‘gargle,’ with two feet of snow and a beastly east wind. {155}

• “ 2 pints lager beer, brought to boiling point.

• 3 glass rhum.

• 3 glass cognac.

• 8 lumps sugar.

• 1 lemon.

“I am afraid the poor fellow won’t get another taste of it for five years.”

Lager beer and “rhum” does not read particularly delectable. But there is no accounting for tastes; and possibly the Burglar’s Brew may find favour amongst some of my young friends.

Reserving the right to re-enter upon the subject of long drinks, I will now touch upon a short one or two. Imprimis,

One wine-glass of brandy, thirty drops of gum syrup, six drops of Angostura bitters, and twenty drops of curaçoa. Stir, and shake well. Place a small shred of lemon-peel atop.

Crushed ice (this is a welcome addition), a wine-glassful of Hollands, a liqueur-glassful of curaçoa, three drops of Angostura, a little sugar, and half a small bottle of Seltzer water. Churn up the mixture with a swizzle-stick, which can be easily made with the assistance of a short length of cane (the ordinary school-treat brand), a piece of cork, a bit of string, and a pocket-knife.

Thirty drops of gum syrup, ten drops of Angostura, ten drops of raspberry syrup, half a wine-glass {159} of gin, and half a wine-glass of vermouth; shake, strain, and add peel.

Break into a small tumbler the yolk of one egg, add one-third of a wine-glass of curaçoa, one-third of a wine-glass of maraschino, and one-third of a wine-glass of brandy; add pounded ice, shake well, and strain; whisk the white of an egg to a stiff froth, and place it on the top; dust with pink sugar, and suck through a straw.

Take a spiral glass (see that you get this) and fill it one-third full of maraschino; place carefully in it the unbeaten yolk of an egg. Surround this with {160} syrup of vanilla, and fill up the glass with old brandy. These ingredients must not mix; and in order to prevent this, pour them over the back of the bowl of a teaspoon into the glass.

A quarter of a glass of raspberry syrup, into a spiral glass, and a like amount of maraschino and green chartreuse. Fill up—I always make this in an old-fashioned champagne-glass, and generally omit the raspberry syrup—with the best old brandy you can get.

Place the yolk of an egg in a spiral wine-glass, half full of yel­low char­treuse. Fill up with Dan­tzicer gold­was­ser, and do not let the in­gre­di­ents mix. This gold­was­ser is said to be the oldest liqueur known in Europe, having been introduced {161} into France by the Italians in the time of Catharine de Medici. Its origin is undoubtedly Italian, and the colourless liquor made in Dantzic, with the fragments of gold leaf floating therein, is a fiery imitation of the real thing.

CHAPTER XV STILL HARPING ON THE DRINK

“Sangaree” is generally associated with soft-shell crabs and “yellow Jack”; nev­er­the­less here are a few recipes for concocting the drink, in its various forms.

In America it is made in a large tumbler, with half a tablespoonful of sugar, the juice of half a lemon, a squirt of Seltzer water from a syphon, and a wine-glassful of old cider brandy. Nearly fill the glass with crushed ice, and ornament with any fruit in season.

A large tumbler is used, the juice of six limes is squeezed therein, care being taken to remove the pips. A wine-glassful of Old Tom is added, then a liqueur-glassful of raspberry syrup, three quarters of a liqueur-glassful of orange bitters, a wine-glassful of water, and three drops of Angostura bitters. Nearly fill the tumbler with crushed ice, and shake. {166}

The yolks of two eggs, well beaten, were placed in a large tumbler, a little sifted sugar was added, and a small tumblerful of hot milk was gradually stirred into the mixture. Last of all a large wine-glassful of “John Jameson” was added.

Cut the top off a lemon, and hollow out the interior with the handle-end of a spoon. Place the empty cone thus formed by the skin on the top of a large wine-glass. Fill the cone with brandy, rum, or whisky; take a fork, balance a piece of sugar on the prongs, set the spirit alight, and hold the sugar over the flame until it has melted into the cone. Then take a skewer, and pierce a small hole in the base of the cone. When all the spirit has trickled into the glass, throw the cone away, and drink the result. {167}

“This process,” says my informant, writing from Davos, “sanctifies good liquor, and makes inferior ditto distinctly welcome.”

“Some years since three men were encamped on Texas Prairie, 500 miles from the sea-coast, when one of them was sick unto death with fever, and was frantically crying out for oysters; he was quite sure that if he could only have an oyster or two he would be cured. After much thought as to how they were to procure what he wanted, one of them, having procured some prairie hens’ eggs, not far from the camp, broke one, and putting the yolk into a glass, sprinkled it with a little salt and pepper, adding a little vinegar, and gave it to his sick companion, who declared it was just the thing he wanted; and from that hour he began to get better, and eventually got quite well.”

The name “negus” is suggestive of a children’s party—as well as of the east coast of {168} Africa; ’tis a comparatively harmless beverage, said to have been invented by one Colonel Negus.

Beat up an egg with a tablespoonful of sifted sugar; add one tablespoonful of boiling water, one wine-glassful of brandy, and one wine-glassful of rum. Fill up the tumbler with boiling milk, mix well, and dust with nutmeg.

Put into a silver cup, which has been previously heated, a wine-glassful of Scotch whisky (proof) and one wine-glassful of boiling water; set on fire, and have ready another cup, also heated, and pass the blazing liquid from one cup to the other, three or four times. Serve in a small tumbler with a little sugar and lemon.

Take a small tumbler and bestow therein one wine-glassful of brandy, six drops of Angostura bitters, a liqueur-glassful of curaçoa, and some crushed ice. Shake well, and strain. {171}

Although the word “Posset” suggests a bad cold in the head it may be noticed en route, with other potions. It is a medicated drink of some antiquity; for among the numerous English authors who in some way or other speak of it, the divine William has made one of his characters say: “We’ll have a posset . . . at the latter end of a sea-coal fire.”

And Sir John Suckling, who died in 1641, says in one of his poems:—

Put one pint of milk into a saucepan, and when it boils pour in a gill of sherry; boil it till the curd becomes hard, then strain it through a fine sieve. Rub a few lumps of sugar on the rind of a lemon and put them into the whey; grate a small quantity of nutmeg into it, and sweeten to taste.

CHAPTER XVI “APPLE SASS”

According to some chroniclers the ancient Britons made cider—or “seider” as the poor ignoramuses wrote it—but it must have been nasty stuff according to our civilized ideas; for until the Romans came to visit us the apple was not cultivated in Britain, nor, indeed, any fruit or vegetable. Our blue forefathers were not particular as to what they ate or drank; and I should think the fermented juice of wild or “crab” apples must have corroded the throats of the hardiest.

It is claimed for cider, and perry, that no fermented drinks do less hurt to the imbiber; although one authority states that the man who {175} drinks too much of either invariably falls on the back of his head, which sounds rather dangerous. Whether the drinking of cider in moderation conduces to long life deponent sayeth not; but no less an authority than Lord Bacon evidently thought so; and in his History of Life and Death he tells of eight men dancing a Morris-dance, whose ages, added together, were 800 years, “tennants of one Mannour” belonging to the Earl of Essex, and habitual cider-drinkers. But the lengthening of the days of the imbiber depends, in all probability, upon the brand of cider. I have tasted some varieties which were capable, apparently, of shortening life, rather than of prolonging it; and in parts of Somersetshire, even at the present day, the locals—case-hardened and poison-proof to a man—swill a horrible decoction, which would probably kill off an alien, at long range, most speedily and effectively.

Cider was called “cidre” and “sithere” by fourteenth century writers; and the word is said to be a corruption of the Greek sikera, used in the Septuagint to translate the Hebrew shekar, usually rendered “strong drink” in the Old Testament.

“The name of Cider,” says one of these old writers, “if from Sikera, is but a general name for an inebriating or an intoxicating drink, and may argue their ignorance in those times of any other name than Wine for that liquor or juice in the Saxon or Norman language, either of those nations being unwilling (it’s probable) to use a British name for so pleasing a drink, they not affecting the Britains, made use of few of their {176} words; but since that, that wines have been imported from foreign parts in great quantities, the English have been forced to make use of the old British name SEIDER, or Cider, for distinction sake, although the name vinum may be as proper for the juice of the apple as the grape, if it be derived either from Vi or Vincendo, or quasi Divinum, as one would have it. Also the vulgar tradition of the scarcity of foreign wines in England, viz. that Sack, which was then imported for the most part but from Spain, was sold in the apothecaries’ shops as a cordial medicine; and the vast increase in vineyards in France (Ale and Beer being usual drinks in Spain and France in Pliny’s time) is an argument sufficient that the name of Wine, might be attributed to our British Cider, and of vineyards to the places separated for the propagating the fruit that yields it.”

As a matter of fact the best cider in the world is made in Normandy. And for what purpose do the Normans make it? To send to the Champagne country to be sold to the unsuspecting tourist as the sparkling wine of that district. This is solid truth. Hundreds of millions of gallons are made in Normandy with the most scrupulous care, under the supervision of experienced chemists, and the bulk is eventually sold as champagne. And not only champagne, but claret, white wines, and even honest, manly, beautiful, unsophisticated, good old Portuguese port, owe their being in some instances to Normandy apples; the rich colour of the port being added by log-wood, beet-juice, {177} and the root of the rhatany. In fact, genuine port can be so closely imitated as to deceive many a good judge; and it really seems wonderful that the British farmer does not go in for making port wine, with apples so plentiful and cheap, and beet, mangels, and elderberries so easy to cultivate. In fact, given the time, and the materials, I am convinced that I could produce an excellent ’98 wine for laying down, for hospital purposes, public rejoicings, or miladi’s boudoir.

