Floyd on Hangovers by Keith Floyd

I’ve been meaning to post on this legendary book for a while now. Sadly, we finally discovered the fate of our last copy when we removed a whole load of rotting books from the bottom of a set of shelves in the lounge where the rain had made ingress. The leak is now secured, the walls dry, but Floyd on Hangovers ended up in the tip, so I’ve recently invested in a new edition.

Floyd liked a drink, although the trademark glass of wine during the filming was for show rather than getting sloshed, or so he claimed in his biography. Certainly by the time this was published in 1992, he had a reputation as a bon viveur, and who else could have published a book quite like this, declaring itself as an authoritative guide on the cover? There is also a five-day detoxification programme at the back of the book, which even includes a few recipes, for those of us who might have forgotten that he originally made his living as a chef. I certainly can’t think of anyone else who could written the following titled Findings on Congeners and Inner Peace:

If you have been foolish enough to drink three litres of Western Samoan Cabernet Sauvignon, before moving onto a slightly heavier port wine, significantly bottled in Hartlepool, then the three miserable looking judges sitting at the end of your bed when you wake will give you 9.8, 9.8, 9.9 respectively. If you really had wanted to beat this score, then you should have had several large Scottish ones before starting on the wine. However, this is a fine score, as the hamster gnawing away on your cortex will testify. 
It is not just the alcohol but all those beastly congeners, so prevalent in the fermentation process in the making of red wine and port, that would have scored a direct hit on the intestinal tract and the nervous system. Very often chemicals are added to the drink to make it look more attractive - brighter and clearer - and it is these chemicals, which, combined with the amount of alcohol, are frequently the cause of the worst kind of hangover. Generally speaking, brandy, dark rum, red wine, port and sherries are the worst offenders followed by Vermouth, beer, whisky and gin, and then white wine, lagers and the purest of all - vodka.
With all of this congener-laden alcohol on board the simple task of posting a cheque to pay the gas bill would become complex and so full of important decisions that just addressing the envelope, if you were able to find one, would seem like writing a summary of War and Peace. This is as low as it goes. You feel that you are on the wrong end of a telescope with ‘The Big Eye’ gazing down at you as you fumble around the bedroom trying to decide what’s best. 
This is the time when you need someone who is in a worse state than yourself. Talking about how bad you feel helps. If there is no one around, go to the nearest railway station and look at the guys who have been sleeping rough. Look at those faces ravaged by strong cider, Carlesberg Special Brew, metal polish and broken dreams. You may think you can hear the faint strains of a heavenly choir singing ‘Never, ever, ever again’! You may also feel that is only a matter of time before you join them. This is good. Do not dally too long. Stride along out through the bus exhausts and Kentucky Fried Chicken packets of life. Cancel all appointments. Find a field, preferably with a small stream gurgling nearby, and ponder the marvels of nature. Soon an inner spiritual light will start to glow inside you and the hamster in your head will begin to snooze. 
Now is the time to make a private deal with yourself that you must swear will be honoured for the rest of your drinking life. Never touch a drop of Western Samoan Cabernet Sauvignon again. 

Sage advice indeed...

The Book of Household Management by Mrs Beeton

Often and erroneously referred to as Mrs Beeton’s Cookbook, The Book of Household Management has a great deal more to it than just recipes. A portion of the book is set over to the duties of staff, including those responsible for the cellar:

