Towards the end of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens gives the central character Scrooge - newly converted to the merriment of Christmas following a busy night the details of which you’ll probably recall from the book/play/film/puppet show/muppet show/episode of Blackadder etc and don’t concern us here - this short speech. The reformed miser says to his clerk (to whom he had formerly refused a day off for Xmas day):
“A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year. I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob. Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit.”
The “...Christmas bowl of smoking bishop...” intrigued me, so I looked it up and there’s a whole family of mulled wine recipes that were so popular in Victorian times that a reference like Scrooge’s above could be dropped without further explanation.
Here at the home of the Finnginn blog, we are always saddened to discover that a once-loved Xmas tradition has bitten the proverbial dust. Fortunately, we have a voice, and a host of readers and together we might just reinvigorate the corpse of the smoking bishop tradition.
What is it?
Smoking Bishop is a mulled wine made from port wine and roasted spiced citrus fruits. The Victorian cookbook writer Eliza Acton has a recipe in her Modern Cookery for Private Families first published in 1845.
Eliza Acton deserves to be better known. She was the first in print to refer to plum pudding - that delicious combination of flour, fruits, sugar, spices, brandy and kidney fat - as Christmas Pudding. She also introduced the English speaking world to Spaghetti and to Brussels Sprouts. Now’s not the time to open up an argument between two ladies long since departed but a certain Mrs Isabella Beeton plagiarised quite a few of her recipes. And although I’m firmly team Acton, what’s good enough for Mrs B is certainly good enough for me, so here’s that Acton recipe in full:
“Make several incisions in the rind of a lemon, stick cloves in these, and roast the lemon by a slow fire. Put small but equal quantities of cinnamon, cloves, mace, and allspice, with a race of ginger, into a saucepan with half a pint of water: let it boil until it is 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 up well, and let it stand near the fire ten minutes. Rub a few knobs of sugar on the rind of a lemon, put the sugar into a bowl or jug, with the juice of half a lemon (not roasted), pour the wine into it, grate in some nutmeg, sweeten it to the taste, and serve it up with the lemon and spice floating in it.”
Those of us not possessed of a slow fire can simulate that step with an oven or that air fryer you bought yourself last Xmas.
Another delightful fact is that the smoking bishop is but one of a handful of mulled wine recipes in a family known collectively as the Ecclesiastics. They all follow the same pattern as above but have different names according to the wine you use as the base.
Substitute port for whichever of the following you happen to have in your wine store and change the name:
- Claret - smoking archbishop
- Champagne - smoking cardinal
- Burgundy - smoking pope
But the one that will be mulling away in the Finnginn slow cooker to greet Xmas guests returning rosy-cheeked from the Boxing Day walk will be the smoking beadle - which has added raisins and is made with that most Xmassy of wines: Stones Ginger Wine.
Teetotal Alternative
One for the ankle biters to enjoy alongside the grown-ups is hot Ribena which is made by adding boiling water to blackcurrant squash.
What are you mulling this Xmas? Can you help us revive the tradition of the smoking bishop? Let us know how you get on in the comments below and on the social media.
Photo by Hannah Pemberton on Unsplash
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