Cider, like all other useful drinks, can be, and is, imitated; and Bands of Hope and other well-meaning but misguided associations are chiefly responsible for this. What is known at Sunday-school treats and Salvation Army marriage-feasts as “non-alcoholic cider” has been found, on analysis, to be “a water solution of sugar and citric acid, flavoured with apple essence.” It’s the flavouring as does it.

“Harvest cider,” as home-made for the “hands,” is dreadful stuff, and absolutely unfit for human consumption. Apples which have fallen of themselves, or been blown off the trees, “windfalls,” are left on the ground to rot, and be eaten of slugs and wasps; and are then shovelled into the cider-mill, together with leaves, stalks, slugs, wasps, dirt of all sorts, spiders, ear-wigs, wire-worms, “Daddy Long-legs”-es, and—other things; the whole being converted into a species of “hell-broth,” which would have done credit to the best efforts of the witches in Macbeth, when properly mixed.

For a long time the Germans held aloof from {178} the man­u­fac­ture of cider. The good Rhine wine, and the flowing and flatulent lager of their own country, were good enough for the Teutonic palate. But when it comes to a question of making money, with the risk reduced to a minimum, Germany seldom “gets left,” as the Yankees say. Some of the inhabitants of the Fatherland discovered, about two decades ago, that there was gelt in cider, and since that time apples have been imported from France, by train-loads, for the purpose of being converted into cider. Germany now exports nearly twelve times as much of this fascinating beverage as does France; and under whatever name it may figure in the bills—German Champagne, Military Port, Äpfel-wein, or Sparkling Hock—away goes the apple juice to all parts of the civilized world, including Damascus, Pekin, Khartoum, San Francisco, and Shaftesbury Avenue. In Frankfort-on-the-Maine alone there are more than fifty cider-factories, and the industry brings the town at least half a million sterling per annum.

“The fruits of the earth,” says the ancient chronicler quoted above, “and especially of trees, were the first food ordained for man to eat.”

And yet I had always understood that it was for eating an apple that our first parents were evicted from the garden. But to continue the quotation.

“And by eating of which (before flesh became his meat) he lived to a far greater age than since any have been observed to have lived. And of all the fruits our Northern parts produce, there’s none more edible, nor more wholesome than Apples; {179} which by the various preparations of the cook are become a part of our table entertainment almost throughout the year, and are esteem’d to be very temperate and nourishing.

“They relax the belly, which is a very good property in them; but the sweet more than the sharp. They help concoction, eaten after meat, with a little bread: you may be confident that an apple eaten after supper”—paste this in your hats, ye revellers—“depresseth all offensive vapours that otherwise would offend the head, and hinder sleep. Apples rosted, scalded, or otherwise prepared, according to the skill of the operatour, are good in many hot diseases, against Melancholy, and the Pleurisie.

“But Cider is much to be preferr’d, it being the more pure and active part separated from the impure and feculent; and without all, peradventure, is the most wholesome drink that is made in Europe for our ordinary use, as before is observed. For its specifick vertues, there is not any drink more effectual against the Scurvy. It is also prevalent against the Stone, and by its mundifying qualities is good against the diseases of the Spleen, and is esteem’d excellent against Melancholy.”

Possibly the course of time has made us merrier than our forbears; at all events “mel­an­choly” is a disease for which no remedy is prescribed in the modern editions of the Pharmacopœia. What with musical farces, and Arthur Roberts, and the means to purchase a “livener” next morning, no citizen of London is justified in the possession of lowness of spirits. {180}

Making cider is easy enough, but requires, like all other man­u­fac­tures, care and a modicum of common sense. And here let me join issue with those who maintain that the inferiority of English cider is due to the antiquated methods employed in making it. In the first place I question the inferiority; and in the second, although it is a fact that there is very little difference between the methods of to-day and two hundred years ago, we are more careful, on the whole, in the selection of the material. Far more important than complicated machinery is the proper choice of apples. Grow these in a scientific way, and do not eat all the best for dessert. The cider apple should be neither green nor over-ripe—and certainly not rotten like those used occasionally for the harvesters—free from injury (and therefore not a “windfall”) and just full ripe. The selected fruit should be placed in a mill which breaks them up and pulps them; the pulp is then put under a press, and squeezed dry to the last drop. The liquid is then left to ferment, and this process should be very gradual, and be closely watched. Finally the cider is drawn off, the finest qualities being bottled, and they may be regarded as pure wine. At all events they are frequently sold “as sich.”

It is claimed that cider, when pure and well made, is not merely an extremely wholesome drink, but a very helpful one to those who suffer from gout or rheumatism. It is asserted that cider will even cure these painful disorders, and that those who drink the juice of the apple are far less subject to aching joints and limbs than {181} other quaffers. It is the “malic acid” in the liquor which is so inimical to these diseases; and as a cider-drinker of considerable experience, and a sad sufferer, at times, from both diseases, I can safely say that there is no “touch” of either in the “natural” Norfolk cider made by Messrs. Gaymer—a dry wine which is very palatable, and is one of the best and the most wholesome of beverages.

Cider at its strongest does not contain a large percentage of alcohol, and its makers contend that its qualities are more health-giving and far less heady than those of any other liquor con­sumed in England. Ac­cord­ing to Mr. Rad­cliffe Cooke, an enthusiast on the subject, the revival in the cider industry dates from 1890, and there is every hope that that industry will flourish more and more, through the centuries. The recognized cider fruit may be divided into “bitter-sweets”—such as the so-called Norman apples and the Wildings—and the “red” fruits, such as the nearly extinct “Red Streak.” The best cider is made from an admixture of the two sorts. But the gout-fuge cider, we gather from another writer, should be made from a single sort of apple.

“There is no difficulty,” writes Mr. Cooke, “in expressing the apple juice; but the fermentation process is not sufficiently studied, and it is here that failure commonly occurs.”

“As for the making of Perry and Cider,” writes an authority of the seventeenth century, “which are drinkes much used in the West parts, and other countries well stored with fruit in this {182} kingdome; you shall know that your perry is made of peares onely, and your cider of apples; and for the manner of making thereof, it is done after one fashion, that is to say, after your Peares and Apples are well prickt from the stalkes, rottennesse, and all manner of other filthe, you shall put them in the presse mill which is made with a mil-stone running round in a circle, under which you shall crush your peares or apples, and then straining them through a bagge of haire cloth, tunne up the same (after it hath bene a little setled) into hogs-heads, barrels, and other close vessels.

“Now after you have prest all, you shall save that which is within the haire cloth bagge, and putting it into severall vessels, put a pretty quantity of water thereinto, and after it hath stood a day or two, and hath beene well stirred together, presse it over also againe, for this will make a small perry or cider, and must be spent first. Now of your best cider that which you make of your summer or sweete fruit you shall call summer or sweete cider or perry, and that you shall spend first also; and that which you make of the winter and hard fruit, you shall call winter and sowre cider, or perry; and that you may spend last, for it will indure the longest.”

We don’t boil much cider nowadays, but this was a custom in con­sid­er­able favour with the ancients.

“In many places,” says another writer, “they boyl their cider, adding thereto several spices, which makes it very pleasant, and abates the unsavoury smack it contracts by boyling, but {183} withal gives it a high colour. This way is not to be commended, because the juice of the apple is either apt to extract some ill savour from the brass or copper, we being not acquainted with any other vessels to boyl it in, or the sediment of it is apt to burn by its adhering to the sides of the vessel, it being boyl’d in a naked fire.

“But if you are willing to boyl your cider, your vessel ought to be of Latten, which may be made large enough to boyl a good quantity, the Tin yielding no bad tincture to the liquor. . . . It many times happens that cider that hath been good, by ill-management or other accident becomes dead, flat, sowr, thick, muddy, or musty; all which in some sort or other may be cured. You may cure deadness or flatness in cider by grinding a small parcel of apples, and putting them in at the bung-hole, and stopping it close, only sometimes trying it by opening the small vent that it force not the vessel; but then you must draw it off in a few days, either into bottles or another vessel, lest the Murc corrupt the whole mass. Cider that is dead or flat will oftentimes revive again of itself, if close stopt, upon the revolution of the year and approaching summer.”

Hippocras.

Here is an ancient recipe:—

Take of cardamoms, carpobalsamum, of each half an ounce, coriander-seeds prepared, nutmegs, ginger, of each two ounces, cloves two drachms; bruise and infuse them two days in two gallons of the richest sweetest cider, often stirring it together, then add {184} thereto of milk three pints, strain all through an hippocras bag, and sweeten it with a pound of sugar-candy.

D’you kna-ow—as the curate in The Private Secretary says—I am not taking any hippocras to-day.

“Wormwood imbib’d in cider,” says another writer, “produceth the effect that it doth in wine.” Evidently some nasty effect; only conceive an admixture of absinthe and cider!

That the ancients loved mixtures—and sweet mixtures—is pretty evident from the writings of Pliny and others. Were a man to invite me to drink apple juice in the which had been bottled dried juniper-berries, I should probably hit that man in the eye, or send for a policeman. But two or three hundred years ago “juniper-cider” appears to have been a popular drink, although we read that “the taste thereof is somewhat strange, which by use will be much abated.”