2163. ...but the real duties of the butler are in the wine-cellar; there he should be competent to advise his master as to the price and quality of the wine to be laid in; "fine," bottle, cork, and seal it, and place it in the binns. Brewing, racking, and bottling malt liquors, belong to his office, as well as their distribution. These and other drinkables are brought from the cellar every day by his own hands, except where an under-butler is kept; and a careful entry of every bottle used, entered in the cellar-book; so that the book should always show the contents of the cellar.
2164. The office of butler is thus one of very great trust in a household. Here, as elsewhere, honesty is the best policy: the butler should make it his business to understand the proper treatment of the different wines under his charge, which he can easily do from the wine-merchant, and faithfully attend to it; his own reputation will soon compensate for the absence of bribes from unprincipled wine-merchants, if he serves a generous and hospitable master. Nothing spreads more rapidly in society than the reputation of a good wine-cellar, and all that is required is wines well chosen and well cared for; and this a little knowledge, carefully applied, will soon supply.
2165. The butler, we have said, has charge of the contents of the cellars, and it is his duty to keep them in a proper condition, to fine down wine in wood, bottle it off, and store it away in places suited to the sorts. Where wine comes into the cellar ready bottled, it is usual to return the same number of empty bottles; the butler has not, in this case, the same inducements to keep the bottles of the different sorts separated; but where the wine is bottled in the house, he will find his account, not only in keeping them separate, but in rinsing them well, and even washing them with clean water as soon as they are empty.
2166. There are various modes of fining wine: isinglass, gelatine, and gum Arabic are all used for the purpose. Whichever of these articles is used, the process is always the same. Supposing eggs (the cheapest) to be used,—Draw a gallon or so of the wine, and mix one quart of it with the whites of four eggs, by stirring it with a whisk; afterwards, when thoroughly mixed, pour it back into the cask through the bunghole, and stir up the whole cask, in a rotatory direction, with a clean split stick inserted through the bunghole. Having stirred it sufficiently, pour in the remainder of the wine drawn off, until the cask is full; then stir again, skimming off the bubbles that rise to the surface. When thoroughly mixed by stirring, close the bunghole, and leave it to stand for three or four days. This quantity of clarified wine will fine thirteen dozen of port or sherry. The other clearing ingredients are applied in the same manner, the material being cut into small pieces, and dissolved in the quart of wine, and the cask stirred in the same manner.
2167. To Bottle Wine.—Having thoroughly washed and dried the bottles, supposing they have been before used for the same kind of wine, provide corks, which will be improved by being slightly boiled, or at least steeped in hot water,—a wooden hammer or mallet, a bottling-boot, and a squeezer for the corks. Bore a hole in the lower part of the cask with a gimlet, receiving the liquid stream which follows in the bottle and filterer, which is placed in a tub or basin. This operation is best performed by two persons, one to draw the wine, the other to cork the bottles. The drawer is to see that the bottles are up to the mark, but not too full, the bottle being placed in a clean tub to prevent waste. The corking-boot is buckled by a strap to the knee, the bottle placed in it, and the cork, after being squeezed in the press, driven in by a flat wooden mallet.
2168. As the wine draws near to the bottom of the cask, a thick piece of muslin is placed in the strainer, to prevent the viscous grounds from passing into the bottle.
2169. Having carefully counted the bottles, they are stored away in their respective binns, a layer of sand or sawdust being placed under the first tier, and another over it; a second tier is laid over this, protected by a lath, the head of the second being laid to the bottom of the first; over this another bed of sawdust is laid, not too thick, another lath; and so on till the binn is filled.
2170. Wine so laid in will be ready for use according to its quality and age. Port wine, old in the wood, will be ready to drink in five or six months; but if it is a fruity wine, it will improve every year. Sherry, if of good quality, will be fit to drink as soon as the "sickness" (as its first condition after bottling is called) ceases, and will also improve; but the cellar must be kept at a perfectly steady temperature, neither too hot nor too cold, but about 55° or 60°, and absolutely free from draughts of cold air.

She also explains the correct way of opening wine and champagne:

2192. In opening wine, let it be done quietly, and without shaking the bottle; if crusted, let it be inclined to the crusted side, and decanted while in that position. In opening champagne, it is not necessary to discharge it with a pop; properly cooled, the cork is easily extracted without an explosion; when the cork is out, the mouth of the bottle should be wiped with the napkin over the footman's arm.

Now you won’t find any of that in Nigella...

Stirred But Not Shaken by Keith Floyd

Somewhere in our flat there is a copy of the brilliant Floyd on Hangovers, a potted history of drink, boozy escapades and spurious cures for over indulgence. Unfortunately, I can’t find it anywhere, so until then, here is Floyd’s autobiography, Stirred But Not Shaken.

Floyd sets the scene at the start of the book with an evening of Bacchanalian excess; there is bare knuckle boxing, glorious roasts, and lakes of whisky and port. At the end of the night, after staggering to his room, he finds himself lying flat on a hard mattress, wired up to tubes and a ventilator. When he can eventually speak, he asks the people milling around his bed about the party:

I said to them, “How did you enjoy the dinner and boxing?” Silence. I said, “Well surely you were there. It was a great night. I mean, there was betting, there was the port, there was the whole baron of lamb, and then there was the dawn. How do you manage to have such a place in what appears to me to be a hospital?” It was a hospital.

