Jerry Thomas’s 1862 Recipe for ‘Bishop a la Prusse’
“Bishop (A la Prusse.) A favorite beverage, made with claret or port. It is prepared as follows : roast four good sized bitter oranges till they are of a pale brown color, lay them in a tureen, and put over them half a pound of pounded loaf sugar, and three glasses of claret ; place the cover on the tureen and let it stand till the next day. When required for use, put the tureen into a pan of boiling water, press the oranges with a spoon, and run the juice through a sieve ; then boil the remainder of the bottle of claret, taking care that it does not burn ; add it to the strained juice, and serve it warm in glasses. Port wine will answer the purpose as well as claret. “Bishop” is sometimes made with the above materials substituting lemons instead of oranges, but this is not often done when claret is used.”
Jerry Thomas – How to Mix Drinks: Or, The Bon-Vivant’s Companion (1862)
How’s this for a winter warmer? Roasted oranges, spices, port, and claret wine? Lovely.
The most famous instance of ‘Bishop’ has to be its appearance in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). During his big redemption scene at the end of the story, Scrooge says to Bob Cratchit:
“…we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!”
This Dickensian phrasing seems to have led quite a few people over the years to the not unreasonable conclusion by that the drink was called “smoking bishop”. Which it wasn’t.
Okay, look, I hate to be pedantic, and for the record I think “smoking bishop” is a much better name, and there’s really no reason not to call it that… but I also think that in A Christmas Carol, “smoking” is actually an adjective, not part of the noun. And I say that because the various additional sources in which ‘Bishop’ is mentioned all agree that this is the name of the drink: just ‘Bishop’.
For instance: prior to Thomas, but two years after A Christmas Carol, Eliza Action has an ‘Oxford Receipt for Bishop’ in Modern Cookery for Private Families, 2nd edition (1845):
“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 lemons 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 your taste, and serve it up with the lemon and spice floating in it.
*A Seville orange stuck with cloves to many tastes imparts a finer flavour than the lemon.”
This turns out to be an almost word-for-word copy of the recipe for ‘Bishop’ that appears in Oxford Night Caps, a Collection of Receipts for Making Various Beverages (1827) by Richard Cook. It’s the very first entry in the collection, to which Cook adds the following background information:
“Bishop seems to be one of the oldest winter beverages known, and to this day is preferred to every other, not only by the youthful votary of Bacchus at his evening’s revelry, but also by the grave Don by way of a night cap ; and probably derives its name from the circumstance of ancient dignitaries of the Church, when they honoured the University with a visit, being regaled with spiced wine.”
Cook also disagrees slightly with Acton’s opinion that oranges are a superior substitute for lemons, saying:
“Oranges, although not used in Bishop at Oxford, are, as will appear by the following lines, written by Swift, sometimes introduced into that beverage.
Fine oranges,
Well roasted, with sugar and wine in a cup,
They’ll make a sweet Bishop when gentlefolks sup.“
The ‘Oxford Bishop’ recipe from Oxford Night Caps is also repeated in The Year Book of Daily Recreation & Information (1832) by William Hone, who adds another detail:
“In your Oxford bishop oranges are not used : but the true London way of making a bishop is to use oranges instead lemons.”
Hone then quotes the same lines from Swift and credits “St. Patrick’s Great Dean” – Swift was the Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin from 1713 – as the source of the orange-based variant of the drink.
There’s an earlier mention of ‘Bishop’ the beverage in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1756) in which one of the definitions of the word ‘bishop’ is given as:
“A cant word for a mixture of wine, oranges, and sugar. Swift.”
The referenced “Swift” in the sources above is, of course, the renowned satirist Jonathan Swift. And via a bit of text-searching, I found the original version of the lines provided by Cook, in volume two of The Poetical Works of Jonathan Swift (1871). In a section of “verses made for fruit-women, etc.” the following lines are suggested for sellers of oranges:
“Come buy my fine oranges, sauce for your veal,
And charming, when squeezed in a pot of brown ale ;
Well roasted, with sugar and wine in a cup,
They’ll make a sweet bishop when gentlefolks sup.”