Ginger, cloves, cinnamon, currants, honey, rosemary, raspberries, blackberries, elderberries, and “clove-July-flowers,” all used to be put into cider, by way of flavouring; “but the best addition,” says the same writer, “that can be to it is that of the lees of Malaga Sack or Canary new and sweet, about a gallon to a hogshead; this is a great improver and a purifier of cider.”

Evidently in those days they had some crude sort of ideas on the subject of Cider Cup.

CHAPTER XVII CORDIALS AND LIQUEURS

Take six dozen pounds of cherries, half red and half black, and mash or squeeze them with your hands to pieces, and put to them three gallons of brandy, and let them stand steeping twenty-four hours. Then put the mash’d cherries and liquor a little at a time into a canvas bag, and press it as long as any juice will run; sweeten it to your taste, and put it into a vessel fit for it, and let it stand a {186} month, and bottle it out; put a lump of loaf-sugar into every bottle.

Another way, and a nicer; the idea of squeezing cherries to pieces with the human hands savouring of barbarism—and fingers.

Take Black Geans or Black Morellos—but remember that the former are sweet, the latter acid and bitter, and there will be a great difference in the results. They must not be over-ripe. Take off the stalks, and if you choose prick them with a pin. Fill a bottle with them three-quarters, pour in brandy to the neck, and cork it up. It will be ready in a month.

It will be noticed that no mention of sugar is made in the above. The necessary quantity would naturally vary, according to the description of cherry employed.

Yet another—my way.

This can either be made from Black Gean cherries, or Morellos, but the latter are better for the purpose. Every pound of cherries will require one quarter of a pound of white sugar and one pint of the best brandy. The cherries, with the sugar well-mixed with them, should be placed in wide-mouthed bottles, filled up with brandy; and if the fruit be previously pricked, the mixture will be ready in a month. But a better blend is procured if the cherries are untouched, and this principle holds good with all fruit treated in this way, and left corked for at least three months.

It should be borne in mind that these cordials are far better when home-made—provided always {187} the best materials be used. The cherry brandy, sloe gin, etc. etc., which is bought is not always made with ’65 cognac. Remember how many people have to make some sort of profit out of what can be purchased over the counter.

One more way.

Put six pounds of black cherries, six pounds of Morellos, and two pounds of strawberries in a cask. Bruise them slightly with a stick, then add three pounds of sugar, twelve cloves, half an ounce of powdered cinnamon, and two grated nutmegs, with a quarter of the kernels of the cherry-stones, and a handful of mint and balm. Pour over these six quarts of brandy, and let the cask remain open for ten days. Then close it, and in two months it will be fit for use.

Allow one pound of sugar to one pound of sloes. Half fill an ordinary quart bottle with sugared sloes, and fill up with gin. If the sloes have been previously pricked, the liqueur will be fit for use in a couple of months; but ’tis better not to prick them, but let the gin do its own work of extraction. In that case the bottle should not be uncorked within twelve months.

A great deal of the alleged sloe gin sold is light in colour, and has evidently been hurried in its preparation. A great deal more is quite innocent of sloe juice, and is merely inferior gin, diluted and coloured. The orthodox sloe gin should bear the hue of “fruity” port wine. See that you get it.

Steep in one bottle of old Scotch whisky one pint of white currants, stripped of their stalks, the thin rind of a lemon, and one teaspoonful of essence of ginger. Let the mixture stand for forty-eight hours, and then strain through a hair sieve. Add one pound of loaf-sugar, which will take at least a day to thoroughly dissolve. Then bottle off and cork well. It will be ready for use in three months, but will keep longer.

A cordial which is but seldom asked for nowadays was known in the seventeenth century as

And then notify the undertaker, I should think. The Merry Monarch had his faults, but, surfeit or no surfeit, it is hard to believe that a king could bring himself to lap such a {190} “hell-broth” as the above. Pah! Let us take the taste out with

Take a gallon of best brandy, and mix with it a pound of orange-flowers which have been boiled. Save the water, sweeten it, and bottle off the mixture.

And the author of the above adds: “ ’Tis a good cordial.” Three hundred years ago carraways invariably figured at the dessert-table in England. The seeds now appear either in cakes for school-treats, sugar-plums, or the favourite liqueur known as

To every pound of fruit (which should not be quite ripe) add one pound of loaf-sugar. Put the apricots into a preserving-pan, with sufficient water to cover them. Let them boil up, and then simmer gently until tender. Remove the skins. Clarify and boil the sugar, then pour it over the fruit, and let it remain twenty-four hours. Then put the apricots into wide-mouthed bottles, and fill them up with syrup and brandy, half and half. Cork tightly, and seal the tops of the corks.

This apricot brandy should be prepared in the month of July, and kept at least twelve months before using.

Take the thin rinds of six Seville oranges, and put them into a stone jar, with half a pint of the strained juice and half a gallon of good old brandy. Let it remain three days, then add one pound and a quarter of loaf-sugar—broken, not pounded—and stir till the sugar is dissolved. Let the liquor stand a day, strain it through paper until quite clear, pour into bottles, and cork tightly. The longer it is kept the better.

The ancients apparently interpreted the word “cordial” in a different way to our later way; and their cordials were chiefly used in the sick-room.

Fill a large still with marigold flowers, and strew on it an ounce of ground nut­meg; beat them grosly, and take an ounce of the best English saf­fron, pull it, and mix with the flowers; then take three pints of mus­ca­dine or tent, or Malaga sack, and with a sprig of rose­mary dash it on the flowers; then distil it off with a slow fire, and let it drop on {193} white sugar-candy; draw it off till it begins to be sowre, save a pint of the first running to mix with other waters on an extra­or­di­nary occasion; mix the rest together to drink by itself. Take five or six spoon­fuls at a time.

As Hamlet observes, on a memorable occasion: “Oh, hor­rible, hor­ri­ble, most hor­ri­ble ! ”

The name of the “little refreshers” consumed at tavern-bars in large cities is legion. I have heard the following compounds called for, at dif­fer­ent times: sherry-and-bitters—there being at least half a dozen sorts of bitters—gin-and-ditto, whisky-and-ditto; vermouth (Italian or French), vermouth-and-sloe-gin, gin-and-sherry, gin-and-orange-gin, sloe-gin, gin-and-sloe-gin (commonly called “slow-and-quick”), curaçoa-and-brandy, whisky alone, brandy alone, gin alone. And in the Borough there is a dreadful mix­ture known by the approp­ri­ate name of

I should question the “pick-me-up” part of this story; therefore shall not schedule “Twist” in my list of Restoratives, in the next chapter.

Put a little in a saucer; take a lump of sugar, set fire to it, and replace it in the saucer, so that the rest of the liquid may be set ablaze. When the flame is burnt out and the sugar melted, the liqueur is fit to drink.

The French make different imitations of the true liqueur, one of them from peach-stones, which they call “Marasquin de pêches.” And in the true Maraschino of Zara there be a few peach-stones mixed with those of the geans. These are small and quite black, and are fermented first with honey, then with the leaves and kernels of the fruit, and are last of all distilled and sweetened with sugar.

One more cordial, to finish the chapter. The recipe was given in the Lady’s Pictorial, by Mrs. C. E. Humphry, the delightful and ever-welcome “Madge” of Truth. I can vouch for the efficacy of the potion.

CHAPTER XVIII THE AFTERMATH OF REVELRY

This is a world of compensations. Therefore it is of no use shut­ting our eyes to the fact that for every minute of inju­di­cious, over-estimated revelry, of devotion to the rosy god, passed at night in the best of society, with boon com­pan­ions, we are liable to an hour’s dis­tur­bance, worry, agony of mind, head­ache, remorse of con­science, “jim-jams,” “Kat­zen­jam­mer” (the equiv­a­lent for “hot coppers”)—call it what you will, next day. Some suf­fer for over-indulgence more than others. There be so-called “seasoned casks” who claim that no amount of debauchery can affect them for the worse, as long as the {199} liquor be good, and not swal­lowed too quickly. But, although these may “come up smiling” next day, on making their first public appearance, the col­lapse, the down­fall is only post­poned. With­out being able to explain these things medically, it is certain that Alcohol—which is, as previously explained, the Devil in Solution—will destroy in the end, if you abuse her, although her methods of destruc­tion may dif­fer, according to the capacity, or con­sti­tu­tion, of her victims.

And let not the over-estimator expect any sympathy from the world, or any part of it, whilst he is experiencing the “remorse of conscience” stage. Katzenjammer patients are sternly and forcibly refused admission to any public hospitals, even if in extremis; for mercy, charity, and the medical faculty have refused hitherto to recognize the fact that alcoholism is a disease. And he who is “jumpy” and nervous of a morning has just as much chance of obtaining condolence from friends or relatives as has the casual sufferer from gout. Both disorders are, in fact, excellent provocatives of badinage and laughter.

I remember hearing of an accountant in Cape Town, a hardened and determined “night bird,” a frequenter of hostelries, a boon companion—in short, a sot. He was called as a witness in an intricate case in the High Court, one morning, whilst suffering terribly from nerves. It was heart-rending to watch his agony. His features twitched, his eyes rolled, and his hands shook as though afflicted with palsy on the higher scale. The ledgers which {200} were occasionally handed up to him by the usher, for reference, slipped from his grasp, and documentary testimony flew all over the counsels’ wigs. At length the notice of the judge was attracted to the state of things.

“What is the matter with that witness?” asked his lordship. “Is he trifling with the court?”

“M’lord,” said counsel for the plaintiff, “I am instructed that the witness is what may be called a free-liver, and that it is often necessary for him to swallow a dram in the morning, before proceeding to business. I am also instructed that the witness overslept himself this morning, and had no time to procure the necessary dose, before appearing as a witness before your lordship.”