After an alcoholic collapse, Floyd had been suffering hallucinations in intensive care brought on by the drugs keeping him alive and a nasty attack of the DTs. As the doctor kindly pointed out:

“...Drink again as you have before and you will die.”

Floyd started off his professional life as a cook after leaving the army. After several briefly successful ventures in the West Country that all ended in financial disaster, he found himself doing a one off cooking slot on a regional television broadcast at the beginning of the 1980s. It snowballed from there.

For better or for worse, Floyd, and his director David Pritchard, invented the modern TV chef. Before Floyd, everything was a bit staid and formal; Floyd took food out of the studio and into the great outdoors, chatted to the film crew, and most famously, had a constant prop of a glass of wine. Despite his reputation as a rogueish guzzler, he claimed never to have drunk once while filming his series, and the glass of wine was to give him something to do between the action:

I had a bottle of wine on the prep table intended for cooking. But in the absence of any direction from Pritchard, when I ran out of inspiration and words, I said, “I think I’ll have a quick slurp,” to buy valuable seconds to recompense my thoughts.

Despite his insistence that he was never sozzled while on the show, he was shifting a lot of whiskey in between filming:

Increasingly, however, I found myself staying up all night, unable to sleep because I was worrying about how it would go the next day. Slowly and, it seems, inevitably a bottle of whisky was becoming my crutch: a companion that would help me through the hours from midnight to dawn.

This seeped into his home life, and by the time his TV career was over and his fourth marriage was collapsing, he was drinking like a pissed fish:

As far as booze is concerned, I thought I could knock it on the head quite easily. But on the other hand, I felt under pressure with Tess and I couldn’t help myself... Our relationship was deteriorating rapidly, and our life was one long round of screaming matches interspersed with my complete alcoholic blackouts, and romance had long gone. The fairy tale we’d once lived turned into the grim reality that I can now talk about, but it pains me to do so. The fact is I kept a bottle of Scotch in my bedside table. In the mornings, when I awoke I had to have – I didn’t have to but felt that I did – a few large glasses of whisky before I could get downstairs.

The near death experience (his third admission to hospital suffering from the effects of drink and malnutrition – sadly for Floyd, he had come to hate eating) seemed to make him turn things around and late in life he found love again with an old friend and was ready to go back onto the television. A programme was produced for Channel 4 and at the time the book was published he had several new opportunities lined up. He died of a heart attack the night the show was broadcast.

Floyd was a culinary inspiration to millions of viewers who, like me, regard him with great affection. This rambling memoir sounds like a long afternoon at the bar with the man himself and I could hear his distinctive voice rattling off the anecdotes as I read it. I feel it would be appropriate (raises glass) to leave the last word to him:

Sometimes I worry about what I’ve left out. And sometimes I worry about what I’ve put in. but for now, as this book fades to black, I’ll have another pastis. Thank you and au revoir.

Kafka’s Soup by Mark Crick

A brilliant piece of literary ventriloquism, Kafka’s Soup presents fourteen recipes, as written by the world’s writers. Kafka presents a recipe for miso soup, The Marquis de Sade stuffs poussin, and Harold Pinter makes cheese on toast. As this is a blog about drinking rather than eating, I’ve selected a few quotes from Rich Chocolate Cake á la Irvine Welsh.


Stevie is planning a quality fuckin cook-up and hoping to avoid his so-called friends who will come around his flat, drink his beer and eat his chocolate cake. It’s a boozy old recipe with a good glug of port in the mixture:

Ah add the eggs and flour to the mixture and pour oan a drop of port. Ah hae a drop masel; it’s no bad, so I put some more intae the pan. The bottle’s soon finished. Ah’ve drunk half and the other half’s goan intae the mixture – greedy fuckin cake.

He’s got enough booze laid in to keep him going while it’s in the oven:

Ma heid is beginning tae throb again and ah decide it’s time tae hit the bevvies. Ah’ve enough cans of special tae see me through till the cookin’s over, if nae fucker comes in.

Unfortunately, his ‘friend’ Spammer turns up, along with Gav and Hiddy, two layabouts who work for the local funeral directors. They’re on the way to a funeral, but they daren’t leave the coffin in the hearse while it’s parked outside, as they’ve lost one body already. They come in with the deceased’s grieving girlfriend, Debbie, and start on the beer:

Gav and Hiddy hae forgotten their hurry and are hittin the bevvies, their feet up on Debbie’s boyfriend’s wooden overcoat.

