If you've ever read 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens you may recollect
a Christmas punch called smoking bishop, and seeing as Christmas is just around the corner
I've decided to make myself a big bowl of Victorian smoking bishop,
this time on Drinking History.
So at the end of 'A Christmas Carol' after Scrooge has had his change of heart
he takes his poor clerk Bob Cratchit aside and says
"A merrier Christmas Bob my good fellow,
than I have given you for many a year! I'll raise your salary and endeavor to assist your struggling family,
and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!"
And that smoking bishop is just one of many types of hot punch, or mulled wine, or wassail, whatever you want to call it.
Mostly I'm going to be working from a recipe written in 1836 just seven years
before Dickens published 'A Christmas Carol'
and I chose it 1) because it's one of the earliest if not the earliest recipe and
2) because I love the name of both the book and the pseudonym for the author.
It's called 'Apician Anecdotes' or 'Tales of the Table Kitchen and Larder' by Dick Humelbergius Secundus,
and yes that word Apician comes from our old friend from ancient Rome Apicius.
Now the recipe is rather long so I'm going to read a condensed version though I'll put the entire thing in the description.
"Make incisions into the rind of a lemon; stick cloves in and roast the said lemon by the fire.
Put small quantities of cinnamon, mace, cloves, and allspice, and a race of ginger,
into a saucepan, with a half pint of water; let it boil until it be reduced one half.
Boil one bottle of port wine; burn a portion of the spirit out of it, by applying a lighted taper to the saucepan which contains it.
Put the roasted lemons and spice into the wine; stir it up well,
and let it stand near the fire ten minutes... put in the sugar with the juice of half a lemon...
and serve it with the lemon and spice floating in it."
Now like I said there are many recipes for smoking bishop one of the most famous and off quoted
by Eliza Acton it was published just a few years after this one and it is taken word for word
from this recipe except that she does add
nutmeg at the end making it completely her own recipe, I guess.
She also says "bishop is frequently made with a Seville orange stuck with cloves and slowly roasted,
and its flavor to many tastes is infinitely finer than that of the lemon."
But finding Seville oranges today at least where I live is very, very difficult
so you can feel free to use pretty much any citrus you want
either oranges or lemons, or even a little bit of grapefruit to add that bitterness,
it's up to you. Personally I'm going to use two Meyer lemons which are fantastic and one orange,
then 24 cloves, two sticks of cinnamon, a quarter teaspoon ground mace, an eighth teaspoon ground
cloves, a quarter teaspoon ground allspice, and an inch of ginger peeled and sliced,
then one and a quarter cup or 300 milliliters of water, a half cup or 65 grams powdered sugar.
You can use regular granulated sugar, but it just doesn't mix in as well.
The juice of half a lemon, and one 750 milliliter bottle of Ruby Port.
I'm using a bottle of Sandeman Fine Ruby Port that I got from CuriaDa.
Now I've mentioned them before, they are a great way to find some of the less common spirits and liquors,
and have them shipped from online. They come straight to your door, they're fantastic.
I'll put a link in the description where you can get this bottle as well as several of my favorite holiday spirits,
but you can feel free to use any Ruby Port. Now I wouldn't use a Tawny Port,
1) because Ruby Port is more historically accurate for this recipe and 2) because Tawny Ports tend to
be a little finer, a little more expensive and you don't want to go mulling a very expensive bottle of port.
Just go with something nice, but less expensive like this one.
So first take your citrus and cut eight small incisions into each, then insert a clove into each cut,
set these on a lined baking sheet, and put them in an oven at 300 degrees Fahrenheit or 150 Celsius
for about an hour and 20 to an hour and 30 minutes. You'll know when they're done because they'll be very soft to to the touch.
Once they're roasted add the water to a small saucepan and then stir in all of the spices,
and then set it on the stove and bring to a light boil, just like a simmer. You want it to reduce
by about half which takes 15 to 20 minutes. While it reduces pour the port into another
larger pot and set it over a medium flame until it just simmers.
Now the recipe says to boil it but most of the other recipes say to not boil it, and I would say just get a light simmer.
