A couple of months ago I decided to find out more about my favourite ale, which is called Smugglers. I guess the name has always been part of the appeal and reminded me of the video series England and the English, which we watch with first-year students at MGIMO — the section about the history of tea drinking tradition, in which they speak about how tea was smuggled onto the island through Cornwall.
It turned out the brewery that produces Smugglers Ale, called St Austell, is located in Cornwall too, a curious coincidence again. They have a range of interesting beverages on offer, including a few seasonal ones, and they provide them with what I thought to be very creative names and descriptions. Among the ones that caught my attention were the Halloween ale and the Christmas ale.
The description of the Christmas ale, called Proper Cracker, says that it ‘is packed full of delicious dark fruit flavours and a hint of spice to bring a glow to the cockles’. The phrase ‘bring a glow to the cockles’ is a variation on the idiom ‘to warm the cockles (of somebody’s heart)’, which means ‘to make somebody feel happy or sympathetic’.
This made me think of the recent video made by the British Vogue magazine in which they invited Adele to try and identify ten traditional British dishes wearing blindfolds. The second dish was cockles, which she identified straightaway. She was also given to try a cake called Battenberg towards the end. Square-shaped and chequered inside, it’s a recipe I’ve thought of giving a go for a long time.
19/11/2021
/Photo from https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/battenberg-cake/