“Tut, tut!” exclaimed the judge. “This is wasting the time of the court. Let him be removed at once to the waiting-room and dosed with old brandy.”

He was a practical judge; and in five minutes’ time that accountant had pulled himself together.

And an even more painful case than the above is within my memory. A certain newspaper-proprietor was in the habit of paying the weekly wages of his staff himself, each member having to sign a receipt for the reward of merit. The fashion-editor—a hardened libertine—turned up one Saturday, before his chief, absolutely incapable of signing his name, or any part of it. His gait was all right, as was his speech; but the pen slipped through his fingers as though it had been a well-oiled icicle. The {201} chief called the next case, the while some of us poured over-proof rum down the throat of the fashion-editor at an adjacent hostelry. He sub­se­quent­ly trousered his salary, and signed the receipt, sat­is­fac­tor­i­ly, after pleading that he was suffering that morning from “shock.”

The chief looked somewhat incredulous.

“Is he an inebriate?” he asked, as soon as the invalid had left the office.

“Oh! dear no, sir,” replied the acrostic-editor, “he’s almost a teetotaller.”

And the incident was finished.

But what is really the best thing to be done under such sad circumstances? Should the invalid resort to the old remedy, and take at once that “hair of the dog” who bit him overnight? Not invariably. For instance, should British port, or brandy of the desiccated-window-sill (vide a former chapter) have been the causa teterrima of the trouble, nobody, however shaky, would revert to such remedies, the first thing after waking. And frequently it is difficult for the waker to remember which dog it was that assaulted him. I once visited a young friend in his chambers, at the hour of noon, and found him with a sad countenance, seated in an easy-chair faced by a perfect army of assorted bottles. I was about to administer a mild reproof, but he stopped me.

“It’s all right, dear old chappie, I’ve been taking a hair of the dog—you know. But I met such a lot of dogs, jolly dogs too, last night, that I’m hanged if I can remember which of ’em bit me!” {202}

The ancients cooled their coppers, for the most part, with ale, either small or large. And I am led to the belief that cider, or some preparation of apples, was also used as a pick-me-up, if “mel­an­choly vapours”—a complaint for which Gervase Markham specially rec­om­mend­ed cider as a specific—meant the same thing as alcoholic remorse. Search as I may I can find no recipe, no prescription, in old books for “hot coppers.” Can it be that the ancients, who as previously pointed out, were not teetotallers, deceived themselves in protesting before men that they had no sin?

But this is an alleged preventive of the act, and not a chaser of sorrow from the brow of the unwise partaker.

“To quicken a man’s wits,” writes the same Mr. Markham, “spirit and memory, let him take Langdebeefe”—can this mean langue de bœuf?—“which is gathered in June or July, and beating it in a cleane mortar; Let him drinke the juyce thereof with warme water, and he shall finde the benefit.”

Probably the most useful part of this prescription was the warm water; still it can hardly be regarded as a restorative. {203}

Other recipes are before me, for “drawing out bones broken in the head,” and “for the falling of the mould of the head”; but these, apparently, have no concern with the question at issue. But to continue the search—eureka!

This I take to be a bona fide pick-me-up of two hundred years ago; and if “carduns” be the old spelling of “cardamom” ’tis very much the same mixture that the chemist will place in the trembling hand of the over-estimator, enquiring at the same time, “Would you like a lozenge after it, sir?” And the omission of sal volatile or chloric ether in the prescription leads to the belief that those drugs were joys unknown to the reveller of the seventeenth century.

The most aggravating part about the aftermath of revelry is that it takes, just as it likes, directly opposite forms. Two sinners may jump the same stiff course—by this sporting metaphor is meant imbibe the same amount and description of alcohol—after dinner, and, whilst A may wake with a double-breasted headache, a taste of sewage in the mouth, and a tongue as foul and furry as a stoat’s back, B will commence the day with a {204} dreadful sinking at the base of the stomach, palpitation of the heart, and a desire to eat anything solid within reach. A prays faintly for burnt brandy, or death, and could not swallow even a devilled biscuit, were you to promise to make him a director of a gold-mine for performing that feat; whilst B is “dead off” brandy, but is capable of washing down ham and eggs and chops unlimited, with a gallon or two of coffee. Any medical man will doubtless give a reason for this discrepancy, which is quite beyond my powers of elucidation.

First and foremost, bear in mind that this appetizer must not be made in the kitchen. It comes under the heading of “parlour cookery,” and can even be man­u­fac­tured in the bedroom of the sufferer.

A hot-water plate is necessary for the operator, or, better still, a slop-basin filled with water as near the boiling point as possible, with a plate placed atop. Melt on this plate a piece of butter about the size of a walnut, and when the butter is oiled stir therein with a fork the beaten yolk of one egg. Keep on the stir, and add, gradually, a dessert spoonful of essence of anchovies. Add cayenne, according to your disposition, or indisposition, and then you will be ready for a nice strip or two of delicately-browned toast, brought up hot from the kitchen fire. Soak the toast in the mixture, and eat as much as you can.

Above is the estimate for one invalid. It is essentially a pick-me-up for a bachelor—benedicts never require these things—and if, whilst in barracks, or chambers, Jack, Tom, and Harry should call, the proportions of the ingredients must, of course, be increased. A glass or two of the Boy will be found to go down excellent well with this toast, the secret of which I learnt long years ago, in British India. It is not a dish for the dinner-table.

Beat the yolks of sixteen eggs and twelve tablespoonfuls of pulverized loaf-sugar to the consistency of cream; stir into this two-thirds of a grated nutmeg, and then pour in half a pint of good old brandy, or Jamaica rum—or both n.q.—and three wine-glasses of Madeira. Have ready the whites of the sixteen eggs, whipped to a stiff froth, and beat them well into the above mixture, and then stir in six pints of new milk, as fresh as possible from the cow.

One of the best restoratives is that which is frequently given by the trainer of an athlete, or boxer, should his charge feel the effects of overwork. It consists of the heart of a good loin chop, free from fat, and neither underdone nor overdone, on a very hot plate, with a glass of port wine poured over the meat. Another familiar strengthener is prepared in the following way:—

Put a tablespoonful of old brandy into half a pint of good beef-tea. And by beef-tea I mean the juices of the meat extracted at home, and not by the employées of advertising firms. “Breakfast delicacies” and tinned preparations are only for the unwary. This may be taken either hot or cold. {207}

To a pint bottle of orange wine add ten grains of sulphate of quinine, cork well, and let it stand for a few days. Take a wine-glassful at a time, either with or without a dash of soda-water.

A favourite restorative of the working man, who has been propounding abstruse political problems in the tap-room all night, is a red-herring, eaten raw, with the aid of his clasp-knife. This he will wash down with some sort of ale, or with a mixture of gin-and-peppermint, according to the state of his feelings. That old, heroic soberer the Pump, is not much used for that purpose, nowadays.

I have already alluded in another chapter to a Prairie Oyster. A Worcester Oyster is made in the same way, with the substitution of Worcester sauce for vinegar.

Into a wine-glass half full of curaçoa pop the unbroken yolk of a bantam’s egg, and fill the glass up with maraschino. I think I should prefer the “Twist” of the workers in the Borough hop-market.

Ten drops of Angostura bitters in a wine-glass, filled up with orange-bitters. One wine-glassful of old brandy, one ditto cold water, one liqueur-glassful of curaçoa, and the juice of half a lemon. This, I should say, ought to be mixed with a swizzle-stick.

One ounce of Seville orange-peel, half an ounce of gentian-root, a quarter of an ounce of cardamoms. Husk the cardamoms, and crush them with the gentian-root. Put them in a wide-mouthed bottle, and cover with brandy or whisky. Let the mixture remain for twelve days, then strain, and bottle off for use, after adding one ounce of lavender drops.

A hot-pickle sandwich may be made with two thin, crisp slices of toast, with chopped West-Indian pickles in between. There are also many excellent sandwiches made for restorative purposes, by the nymphs who enliven the various Bodegas by their abilities and pretty prattle. And of those sandwiches commend me to the one labelled “Rajah.”

But, after all, fresh air and exercise are the best of all restoratives; and most of the above recipes are adduced in the interest of the jaded Londoner, or the dweller in cities, to whom a ride, or a walk, save on Sundays and Bank holidays, {210} is a rarity. Get on your hack and gallop a dozen miles to covert. By the time you have mounted your first hunter, you will have forgotten all about the dog which may have bitten you on the previous night, and will also have forgotten a stern resolution made, whilst shying at your breakfast, never again to put whisky, however old, atop of claret. And by the time you have jumped three ox-fences, and a great yawning drain big enough and deep enough to bury the whole field, you will have recovered every bit of that “nerve” about which you had just a suspicion of a doubt, just before mounting your hack. God grant that nerve may be with you always!

CHAPTER XIX THE DRINKS OF DICKENS

Although it is the fashion of the day to belittle, if not sneer at, the works of “Boz,” he has still sufficient admirers to justify a chapter on what is, I hope, a congenial subject to my readers. The characters may be unduly elaborated, and the incidents too much spun-out for these slap-dash, go-ahead times; but it is to the simple, homely, hospitality so often referred to in the novels of Charles Dickens that most of them owed that popularity which may, or may {212} not, be on the wane. The close student of these novels will discover that all which is good, and honest, and upright, and charitable is honoured in their pages, whilst meanness, deceit, hypocrisy, and cant are lashed with no uncertain hand. “The greatest of all gifts is Charity,” is the lesson taught by Charles Dickens, who shewed at the same time that it is quite possible to enjoy the good things of life without making a beast of oneself. And he it was who clothed Christmas in that warm, sumptuous robe of joviality and hospitality which makes all who keep that festival in the proper spirit forget for the time that a quarter’s rent falls due on the same day.

