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Snapdragon
This is a Christmas dish of very easy preparation, and the central feature of a favourite Christmas sport. "A quantity of raisins are deposited in a large dish or bowl (the broader and shallower this is the better), and brandy or some other spirit is poured over the fruit and ignited. The bystanders now endeavour by turns to grasp a raisin by plunging their hands through the flames; and as this is somewhat of an arduous feat, requiring both courage and rapidity of action, a considerable amount of laughter is evoked at the expense of the unsuccessful competitors."
Snapdragon is less a dish than a parlour game with an edible prize, and the mechanics of it are exactly what makes it unsafe in a modern room.
- Burning spirit is the whole hazardBrandy at around 40% ABV burns with a pale blue flame that is easily missed in a lit room. Players and bystanders cannot reliably see where the fire ends, which is precisely the condition under which people put their hands and sleeves into it.
- A broad shallow dish makes it worseThe original recommends the widest, shallowest vessel available, without saying why. Such a dish maximises the surface area of burning liquid, gives the flame the greatest chance of running over the rim if the dish is jostled, and offers nothing to contain a spill.
- Spilled burning alcohol spreadsA knocked bowl does not extinguish itself. It sends a thin film of lit spirit across a table, a cloth or a floor and onto whoever is nearest, and clothing can catch from it.
- The raisins are the delivery system for the burnDried fruit that has sat in burning spirit is soaked with hot alcohol and holds heat well past the moment the flame appears to go out. Putting one straight into the mouth, which is the point of the game, risks burns to the lips, tongue and palate.
- The period context assumed supervision that does not transferVictorian accounts describe Snapdragon as a children's amusement, but nothing in that context makes the burning spirit any less flammable.
- If you want the flavourBrandied raisins made without ignition are a straightforward thing and any current recipe for them will serve. Read this entry as a record of how Christmas was kept, not as instructions.
Snapdragon, also written snap-dragon or flapdragon, was a Christmas Eve and Twelfth Night amusement in England from at least the sixteenth century; Shakespeare uses "flap-dragon" as a byword for something swallowed whole, and Samuel Johnson's dictionary carries an entry for the game. Raisins were the usual bait, sometimes with almonds or candied peel added, and the room was often darkened so the blue flame showed to best effect; rhymes and chants accompanied the grabbing. The entry's wording is telling in itself, quoting an outside description rather than issuing instructions in the usual imperative. Around the time this dictionary appeared the custom was in decline, one of a cluster of Christmas fire-games that faded as households filled with soft furnishings, gaslight and, eventually, a different tolerance for setting spirits alight in the parlour.