Hangover cures #3 – The Jeeves pick-me-up, aka the Prairie Oyster
Ingredients:
Raw egg x1
Worcester Sauce
Tabasco/Hot sauce
(Maybe Cognac – we’ll get to that)
It’s popular for waggy literary types (like me, I suppose, but waggier) to say knowingly that P.G. Wodehouse books should be prescribed as an anti-depressant on the National Health Service of every country – and I can see some merit in the argument.
I mean, look at this passage from Jeeves Takes Charge, in which Edwin the Boy Scout insists on tidying Bertie Wooster’s room – wherein he’s hidden the defamatory works of his Uncle Willoughby – and tell me it’s not pure molten honey crushed up with a Xanax, rendered in word form:
"I shouldn't bother about tidying the room," I said.
"I like tidying it. It's not a bit of trouble really."
"But it's quite tidy now."
"Not so tidy as I shall make it."
This was getting perfectly rotten. I didn't want to murder the kid, and yet there didn't seem any other way of shifting him. I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.
"There's something much kinder than that which you could do," I said. "You see that box of cigars? Take it down to the smoking-room and snip off the ends for me. That would save me no end of trouble. Stagger along, laddie."
He seemed a bit doubtful; but he staggered. I shoved the parcel into a drawer, locked it, trousered the key, and felt better. I might be a chump, but, dash it, I could out-general a mere kid with a face like a ferret. I went downstairs again. Just as I was passing the smoking-room door, out curveted Edwin. It seemed to me that if he wanted to do a real act of kindness he would commit suicide.
It’s in Jeeves Takes Charge where Reginald Jeeves and Bertie Wooster first meet, and Jeeves’s first act of kindness to his prospective master is to cure the latter’s excruciating hangover – which he does with one of the most hotly-debated hangover cures in literature:
… presently he came back with a glass on a tray.
"If you would drink this, sir," he said, with a kind of bedside manner, rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into the sick prince. "It is a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcester Sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it its bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it extremely invigorating after a late evening."
I would have clutched at anything that looked like a life-line that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.
"You're engaged!" I said, as soon as I could say anything.
I perceived clearly that this cove was one of the world's wonders, the sort no home should be without.
"Thank you, sir. My name is Jeeves."
Now, lovely writing and all that, but old Pelham Grenville doesn’t exactly give us the ingredient list with exact proportions, does he? But reading between the lines, it seems like what Jeeves fashions for Bertie is his take on the Prairie Oyster, which is to say: a raw egg (check), Worcester Sauce (check) and hot sauce (I presume when he says ‘red pepper’, he’s not talking about some sort of juiced capsicum, but rather a variation on tabasco… so check).
The ambiguity of Jeeves’s breakdown of the ingredients (are they just the key ingredients? Or is that it?) means there may also be room for other assorted bits and pieces traditionally associated with a Prairie Oyster, namely: salt, pepper, vinegar and maybe tomato juice.
Although Wodehouse never revealed the full recipe (to the best of my knowledge) Bertie himself later has doubts that it’s a simple three-parter, saying (in Right Ho, Jeeves): “I have had occasion, I fancy, to speak before now of these pick-me-ups of Jeeves's... What they consist of, I couldn't tell you. He says some kind of sauce, the yolk of a raw egg and a dash of red pepper, but nothing will convince me that the thing doesn't go much deeper than that.”
And it’s interesting to note that in the television series from the 1990s, Stephen Fry’s Jeeves is seen adding generous glugs of cognac into the jug containing the blessed cure (see sequence below)… so perhaps this devotee of Wodehouse knows something we don’t! All good grist to the mill for my ‘hair of the dog’ fanaticism though (see Hangovers of Note passim).
Anyway. A Prairie Oyster. Try it out, play around with it. But just know that if it’s good enough for Jeeves, it’s good enough for us.
Although Wodehouse never revealed the full recipe (to the best of my knowledge) Bertie himself later has doubts that it’s a simple three-parter, saying (in Right Ho, Jeeves): “I have had occasion, I fancy, to speak before now of these pick-me-ups of Jeeves's... What they consist of, I couldn't tell you. He says some kind of sauce, the yolk of a raw egg and a dash of red pepper, but nothing will convince me that the thing doesn't go much deeper than that.”
And it’s interesting to note that in the television series from the 1990s, Stephen Fry’s Jeeves is seen adding generous glugs of cognac into the jug containing the blessed cure (see sequence below)… so perhaps this devotee of Wodehouse knows something we don’t! All good grist to the mill for my ‘hair of the dog’ fanaticism though (see Hangovers of Note passim).
Anyway. A Prairie Oyster. Try it out, play around with it. But just know that if it’s good enough for Jeeves, it’s good enough for us.
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