Dickens’s drunkards are few and far between—and in this category I do not include such as Sydney Carton, the members of the Pickwick Club, and David Copperfield, on the occasion of his first dinner-party. Nobody has a right to call the man who makes merry with his friends, now and then, a sot; and a careful study of Dickens shows that the real inebriates, the “habituals” described in his works, had all more or less rascality in their composition—not even excepting Dick Swiveller, who, however, became a reformed character towards the close of the book.

As for the drinks themselves, it is especially worthy of note that there is no mention whatever made of whisky in these works; a fact which justifies everything which I have written in a former chapter as to the neglect with which this undoubtedly estimable and wholesome fortifier was treated by society, until within the last few {213} decades. A brandy-and-soda was an unknown fact during the Dickens period; simply because, although there was plenty of brandy, the true virtues of soda-water had not been discovered. Moreover, nobody was known to call for a gin-and-bitters, or a sherry-and-angostura; whilst cocktails and cobblers are mentioned only in the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit. Ales and beers were known by various fantastic names during the first half of the present century, when men knew not “four-’alf” nor “bitter-six”; thus we have little David Copperfield gravely asking for a glass of the “Genuine Stunning,” whilst Mrs. Gamp was unable to fulfil her arduous duties sat­is­fac­tor­i­ly without a generous allowance of “the Brighton old Tipper.”

But to the books themselves. And commencing with David Copperfield—who is provided with the heart, feelings, and understanding of the great novelist himself—I make my first pause at the waiter at the Yarmouth hotel. I don’t like that waiter, either as a man or a waiter; and his portrait by “Phiz” suggests a Cheap Jack at a fair, or a barber, rather than a coffee-room attendant. As a boy, I always looked up to a waiter as a benefactor—a species of Santa Claus, and not as a marauding varlet who would probably despoil me of my lawful share of the banquet and then lie about the incident to the landlady. And when this rascal pleads that he “lives on broken wittles, and sleeps on the coals,” I lose patience with him. A waiter who could rob a poor boy of his beer {214} would not need to sleep on the coals. He might have been a tax-gatherer, or a bailiff.

Mr. Creakle, the schoolmaster, appears to have been a bit of an imbiber, whilst the boys themselves partook, sub rosa, of cowslip wine, occasionally fortified by Steerforth with orange juice, ginger, or a peppermint drop; and it was probably due to this decoction, rather than to “Crab,” that poor Traddles became ill in the night—his sufferings being unduly prolonged by black draughts and blue pills, not to mention six chapters of Greek Testament and a special-extra caning. Poor little David partook of assorted drinks during his boyhood, including the aforesaid “Genuine Stunning,” and occasional wine-glasses of punch whilst lodging with the Micawber family; and, his good aunt once found, “her first proceeding was to unlock a tall press, bring out several bottles, and pour some of the contents of each into my mouth. I think they must have been taken out at random, for I am sure I tasted aniseed water, anchovy sauce, and salad dressing.”

“My aunt” partook of hot white wine and water, with strips of toast soaked therein, by way of a night-cap; and whenever Micawber turns up, we may be sure that the ingredients for a bowl of punch (presumably rum punch) are not far off. Not much drinking was done in the Peggotty family, but Mrs. Crupp, David’s landlady, seems to have had the proverbial passion of her race for brandy; and, naturally enough, the “handy young man” hired to wait, on the occasion of the dinner to Steerforth, got more {215} than his fair share of the wines. Mr. Wickfield—silly old dotard to be deceived by such a shallow, transparent ruffian as Uriah Heep—drank assorted wines to drown his cares; whilst one of the servants engaged by Dora, during her brief experience of matrimonial joys, used to chalk up an account, in her mistress’ name, at the public house, the items appearing as “half-quartern gin and cloves (Mrs. C.);” “glass rum and peppermint (Mrs. C.)”—the parenthesis always referring to Dora, who was supposed to have consumed the whole of these refreshments.

There is a fair amount of assorted drinking in Martin Chuzzlewit. Revelry at Pecksniff Hall took, we learn, the form of red and white currant wine, of acid char­ac­ter­is­tics, the remains of the two bottles being sub­se­quent­ly blended, for the special malefit of Tom Pinch and young Martin. But the artful Pecksniff himself did not stir without the brandy bottle when going on a journey, and the family seem to have done themselves particularly well at “Todgers’s.” Whenever I feel more than ordinarily depressed in spirits, I overhaul my Martin Chuzzlewit and read, once again, the report of the dinner at Todgers’s, which led to Mr. Pecksniff’s fall into the fireplace. John Westlock—about the most admirable young man in all Dickens’s novels—did not forget to do his friends well at Salisbury. “As to wines,” we are told, “the man who can dream such iced champagne, such claret, port, or sherry, had better go to bed and stop there.”

The blackmailing of the captain of the Screw by the proprietor of the New York Rowdy Journal {216} took the form of champagne; and the merits of a sherry cobbler are fully recognized by Martin, who sub­se­quent­ly, however, fared badly in the way of wines and spirits whilst in the States. Eden, that alleged “prosperous city,” appears to have possessed neither pawn-shop, place of worship, nor drinking-bar; and the comparative delights of the “Dragon” on the return of Mark and Martin to Wiltshire are made delightfully apparent. As for the bad characters, Chevy Slyme loafed in a chronic state of eleemosynary drink, until he joined the police force, whilst Montague Tigg fared sumptuously on the best of liquor—including old Maderia—until knocked on the head by the villain Jonas, who also appears to have been a bit of a soaker, when he could get his drink for nothing.

Mrs. Gamp’s wants were few and simple, but she insisted upon a regular supply, and got it. Leaving solid sustenance out, she stipulated for “a pint of mild porter at lunch, a pint at dinner, half a pint as a species of stay or holdfast between dinner and tea, and a pint of the celebrated staggering ale, or Real Old Brighton Tipper, at supper; besides the bottle on the chimney-piece, and such casual invitations to refresh herself with wine as the good breeding of her employers might prompt them to offer.” And she never exceeded the allowance of a shillingsworth of gin-and-water warm when she rang the bell a second time after supper. She must have cost as much to keep as a steam-yacht. The contents of Mrs. G.’s teapot, on the occasion of her historic quarrel with Betsy Prig, are alluded to, {217} vaguely, by the novelist as “spirits,” and were, I shall ever maintain, gin, and not rum, as stated by other reviewers. The idea of putting rum on the top of “Newcastle salmon, intensely pickled,” and such a monstrous (to a connoisseur in these things) salad as that furnished by Mrs. Prig, is barbaric.

After an experience of the modern roadside inn, or of the “reserved lounges” of the alcohol-palaces of to-day, what can be more delightful reading than the description of the interior of the “Maypole,” in Barnaby Rudge?

“The very snuggest, cosiest, and completest bar that ever the wit of man devised. Such amazing bottles in old oaken pigeon-holes; such gleaming tankards hanging from pegs at about the same inclination as thirsty men would hold them to their lips; such sturdy little Dutch kegs ranged in rows on shelves; so many lemons hanging in separate nets, suggestive, with goodly loaves of sugar stowed away hard by, of punch, idealized beyond all mortal knowledge, etc. etc.”

Hardly an ideal landlord of the past, though, was old John Willet. A far better stamp of host was Gabriel Varden, the locksmith, who took deep draughts of sparkling home-brewed ale, from a goodly jug of well-browned clay, for breakfast, and who was one of the “Maypole’s” best customers. Mr. Chester—whose interview with his son will remind the student of Monsieur le Marquis’s interview with his nephew, in A Tale of Two Cities—was a judge of wine, though not given to over-indulgence in the bowl, like his bastard, Maypole Hugh; and Lord George {218} Gordon’s favourite brew appears to have been hot mulled wine. As for the rest of the rioters, they drank, after the manner of rioters, anything they could get.

The first mention of wine in A Tale of Two Cities is the fall and breakage, pro bono publico, of a large cask of inferior claret in the district of St. Antoine—emblematic of the blood to be spilt in Paris later on—which called forth the delightful, philosophic remark of Defarge, the master of the wine-shop to which the cask had been consigned: “It is not my affair. The people from the market did it. Let them bring another.” But the chief imbibers in the book are Sydney Carton and Serjeant Stryver, the pushing and successful advocate for whom the other “devilled.” Stryver, we gather from Edmund Yates’s Reminiscences, was modelled by Dickens, from Mr. Edwin James, Q.C., who at one time “stood high in popular favour,” and who “liked talking.” There is plenty of sub­se­quent moderate drinking—in Defarge’s wine-shop principally—but with the exception of these two advocates, Stryver and Carton—“what the two drank together, between Hilary Term and Michaelmas might have floated a king’s ship”—nobody appears to swallow an undue amount of alcohol, in this the most powerful, and the saddest, of all Dickens’s books.

I could never wade through Our Mutual Friend, and Little Dorrit is not one of my favourite books. It was ruthlessly mauled by the Saturday Review soon after its appearance, and Thackeray’s openly expressed opinion of the work was “Little D. is Deed stupid.” I have {219} heard another great man express the same opinion of it, in more elegant language. There is not much revelry in Little D. until we get to the second volume; and with the exception of Blandois the strangler and the romantic Flora nobody appears to have a really good thirst. In the Marshalsea the “collegians” were evidently worse provided with alcoholic comfort than in the Fleet; and this is all which can be written in this chapter about Little Dorrit.

