Smoking Bishop

A popular Christmastime drink in Victorian England, this mulled punch famously appears near the end of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Scrooge, who has been given a second chance at life, surprises Bob Cratchit with a stream of kind words and the offer of “a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop.”

In the 1827 Oxford Night Caps, a slim volume of recipes for alcoholic beverages “used in the university,” the bishop is described as “[seeming] to be one of the oldest winter