As the cake is now cooked, it’s time for the icing, complete with a good measure of kahlua:

Kahlua’s a fuckin lassie’s drink, ah know, but it’s no bad in a cake.

At least the end result goes down well:

Spammer has by now drunk the rest of the kahlua, and is oot of his box, jumping around desperate for a piece of the brown stuff... We’re all soon stuffing our faces, though ah would’nae recommend the heavy as an ideal accompaniment.

It looks so good, I might try it myself, but I’ll take his advice and avoid the Special Brew...

London's Best Pubs by Peter Haydon

A quick foray back into non-fiction this week for Peter Haydon’s beautifully produced guide to London’s most interesting and unusual pubs. I include it because it contains not one but two pictures of my favourite pub cat, Tom Paine at the Seven Stars, but also a rather fine historical introduction to the public houses of London.


Descended from coaching inns, taverns and alehouses, the London pub as an institution has changed considerably over the last few hundred years. Back in the 1700s, for example, the drink of the tavern was wine, until wars with France conspired to disrupt supply. Portugal came to the rescue:

Our long-standing friendship with Portugal meant that port was the popular tavern drink of the 18th century. Consumed as it was in very large volumes, port can be considered largely responsible for having made the 18th century the era of gout and the skull-splitting hangover.

William III’s policy to wean the population off wine popularised gin instead. He succeeded only in making the nation drunk. Indeed, until this point, alcohol wasn’t really considered particularly harmful:

...with gin came the revelation that there was an alcoholic drink that was actually bad for people.

After the gin fevers of the 18th and 19th centuries came the Temperance movement and drink as a political issue. London’s taverns, gin palaces and inns have been shaped by licensing acts, brewery speculation, social mores and trends and have arrived in the beginning of 21st century as unique and remarkable public spaces. Haydon describes them thus:

For me, the chief virtue of a pub is that it can almost anything you want it to be. Provided you do the landlord the courtesy of buying a drink you can stay as long as you like, be as gregarious or reticent as you like and be as idle or as studious as you like. You can enjoy the company of all or engage in solitary reverie. You can talk to strangers, make lifelong friends, catch up on gossip, commit to memory a cracking good joke for later use, hold forth on any subject close to your heart and leave whenever you wish (within opening hours, of course). The pub is egalitarian, libertarian, non-judgemental and subversive. For these reasons alone, I rate it as priceless.

He helpfully includes an excellent quote from Dr Johnson, regular at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese:

No, Sir, there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.

I’ll quite happily raise a glass to that.

An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David

A legend in food writing, Elizabeth David arrived back in Britain in 1946 to find food severely rationed and olive oil only available from the chemists. She put her reminiscences of the food she’d enjoyed in the Mediterranean into her first book, Mediterranean Food, which appeared in 1950, followed by volumes on the food of Italy and provincial France.

David is rightly remembered for her writing as well as her cooking and An Omelette and a Glass of Wine is a delightful compilation of journalism and recipes that first appeared in The Spectator and Vogue among other publications.

In the article that gives the book its name, David sets out a simple philosophy for enjoying food and wine, in this case a cheese omelette and a glass of white:

I like white wines with all cheese dishes, and especially when the cheese in question is Gruyère. No doubt this is only a passing phase, because as a wine drinker but not a wine expert one’s tastes are constantly changing. But one of the main points about the enjoyment of food and wine seems to me to lie in having what you want when you want it and in the particular combination you fancy.

Of course, you may choose to finish your meal with a dessert, perhaps an apricot tart, washed down with something sticky:

The custom of drinking a little glass of rich wine with a sweet dish or fruit seems to me a civilized one, and especially welcome to those who do not or cannot swig brandy or port after a meal... The musky golden wine of Beaumes – according to Mr Asher, and I see no reason to quarrel with his judgement, ‘its bouquet is penetrating and flower-like, its flavour both honey-sweet and tangy’ – and the sweet apricots, vanilla-sugared on crumbly pastry, made an original and entrancing combination of food and wine.