Nicholas Nickleby, on the other hand, is full of allusions to the flowing bowl. Most of the characters—Smike being a notable exception—moisten their clay in some way or other, from dear old Crummles, who is introduced to our notice with a rummer of hot brandy-and-water in one hand, to the ruffian Squeers. Newman Noggs owed his fall in life to the bold, bad, bottle, and Mantalini presumably took to gin together with the washer-woman, in his declining years. The Brothers Cheeryble were evidently the right sort of people to dine with—although their dinner-hour would hardly suit the present generation—especially if they had many magnums of that famed “Double Diamond.” Sir Mulberry Hawk and his lordly victim drank deep, after the fashion of the day; whilst the keeper of the “rooge-a-nore from Paris” booth on Hampton race-course stimulates the energies of his patrons with excellent champagne, port, sherry, and (most likely) British brandy. Old Gride keeps a bottle of “golden water”—presumably the Dantzic liqueur, “Acqua d’Oro,” mentioned in my chapter on that form of fluid—in his cupboard, {220} and doles out on one occasion a minute glass thereof to Newman Noggs, who would evidently, like the farmer at the audit dinner, prefer it “in a moog.” Mr. Lillyvick, the collector of water-rates, was especially partial to punch—which was “cut off” so unexpectedly for the benefit of Nicholas, after his walk from Yorkshire to the metropolis; and the whole of Mr. Crummles’s company, ladies included, liked a taste of the same beverage. Finally, John Browdie, the good genius of the book, was a fellow of infinite swallow, always ready for his meals, and never behindhand when there was a full jug or bottle handy. And it is recorded that upon being knocked up by Nicholas, on the visit of the last-named to Yorkshire, with the news of Squeers’s trial and sentence, “forced him down upon a huge settle beside a blazing fire, poured out from an enormous bottle about a quarter of a pint of spirits, thrust it into his hand, opened his mouth, and threw back his head as a sign to him to drink it.” And before breakfast, too!

Bill Sikes, on occasion, drank brandy “at a furious rate”; but more often poverty prevented his slaking his thirst on anything more deadly than Spitalfields ale, or eleemosynary gin. The whole of Mr. Fagin’s pupils drank whenever opportunity offered, either malt liquor or gin-and-water out of pewter pots; but the Jew himself, with the innate caution of his race, avoided the wiles of the bowl. Nancy was an “habitual,” in her youth, most probably, or she would not have chummed up with such a criminal crew; and as for Monks, the disorder known as {221} delirium tremens was no stranger to him. Bumble and his wife were not averse to a social glass; and even the charity-boy, Noah Claypole, indulged, during the absence of his master, the undertaker, in oysters, porter, and some sort of wine, name not mentioned. As far as we are told, the decent members of society in Oliver Twist were very moderate in their potations; although it is in my mind that Mr. Fang, the stipendiary, was a port-wine man.

In The Old Curiosity Shop we get allusions to liquids of all kinds, from orange-peel and water, the favourite beverage of the Marchioness, to the truly-awful “wanities” of Quilp, which took the form of over-proof rum, boiled, burnt brandy, or raw Schiedam out of a keg. Quilp, by the way, if amusing enough, is the most exaggerated character ever invented by the great novelist, and has no business out of the realms of pantomime. But he was very, very funny, as impersonated by “Johnny” Clarke in the long ago. Dick Swiveller was a swindler by profession, although like many of these a boon companion, speechifier, and framer of jovial sentiments. The “rosy wine” was represented at his humble home by geneva-and-water, and his astonishment when Mr. Brass’ lodger made a brew of “extra­or­di­nary” rum-and-water in “a kind of temple, shining as of polished silver,” at the same time cooking a steak, an egg, and a cup of coffee, in the same temple, can only have been exceeded by his joy at getting something really decent to drink.

The strolling performers with whom Nell and Grandfather travelled did themselves {222} particularly well, especially dear old Mrs. Jarley, whose consideration for her own comforts was fully equalled by her desire for the worldly welfare of others.

In Bleak House allusions to the bowl are infrequent. The rag-shop “Lord Chancellor” cremated himself with the aid of gin, and Mr. Tul­king­horn had a weak­ness for old port. Mr. Bucket favoured brown sherry, and Harold Skimpole would nibble a peach and sip claret, with an execution in his house. This is one of the best characters drawn by Dickens; and although the type is not a familiar one, I have met him in the flesh.

Dombey and Son is by no means a “thirsty” work; though Joey Bagstock was a votary of the bowl, like old Mrs. Brown. The rest of the company put together (I except “the Chicken”) would not have enabled a publican to pay his rent, and one of the most mel­an­choly parts of the book is the mention made therein of only one bottle of the old Madeira remaining in the cellar of Sol Gills, at a time when most of the other characters in the book—male and female—are making use of his house.

Next to my Pickwick I love my Great Expectations. Brandy-and-tar-water, imbibed by Pumblechook, in mistake, at the Christmas dinner, should properly come under the heading of “Strange Swallows”; but the capacity of those two bottles of port and sherry, which he brought as a present on that occasion, has always been a puzzle to me. Joe, probably, would not be allowed more than a glass, and, naturally, {223} little Pip would be out of it; but there remained Wopsle, Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, and Pumblechook himself; whilst afterwards the sergeant joined in the treat, and had two glasses. And all these people were served from one bottle; for we are distinctly told that the second cork was not drawn until the first bottle had been emptied.

Miss Havisham’s relations having been brewers, beer was naturally the refreshment offered to little Pip, whilst in service there, although there seems to have been a bottle or two of wine in the cellars, for the benefit of Mr. Jaggers and others. That worthy, like most successful lawyers of the present day, was a light luncher—a sandwich, and the contents of a flask of sherry serving him for the purpose; but we are told that at his dinners both meat and drink were unexceptionable. His great hand always savoured of scented soap, and at luncheon the odour of superior sherry pervaded his office.

The convict’s emissary, himself a released felon, stirred his rum-and-water with a file; and this appears to have been the favoured drink of the “returned transport,” Magwitch. There was a large consumption of port and sherry—chiefly by Pumblechook—after the remains of Mrs. Gargery had been consigned to the earth; and what with frequent visits, on the part of the inhabitants of those parts, to “The Jolly Bargemen” and “The Boar,” the landlords of those establishments must have done a thriving trade indeed.

I wonder if Sir Wilfrid Lawson, or any other eminent abstainer, ever picked up a volume of {224} the Pickwick Papers for the purpose of perusal? If so, and it was an illustrated edition, the frontispiece must have made his heart quail; for it represents Pickwick himself standing on a chair addressing a more or less excited audience, all seated at a long table, and each with a cigar or pipe in his mouth, and a large tumbler in front of him. And if the eminent abstainer cared to carry his researches farther, he would discover that ere the Pickwickian deputation had started on their first journey they had taken part in a street fight, eventually quelled by the arrival of a perfect stranger, who celebrates the occasion by calling for glasses round of brandy-and-water, hot and strong!

The Pickwick Paper absolutely reek with alcohol, from title-page to name and address of printer. Everybody drinks with everybody else, both in and out of the Fleet Prison. The hospitality of the good people is unbounded, and good and bad alike do it full justice. The very instant the belated travellers have crossed the threshold of Dingley Dell they are fed with cherry brandy. The entire deputation has “Katzenjammer,” on the morning after their arrival at Rochester, and a duel, or an attempted one, is the consequence. In coffee-room, bar-parlour, or smoking-room, an introduction, a story, or a song is an excuse for a bowl of punch. Wherever the Pickwickians go they carry trouble, more or less amusing to the reader, and the trouble is invariably followed by revelry.

That two medical students should wash down their oysters with neat brandy—and before {225} breakfast—seems at the first glance an impos­si­bil­ity; but many of those who know for certain the effects of undue indul­gence are the most careless in indulging, and Bob Sawyer and his still more rascally friend and fellow-student Ben Allen are reckless types of a reckless profession. The same meal—oysters cum brandy—is partaken of, later on, by Solomon Pell and the coachman; and Dickens probably knew that lawyers and stage-drivers, like sailors, can digest anything.

The most drunken man in the book, “the Shepherd,” is an alleged tee­totaller; and the ab­stain­ing divi­sion will as­suredly never forgive Dickens for his word-painting of Stiggins, whose “vanity” was pine-apple rum with hot water and plenty of sugar. The Wellers, père et fils, were not con­ser­va­tive in their po­ta­tions; and whether “the inwariable” is Wellerese for brandy hot, or rum hot, I am still uncertain, although many cor­re­spon­dents have sought to enlighten me on the subject; said cor­re­spon­dents being anything but unanimous. One of the most favoured beverages men­tioned in the work is “cold punch,” by which I under­stand milk-punch, a very “more-ish” draught indeed.

I have prolonged this chapter perhaps unduly. But the subject of the Drinks of Dickens is too important a one to slur over. The man who cannot appreciate Pickwick has never yet come my way. There is a peculiar charm about the book, a broad hospitality, an unbounded love of the good things of this life which must endear it to the hearts of true sons of Britannia, who will revel, on occasion, no matter what obstacles may {226} be placed in their way. And this is the method of procedure, the potation being occasionally varied, which succeeded all the troubles of the friends:—

“So to keep up their good humour they stopped at the first roadside tavern they came to”—this was after the punch and pound incident—“and ordered a glass of brandy-and-water all round, with a magnum of extra strength for Mr. Samuel Weller.”