Again, I think “sweet” is working as an adjective there; I don’t think Swift is saying that the drink should be called “sweet bishop”.
According to Wikisource the “Fruit-Women” verses were published around 1733-36, which means that ‘Bishop’ definitely dates to at least the first half of the eighteenth century. But as Cook pointed out in Oxford Night Caps, it’s basically a variant of spiced wine, which means it’s probably one of the oldest types of cocktail known to humanity; a favourite of Imperial Rome, and therefore most likely ancient Greece as well, as the Wikipedia entry on Hippocras – a famous spiced wine of the middle ages – explains.
To conclude my pedantic point: it’s fairly clear throughout the sources that the drink that Scrooge was referring to was a Christmas bowl of “bishop”, which he described as “smoking”, because it would have been served hot and steaming. None of the other sources call it a “smoking bishop”; that exact phrase seems to have been first used in A Christmas Carol1I used Google Books Ngram Viewer to check for instances of “smoking bishop”, and although there were one or two matches in 1841 and 1842, when I checked them out they were passages in novels which mentioned ‘bishop’, the drink, with “smoking” as a nearby descriptor, not exact phrase-matches., and its adoption as the name for the drink is a modern re-interpretation.
“Smoking Bishop” is much cooler though, so I do think that’s what we should call it from now on. End of pedantry.
Back to How to Mix Drinks: Or, The Bon-vivant’s Companion (1862), the source of the recipe at the top of the post. You’ll note that this recipe is labelled “a la Prusse”, suggesting a German origin. That might explain the distinct similarities between ‘Bishop’ and the Glühwein so beloved of the patrons of modern-day Christmas markets, which apparently dates back to at least 1420, according to Wikipedia.
Not content with just the “a la Prusse” method, Thomas also provides a recipe for a single portion version of ‘Bishop’:
Stick an orange full of cloves and roast it before a fire. When brown enough, cut it in quarters, and pour over it a quart of hot port wine, add sugar to the taste, let the mixture simmer for half an hour.
This sounds like the sort of “Bishop” that might be served up to weary travellers at a coaching inn in the depths of winter. And of course the hot port and subsequent simmering would definitely have resulted in a mugful that was smoking when it was served forth.
Thomas also mentions that you can make an “Archbishop” by using claret instead of port, or a “Cardinal” with champagne, or a “Pope” with burgundy, or a “Bishop (Protestant)” with what I’m assuming is rum, in addition to claret:
4 table spoons of white sugar.
2 tumblers of water.
1 lemon in slices.
1 bottle of claret.
4 table spoons of Santa Cruz or Jamaica.
Ice.
This Protestant version is clearly a drink that’s meant to be served cold though, so it’s definitely not a “smoking” variant.
I’ve also seen mention of a “Church Warden” or “Deacon”, made with ginger wine and sometimes tea. Collectively, all these drinks were once known as “Ecclesiasticals”, as explained by Anne Bramley for The Salt back in 2015, originally by way of mockery of the Catholic Church by the Protestant English. What larks.
So, there we have it. ‘Bishop’; a suitably Christmassy cocktail punch of port, claret, burgundy, Champagne, rum or ginger wine, nicely spiced and with the richness of the juice of roasted lemons or oranges, depending on whether you favour the Oxford or the London method.
Best served smoking.
Speaking of which, if you’d like to see some modern versions of this spiced-wine classic, I can highly recommend those on Dr. Neil Buttery’s most excellent British Food History website, and Max Miller’s always superb Tasting History YouTube channel.
What do you reckon? Is this the sort of seasonal drink that would liven up your Christmas party? Will you be handing out smoking mugs of Bishop to your friends and family this Yuletide? Do let me know, via the comments.
Footnotes
- 1I used Google Books Ngram Viewer to check for instances of “smoking bishop”, and although there were one or two matches in 1841 and 1842, when I checked them out they were passages in novels which mentioned ‘bishop’, the drink, with “smoking” as a nearby descriptor, not exact phrase-matches. ↩︎
