From the Diogenes club to Country Inns: Dining with Holmes and Watson

by Steve Connelly

Alcohol plays its part in the Canon. In the Greek interpreter Watson uses Brandy to revive Mr Melas from the effects of the Charcoal. Even Holmes uses Brandy when Dr Watson recovers from his faint in The Empty House. In the Victorian age, Brandy was commonly seen as a medical stimulant and restorative.
In The Abbey Grange, the investigation leads them to a grand dining room stained with blood, wine and glasses. The wine acts as a clue for Holmes with his investigations.
Alcohol’s role in the Canon is rarely indulgent—it is medicinal, stabilizing and essentially a plot device.
Preservation played a key role in Victorian food culture. Without modern refrigeration, meat was kept in cool pantries or preserved in aspic, salt, or fat. Holmes’s frequent cold suppers of partridge, tongue and ham reflect this. Bread would be delivered daily, butter came in crockery pots, and milk was kept in cool closets. Club lunches and country house feasts involved elaborate planning: courses served in sequence, wine decanted with ceremony, joints carved at the table.
As a reflection, it is worth noting how often Holmes ends a case not with celebration, but with food. Food in the Holmes stories is seldom central, but always meaningful. It marks class, character, location, and mood. A tray of cold meat, untouched. A glass of claret. A hasty lunch at a railway inn. A supper of woodcock and foie gras. These are not banquets, but clues—fragments of the world Holmes inhabits, just as surely as footprints or cigar ash. They reveal who he is, what he values, and how he moves through the complicated texture of Victorian life.
Dr Watson's description takes a food related turn in the copper beeches. Watson describes Violet Hunter in the following way…As he spoke the door opened, and a young lady entered the room. She was plainly but neatly dressed, with a bright, quick face, freckled like a plover's egg, and with the brisk manner of a woman who has had her own way to make in the world.
To Sherlock Holmes, his world was rich with flavour; And Watson, ever faithful, noticed each crumb. From the tea trays of Baker Street to the great dining rooms of English country houses, from a nutritious meal at a restaurant to hot tea at Charing Cross, the food they ate, or declined, helps us to know them, and to understand the world they helped make so unforgettable.