CHAPTER XX SWORN OFF!

The first temperance society in England was formed at Brad­ford, York­shire, on the 2nd Feb­ru­ary 1830, the chief mover having been Mr. Henry Forbes, who had signed the pledge at Glasgow. But the use of ardent spirits was condemned by many medical practitioners early in the seven­teenth cen­tury, although the United Kingdom does not seem to have abstained from strong waters any the more. Repressive leg­is­la­tion, in order to inculcate sobriety, was tried in Mas­sa­chu­setts, U.S., early in the present century, but a few years before a society had been formed at Moreau, New York State, in order to prohibit the con­sumption of both wines and spirits, except {228} medicinally, or wine except at public dinners or in the Lord’s Supper.

The work whence I have gleaned the above details also informs the reader that “such as Doctor Samuel Johnson and John Howard set an example of abstinence from all inebriating drinks”; which, as far as Doctor Johnson is concerned, is somewhat startling news to myself. I had always imagined that the burly lexicographer—I was reproved by a critic for calling him this in Cakes and Ale—was a bit of a boon companion; and the records of Fleet Street taverns by no means tend to contradict this idea. Not only is the hard, oaken seat at one end of the dining-room of “Ye Olde Cheshyre Cheese” marked with a brass plate, with a suitable inscription, but the many visitors to that snug hostelry, including hundreds of our American cousins, are always taken upstairs and shewn Doctor Johnson’s chair. Did “Sam,” and “Davy,” and “Noll” slake their thirst on cold water, beneath that tavern’s roof? I trow not. Cross out Doctor Johnson’s name as a total abstainer, please.

In 1834, Mr. J. S. Buckingham, who was returned for Sheffield to the first Reform Parliament, succeeded in obtaining a select committee of the House of Commons, to enquire into the causes, extent, and remedies of drunkenness. In the meantime the limitation of the pledge to abstention from ardent spirits had proved a greater drawback than in other countries, because beer had been the popular beverage, and its use a cause of widespread drunkenness before ardent spirits were commonly sold. But the idea of {229} our legislators before 1834 had been that “good malt and hops could injure nobody.”

From ’34 to ’45 there was great activity in the temperance ranks through­out the world; and in ’53 the United Kingdom Alliance for the Legislative Suppression of the Liquor Traffic was formed, its first pres­i­dent being Sir W. C. Trevelyan. In March ’64 a Permis­sive Prohi­bi­tory Bill was brought into the House of Commons, but although repeatedly re-introduced it never obtained a second reading. Nor is it likely that such a Bill will ever become law as long as the sons of Britannia are living outside a state of slavery. Repressive legislation serves only to stimulate that which it claims to check; and thus it is that these would-be reformers, whether Prohibitors of the Drink Traffic, Vigilance and Purity Societies, and Anti-gambling Societies have succeeded in making the state of London infinitely worse, as regards drunkenness, chastity, and betting, than it was forty years ago.

Poor frail humanity will always do the thing which it ought not to do in preference to fulfilling its obligations. It has been so since the be­gin­ning of the world, and will continue so until the end. For­bid­den fruit has ever been the sweetest; and it is char­ac­ter­is­tic of mankind—and more especially of womankind—to oppose, as far as they can, any attempt at restraint. What has been the effect of closing Cremorne Gardens, the Argyll Rooms, and other public resorts where dancing and revelry were carried on until the small hours, five-and-twenty years ago? {230} The evil took refuge in the open streets, and, more recently, in so-called social clubs, in which illicit liquors were, and are, sold, and the pander, and the pimp, and the bully met, and meet the drunkard, the dupe, and the greenhorn. What has been the effect of the Anti-gambling Crusade? To create working-men bookmakers. This is a fact. In most large warehouses and factories there are employés who will lay “starting prices,” in shillings and sixpences, to their mates. There is not a tithe of the amount wagered amongst the upper classes that there was in the fifties and sixties; but amongst the horny-handed sons of toil the vice has increased to an enormous extent, mainly owing to repressive legislation. If a man wants to gamble there is only one factor to prevent him—impecuniosity; and even that factor need not prevent a man from having a drink if he waits in the tap-room long enough on pay-day. Since Sunday closing in Wales, shebeens have arisen by the hundred; and paraffin, for want of a better drink, is still drunk on the Sabbath day, by the miners in the Rhondda Valley.

All honour to him who abstains from strong drink for conscience’ sake, or in the hope that others may profit by his example. But the lash of scorn for him who because he does not swallow fermented refreshment himself, says to his brother “Thou shalt not drink!” The Puritans abolished bear-baiting, not on account of the cruelty to the bears, but because the alleged sport gave pleasure to the people; and the Puritans of the day, who forbid cakes and ale, {231} and hunting, and horse-racing, do so for the self-same reason.

“He who does not smoke,” said the sage, “has known no great sorrow.” Similarly, it may be urged that he who never joins in a friendly glass has known no great joy. Do we express our unfeigned joy and thankfulness for having a great and good Queen to reign over us by toasting her in flat soda-water? Forbid the deed! When our sons return from the midst of many and great dangers, from the battle-field, the raging deep, or the land of savages, do we express our delight by putting the kettle on to boil? Avaunt ! I have known a man who had won £27,000 on a certain Wednesday at Ascot, dine that same night off a chump chop, chips, and a bottle of ginger-beer, at a coffee-house no great distance from Fleet Street. And he gave the waitress one penny for herself, and counselled her not to “get gamblin’ ” with it. But amongst my own personal friends, when the fancied horse catches the eye of the judge, there is revelry; and who shall say that they sin thereby? I do not believe in the man who takes his winnings sadly—or at all events impassively. “A shout, and a drink, and then sit down and write about it,” is the programme pursued by a journalistic friend; and although I do not always “write about it,” ’tis much the same programme pursued by myself. Nor do we rejoice for the sole reason that we have got the better of somebody else. For, alas! the balance at the end of the year is far too often in favour of that “somebody else.”

“On the question of the prohibition of the {232} liquor traffic,” says an authority on the ethics or total abstinence, “there has been much controversy. Its opponents have contended that it is an invasion of personal liberty; that even when imposed by a majority it is a violation of the rights of the minority, and that all that is really required is such a magisterial and police supervision as will repress drunkenness as much as possible, and inflict different penalties on offenders. To this statement various answers are returned. With regard to the violation of personal liberty the prohibitionists maintain that in one sense all law interferes with liberty. A good law interferes with the liberty to do wrong. Therefore, they say, assuming that the common sale of drinks wrongs the public a law interfering with this wrong is in accord with true liberty. They hold that individual profit must be subservient to the public welfare, Salus populi suprema lex. If hardship is alleged as affecting the buyer, the statement of John Stuart Mill is quoted, who declared that every artificial augmentation of the price of an article is prohibition to the more or less poor; yet there is hardly any government which does not in some way or other legislate so that the price of intoxicants is increased. As to the possibility of extirpating intemperance by means of strict regulation as to the sale of drink, the prohibitionists affirm that the existing system has been tried for hundreds of years, and often under the most favourable circumstances for its success, and that yet the licensing system, as judged by its fruits, is confessed to be a mel­an­choly failure.” {233}

My remarks on the above are few and simple. It is this very Jesuitical logic which has earned the “prohibitionists” the contempt of all friends of freedom. It is this false and tyrannical doctrine which asserts that “the end justifies the means,” which still stinks in the nostrils of the majority of the people’s representatives in Parliament.

Now for a few hints as to some non-alcoholic beverages. And first of all let it be stated that the thirsty man can do much worse than turn to a teetotal beverage—as long as he avoids the bottled flatulence which is sold, and freely advertised outside, in pretty nearly every country cottage which can boast of good accommodation for travellers, and a bicycle shed. The iced fruit-fizzers of Mr. Sainsbury—where the pick-me-ups come from—close to the Lady’s Pictorial office, are, to my personal knowledge, freely patronized in summer-time by habitual worshippers at the shrine of Bacchus. Moreover a follower of the sport of kings would rather go without whisky all the afternoon than miss his cup of tea, after business hours. No directions are needed here for the man­u­fac­ture of tea or coffee. Every housewife has a way of her own; and it is as the laws of the Medes and Persians that her way is the only way. Nor need a discussion be entered on as to the respective merits of different brands of cocoa.

The next item on the programme is called in my book,

Drink for Dog Days,

but as this is not a nice name, and suggests hydrophobia and—other things, I will re-christen it

Citron de Luxe.

The composition is very simple. Put a lemon-ice in a large tumbler, fill up with soda-water, stir well, and drink.

N.B.—Mr. George Krehl, of “Verrey’s,” who knows something about dog days, and dogs, won the prize offered in the Sporting Times for the best recipe for a summer drink, many years ago, with a similar suggestion. But G. K. added a small glass of Curaçoa, and (I think) a drop or two of Angostura bitters.

I also read, in the work of reference from which I am quoting, under the same heading, “Temperance Drinks,” that:—

“Many of the British wines, mixed with an equal quantity of water, with a little ice, make very cool and refreshing drinks.” Very, very likely. But can there be wine without fermentation? And are the total abstainers, not content with drinking alcoholic gingerade and stone ginger-beer, getting the wedge in still further. Forbid it!

INDEX OF RECIPES

Absinthe, 115.