I will finish with her memories of Norman Douglas, an old friend of David’s, whose South Wind I am eyeing up for a future post:

There, at a table outside the half-ruined house, a branch of piercingly aromatic lemons within arm’s reach, a piece of bread and a bottle of the proprietor’s olive oil in front of me, a glass of wine in my hand, Norman was speaking. ‘I wish you would listen when I tell you that if you fill my glass before it’s empty I shan’t know how much I’ve drunk.’

Sage advice indeed.

The Take by Martina Cole

Returning to a gangland theme, I recently picked up a copy of Martina Cole’s The Take, a story of organised crime and family betrayal from Britain’s best selling author. I was drawn to Cole by this fantastic interview in The Guardian ('The Booker prize money wouldn't even keep me in cigarettes') and finally got about to taking one of her novels out of the library.


The Take follows the life of career criminal Freddie Jackson, East End ‘face’ and drink and drug fuelled nutter. Freddie puts away the sauce, but not quite to the same degree as his long suffering wife, Jackie, who is slipping into alcohol dependency. Finally, it looks like Freddie has gone too far, even for Jackie. At eleven in the morning, self-destruction beckons:

She burped, and tasted the tannic cheapness of the wine, then she topped up the glass and drank once more. She need oblivion and she knew that today of all days it was not to be hers. This was far too serious to anaesthetise with wine or vodka. This needed brandy or even whisky.

There are some great descriptions of the ravages of booze throughout the book: A copper with the beer gut and the weather beaten look of a man who had drunk too much too soon, the electric pain of a hangover. Speaking of hangovers, there’s a cracking one when Freddy’s best friend wakes up after his stag night:

The night before was a complete blank, and he know that was how this was meant to be. He had been drinking brandy and port, a lethal combination, and he felt as if someone had hit him over the head with a billiard ball in a sock.

For all the heavy drinking and drug taking, the swearing and the ultraviolence, The Take is at heart a morality tale about hubris and nemesis. And I’m enjoying every minute of it.

The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe

A child of the '70s, I've always had a bit of a soft spot for the decade, even though I only made my appearance half way through. The Rotters' Club sits itself comfortably in the middle as well, dissecting this turbulent era through the teenage antics of four friends at a Birmingham grammar school.


Booze makes several appearances, including a passing reference to Blue Nun (!) but I’ve selected for the blog that teenage rite-of-passage, namely drinking too much from the drinks cabinet at a party where the parents are away.

Benjamin Trotter can remember consuming three quarters of a bottle of vintage port, and little else after that:

Benjamin awoke, opened his eyes, and noticed some peculiar things. Firstly, opening his eyes had made no difference. He still couldn’t see anything. Secondly, he was in excruciating pain. His back ached and he had cramp in both legs but this was small fry compared to the pulsing, shuddering pain in his temples, which periodically spread out in waves of unmitigated agony, making him feel that his entire skull was enclosed in a slowly contracting vice.

Having woken up in a wardrobe with a girl whose name he can’t recall and a blistering hangover, Benjamin remembers that it’s the first day of the new school year the next day, and as a school prefect, he has to go to drinks that very evening, despite the fact that all he felt capable of doing was having a long and much-needed vomit then crawling into bed to die.

He gets away with his hangover at first, hiding his drinks and doing his best to keep down the food. Trouble starts with the toast at the end:

Now, Mr Nuttall is going to pass around a bottle of the Founder’s Port. In keeping with a tradition going back to the eighteenth century, we shall all declare our loyalty to King William’s, and drink our glasses down in one draught.

The bathroom quickly beckons young Benjamin...

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

Lucky Jim was heartily recommended to me, and not just for its famous description of a terrible hangover. I must confess that having tried reading Kingsley Amis at school and not having got very far with him, I took a little persuading, but it was a very good recommendation...


History lecturer James Dixon is stuck at the house of his Professor for an interminable weekend of madrigals and recorder recitals when he decides to slope off to the pub. On his return he contrives to sink the best part of a bottle of port in one go; (The bottle had been about three-quarters full when he started, and was about three-quarters empty when he stopped) before making his way upstairs. Getting ready for bed, things start to go horribly wrong:

Suddenly feeling worse, he heaved a shuddering sigh. Someone seemed to have leapt nimbly up behind him and encased him in a kind of diving-suit made of invisible cotton-wool.

Worse is to come the next day:

He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

Quite frankly, I'm not surprised...