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Bishop Oxford Nightcap
Take one-eighth of an ounce each of cloves, mace, ginger, cinnamon, and allspice, boil them for thirty minutes in half a pint of water, and strain. Put part of a bottle of port in a sauce-pan over the fire, add the spiced infusion and a roasted lemon stuck with six cloves. Take four ounces of sugar in lumps and grate the outer rind of a small lemon, place them in a punch-bowl, and add the juice of the lemon, pour in the hot wine, etc., then the remainder of the bottle of port, and serve. A Seville orange may be roasted instead of a lemon.
A hot spiced port, thickened in flavour rather than body by a long spice decoction and a whole roasted citrus. The technique is straightforward; the pitfalls are all in the heat.
- Never let the wine boilThe port is warmed, not simmered — once it approaches a boil the alcohol and the volatile fruit aromatics go off with the steam and what remains tastes flat and stewed. Hold it around 160–170F, hot enough to steam faintly but not to bubble.
- An eighth of an ounce eachThat is about 3.5 g per spice: roughly a teaspoon of whole cloves, a blade or two of mace, a teaspoon of dried ginger, a small cinnamon stick, a scant teaspoon of allspice berries. Use whole spices, since the mixture is boiled and then strained.
- Half a pint of waterIn an English book of this period a pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 inch cups. Thirty minutes of open boiling will reduce it noticeably; the recipe does not say to make up the loss.
- The roasted lemonStick the lemon with six cloves and roast it whole; the original gives no temperature, but a modern oven at around 400F until the skin is browned and blistered, 30-40 minutes, answers. Roasting mellows the peel oils and takes the raw edge off the acid, and the roasted clove-stuck citrus is characteristic of Bishop as against plain mulled wine.
- Sugar lumps and the rindRubbing or grating rind onto loaf sugar is the old method of drawing out the peel oil (the oleo-saccharum of punch-making). Four ounces is a generous half cup; with a sweet ruby port you may want less. Modern cube sugar works, or ordinary granulated.
- Which portA young, fruity ruby port is the right choice, not tawny or vintage. Two lemons are needed in total — one to roast, one for the grated rind and juice.
- Seville orangeThe bitter marmalade orange, in season only from around January. If unavailable, a regular orange with an extra squeeze of lemon juice approximates the sharpness.
- YieldOne bottle of port plus the infusion gives roughly a litre — six small punch-cups, or four generous ones. Warm the bowl and the glasses first, or the drink is tepid by the second round.
The Bishop belongs to a family of English hot wine drinks named, half in jest, after church ranks: Bishop made with port, Cardinal generally with claret, Pope with burgundy or champagne. It was a fixture of college common rooms and winter suppers, and the Oxford attachment in this title reflects that — the drink appears in earlier nineteenth-century collections under the same name, and Dickens gave it lasting currency when a reformed Scrooge proposes discussing Bob Cratchit's affairs over a bowl of Smoking Bishop. The roasted, clove-studded citrus is the signature of the older recipes and marks the drink as a descendant of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century punch tradition, in which spice, citrus oil, sugar and wine were combined by hand rather than poured from a bottle. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households, records it among the standard receipts a cook might be asked to produce on a cold evening.