Ale, Brasenose, 59 ; brewing of, 52, 53, 70 ; cock, 41, 42 ; cup, see cup ; flip, see flip ; mulled, 55 ; posset, see posset ; rum and, see rum ; sangaree, see sangaree.

Almond comfy, 234 ; punch, see punch.

Anchovy toast, 204.

Anisette, 191.

Apple Jack sour, see sour.

Apricock wine, 34.

Apricot brandy, see brandy.

Arctic regions, see cocktail.

Arrack, 118.

•

Baltimore egg nogg, see nogg.

Barley wine, 45.

Bastard, white, 38.

Beer soup, 54 ; brewing of, 53.

Bengal cocktail, see cocktail.

Birch, 30.

Bishop, 140.

Bitters, 209.

Black stripe, 171.

Blue blazer, 169.

Booze, rum, see rum.

Bosom caresser, 171.

Bourbon sour, see sour.

Braggonet, see mead and braggon.

Brandy, apricot, 191 ; burning, 166 ; carraway, 190 ; champirelle, 170 ; cherry, see cherry ; cocktail, see cocktail ; daisy, 152 ; ginger, 190 ; orange, 192 ; orange-flower, 190 ; sangaree, see sangaree ; scaffa, 160 ; smash, see smas ; sour, see sour.

Brasenose ale, see ale.

Brazil relish, 208.

Brewing of ale, see ale ; beer, see beer.

Brown Betty, 57.

Bull’s milk, see milk.

Burglar’s brew, 154.

Burning brandy, see brandy.

Butter and rum, see rum.

•

Capillaire punch, see punch.

Carraway brandy, see brandy.

Cassis, 194.

Catawba cobbler, see cobbler.

Chablis cup, see cup.

Champagne cup, see cup ; cocktail, see cocktail ; English, 40 ; punch, see punch ; smash, see smash.

Cherry brandy, 185, 186, 187 ; cobbler, see cobbler ; gin, see gin ; whisky, 187.

Cider, 174 ; cup, see cup ; posset, see posset ; temperance, 234.

Citron de Luxe, see drink for dog days.

Claret cup—Badminton, Balaclava, Donald’s, or  “For’ard On”—see cup.

Clary wine, 34.

Classical sherbet, see Oxford punch.

Cobbler, Catawba, 150 ; cherry, 235 ; Hatfield, 150 ; Moselle, 150.

Cock ale, see ale.

Cocktail, Arctic regions, 151 ; Bengal, 157 ; brandy, 155 ; champagne, 156 ; Coomassie, 156 ; gin, 88, 157 ; Jersey, 156 ; Jockey Club, 158 ; Manhattan, 156 ; Martini, 158 ; Newport, 157 ; Saratoga, 151.

Cocktail sherry, 158 ; sunrise, 158 ; swizzle, 157 ; whisky, 159.

Cold tankard, see cider cup.

Colleen Bawn, 171.

Coomassie cocktail, see cocktail.

Cordial, ginger, 197 ; Highland, 188 ; saffron, 192.

Corpse reviver, 160.

Crimean cup, see cup.

Cup, ale, 55 ; chablis, 99 ; champagne, 98 ; cider, 94 ; claret, 91, 92, 93 ; Crimean, 95, 97 ; Freemason, 99 ; loving, 97 ; perry, 95 ; porter, 100 ; race day, 97 ; red, 99 ; Rochester, 98 ; tennis, 100.

Curaçoa, 193.

•

D. D., 235.

Devilled biscuit, 209.

Doctor, 169.

Drink for dog days, 235.

•

Ebulum, 41.

Egg flip, see flip.

Egg nogg, see nogg ; Baltimore, see nogg ; sherry, see sherry.

Egg punch, see punch.

Elderberry punch, see punch.

English ale, 55–57 ; champagne, see champagne ; punch, see punch ; sack, see sack.

•

Flip, ale, 55, 57 ; egg, 90.

Freemason, see cup.

Frontiniac wine, 46.

•

Gin and ginger beer, 88 ; cherry, 187 ; cocktail, see cocktail ; punch, see punch ; sangaree, see sangaree ; sling, see sling ; sloe, 188 ; smash, see smash ; sour, see sour.

Ginger beer and gin, see gin.

Ginger brandy, see brandy ; cordial, see cordial.

Glasgow punch, see punch.

Golden slipper, 160.

•

Halo punch, see punch.

Hatfield cobbler, see cobbler.

Heap of comfort, 161.

Highland cordial, see cordial.

Hippocras, 183.

Home Ruler, 166.

•

Jersey cocktail, see cocktail.

Jockey Club cocktail, see cocktail.

John Collins, see sling.

Julep (or julap), 152 ; mint, 153 ; pine-apple, 153.

•

King Charles II.’s surfeit water, 189.

Kirschenwasser, 195.

Knickerbein, 159.

Kümmel, 190.

•

L’Amour Poussée, 159.

Lemon squash, see squash ; wine, 44.

Locomotive, 169.

Loving cup, see cup.

•

Malmsey, 39.

Manhattan cocktail, see cocktail.

Martini cocktail, see cocktail.

Mead, 27 ; and Braggon or Braggonet, 30.

Metheglin, 28.

Milk, bull’s, 152, 170 ; and rum, see rum ; punch, see punch.

Mint-julep, see julep.

Moselle cobbler, see cobbler.

Mother-in-law, 58.

Muskadine, 44.

•

Negus, port wine, 168 ; sherry, 168.

Newport cocktail, see cocktail.

Nogg, Baltimore egg, 205 ; egg, 168 ; sherry egg, 168.

Noyeau punch, see punch.

•

Orange brandy, see brandy ; flower brandy, see brandy.

Orange quinine, 207.

Orgeat, 96.

Oxford punch, see punch.

•

Pepper posset, see posset.

Perry cup, see cup.

Pick-me-up, 204 ; St. Mark’s, 208.

Pine-apple julep, see julep.

Pope, 170.

Pope’s posset, see posset.

Port wine negus, see negus ; sangaree, see sangaree.

Porter cup, see cup.

Porteree, see sangaree.

Posset, ale, 55 ; cider, 172.

Posset, pepper, 172 ; Pope’s, 46 ; sack, 32, 173.

Prairie oyster, 167.

Punch, almond, 110 ; capillaire, 106 ; champagne, 113 ; egg, 111 ; elderberry, 236 ; English, 104 ; gin, 88, 107 ; Glasgow, 104 ; halo, 114 ; milk, 107 ; noyeau, 107 ; Oxford, 105, 107 ; rack, 112 ; restorative, 110 ; shrub, 111 ; Uncle Toby, 112 ; Vauxhall, 112 ; Victoria, 113 ; Yorkshire, 113.

•

Quince whisky, see whisky.

•

Race-day cup, see cup.

Rack punch, see punch.

Raspberry squash, see squash ; vinegar, see vinegar.

Red cup, see cup.

Renish wine, 47.

Restorative punch, see punch.

Rochester cup, see cup.

Rum and ale, 85 ; and butter, 85 ; and milk, 85 ; booze, 89.

Rumfustian, 58, 170.

•

Sack, English, 32 ; posset, see posset.

Saffron cordial, see cordial.

St. Mark’s pick-me-up, see pick-me-up.

Sangaree ale, 162 ; brandy, 162 ; gin, 163 ; port wine, 163 ; porteree, 163 ; sherry, 163.

Santa Cruz smash, see smash.

Saragossa wine, see English sack.

Saratoga brace-up, 154 ; cocktail, see cocktail.

Scaffa, brandy, see brandy.

Scorcher, 207.

Sherry cocktail, see cocktail ; egg nogg, see nogg ; negus, see negus ; sangaree, see sangaree ; sour, see sour.

Shrub punch, see punch.

Sling, 163 ; gin, 88 ; John Collins, 88, 163.

Sloe gin, see gin.

Smash, brandy, 164 ; champagne, 164 ; gin, 164 ; Santa Cruz, 164 ; whisky, 164.

Sour, apple Jack, 165 ; Bourbon, 165 ; brandy, 165 ; gin, 165 ; sherry, 166 ; whisky, 165.

Spleen, to cure, 203.

Squash, lemon, 233 ; raspberry, 236.

Strengthener, 206.

Sunrise cocktail, see cocktail.

Surgeon-Major, 169.

Swig, see wassail.

Swizzle, see cocktail.

•

Temperance cider, see cider.

Tennis cup, see cup.

Turkey oyster, 167.

Twist, 195.

•

Uncle, see mother-in-law ; Toby, see punch.

Usquebaugh, 33.

•

Vauxhall punch, see punch.

Victoria punch, see punch.

Vinegar, raspberry, 236.

•

Wassail, 56.

Whisky, cherry, see cherry ; cocktail, see cocktail ; quince, 191 ; smash, see smash ; sour, see sour.

White bastard, see bastard ; wine whey, 172.

Worcester oyster, 208.

•

Yorkshire punch, see punch.

Original spelling and grammar have been generally retained, with some exceptions noted below.

The index was originally structured rather inconsistently as a nested list, with line-breaks separating list items. In these ebook editions, semicolons have been inserted between list items, with full stop inserted at the end of each top-level entry. The original book separated key terms from page references with comma, and key terms from "see [other topic]" with semicolon; the latter have been changed to comma. One particularly complicated top-level heading, “Egg”, has been split into three top-level entries, “Egg flip”, “Egg nogg”, and “Egg punch”.

• Page 82. ‘Collins—’ to ‘Collins”—’.
• Page 121. ‘Orginal’ to ‘Original’.
• Page 126. ‘ “champagne”) ’ to ‘ “champagne”), ’.