Smoking Bishop

Port wine, red wine, and roasted oranges — Dickens placed this Victorian punch in A Christmas Carol (1843), Scrooge inviting Cratchit to a bowl after his redemption.

The Smoking Bishop is the most literary cocktail in the English-speaking world, its place in cultural memory secured by a single scene in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, published in December 1843. In the story's final pages, after Ebenezer Scrooge has experienced his supernatural redemption and arrived at his clerk Bob Cratchit's home on Christmas morning, he invites Cratchit to discuss a raise over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop — a detail so specific that Dickens clearly expected his readers to know exactly what the drink was. The Bishop is a category of warm wine punch named for its purple color, which recalls the violet-purple of a bishop's ecclesiastical vestments. The Smoking Bishop specifically combines port wine with red wine, halved whole oranges or Seville oranges studded with cloves and roasted until slightly charred, sugar, and spices, simmered together and served hot. The roasting of the orange — which caramelizes the fruit's sugars and creates smoky, slightly bitter notes in the juice — is what gives the drink its smoking designation. Ecclesiastical punch naming was a Victorian tradition: the Archbishop used claret; the Cardinal used champagne; the Pope used burgundy; and the Bishop used port. Dickens's use of the Smoking Bishop in A Christmas Carol turned what was already a fashionable Victorian Christmas punch into a cultural artifact, and it has been prepared and served at Christmas tables in Britain every year since.