That's really what you want. It also says that you can burn away some of the spirit,
I don't know why they would do that,
but that you can burn away some of the spirit with a taper, a candle.
I used a regular like a click click flame whatever that is called,
but if you're going to do that be very, very careful because it's very flammable and I nearly burned our house down.
A lighter! It's called a lighter, how could I not remember that.
Now once it starts to simmer add in the water with the spices and the roasted citrus, and let it simmer for another 10 minutes.
Then add in the lemon juice and the sugar and whisk until dissolved and then take
it off the heat now you can drink it right now but you can also let it sit covered overnight
for the flavors to really develop, and then reheat it the next day which is what I'm going
to do and while the wine is mulling I pose you 2 questions what is bishop, and why is it smoking?
So before I answer those two questions let me answer another and that is why am I at my
table for Drinking History instead of behind the bar. A few people asked last week and
the reason that I'm giving is because I'm just going to do mixed drinks at the bar. The real
reason is because it's covered in Christmas LEGO sets and I didn't have anywhere else to put them,
so I'm at the table. Now the first mention of bishop that I could find that wasn't either an
ecclesiastical post or a pinheaded chess piece came from Samuel Johnson's dictionary in 1755.
bishop a cant word for a mixture of wine oranges and sugar." Sounds about right, and these oranges
would have been as I mentioned Seville oranges which were very popular in England at the time.
Jonathan Swift the author of Gulliver's Travels and a modest proposal agreed with the choice
of fruit when he wrote "Fine orange well roasted with sugar and wine in a cup they'll make a sweet
bishop when gentle folks sup but by the time most of the actual recipes start coming around
the orange has all but left and been replaced with lemons and I don't exactly know why that is
unless maybe Seville oranges had become rarer in England or they just use them to make marmalade
not quite sure. What I do know is that among the Oxford nightcaps bishop appears to be one of the
oldest winter beverages on record and to this very day is preferred to every other not only by the
youthful votery of Bacchus at his evening revelry but also by the grave dawn by way of a night cap
that was Dick Hummel Bridges Secundus and he goes on to say that the reason that it's called bishop
is because in ancient times when bishops and other clerics would visit Oxford they would give
them this mulled cider mulled wine, and that is not true by any stretch of the imagination
probably because there were no oranges in England in ancient times. Not sure what ancient meant but
they were pretty new in the in the 17th and 18th century. No the drink probably actually gets its
name from its color and there's actually an entire group of mulled wines with citrus and
spices called ecclesiastics and they're all named so because their color is reminiscent of the garb
worn by different members of the clergy. A bowl of pope is made with burgundy cardinal champagne
archbishop claret church warden ginger wine and raisins and corister white wine and that's why
smoking bishop is made with Ruby Port because it makes a purple drink just like the purple
robes of bishops at the time. As to the question of why it's smoking,
well just look at it. The steam looks kind of like smoke and the English just loved their hot drinks
at this time. Wine could be heated with a red hot poker out of the fire and if I didn't have a
gas fireplace that's what I was going to do, maybe next year. It could also be heated with an ale
warmer over the fire or as I'm doing in a pot on the stove, so if you have waited for your bishop
to to mull overnight then reheat it on the stove until it's smoking, and here we are a big bowl of
smoking bishop. It's interesting, you can see the oils from the citrus kind of floating on top.
Curious how that's going to affect the taste. Now some of the old recipes say you can add rum or
brandy at this point but I'm going to stick with just the port
for the moment. Let's give it a shot. Oh it smells so good, so Christmas-y.
So
It's similar to gluhwein or glögg or any of those wonderful mulled wines around Europe
at this time of year but the citrus really adds something. It's not particularly orangey or lemony
but it adds that like the zest like you get from a from a lemon zest, or something. It just adds
that extra zing that really kind of elevates it, elevates it above the the common mulled wine
so I definitely suggest that you make this or the smoking pope or the smoking archbishop whichever
wine you like mull it up with some spices and and citrus and enjoy on a nice winter evening
or for Christmas eve, or whatever else you want and I will see you next time on Drinking History.