Outbreak After Dark: A Consumption Christmas Carol

Summary

This month’s Outbreak After Dark is a holiday episode — and a heavy one.

In A Consumption Christmas Carol, we retell Dickens’ ghost story through the real epidemic that haunted Victorian London: tuberculosis. Long before antibiotics, TB shaped daily life, art, poverty, and public health — romanticized in parlors, devastating in tenements, and deadly across every social class.

Moving through past, present, and future, this episode blends gothic storytelling with infectious disease history to explore how tuberculosis was misunderstood, aestheticized, and ultimately revealed as an airborne bacterial infection — one that still claims lives today.

Because some stories linger, we end by the fire with a post-Carol decompression — sharing reflection, context, and space to breathe together.

Listen here or scroll down to read full episode.

Full Episode

INTRODUCTION

HEATHER: Welcome to outbreak after dark, a new monthly ritual here on infectious dose. It's still me, Heather, your resident virologist turned science communicator. But tonight we're stepping just a little further into the shadows. This is where the science stays real, but the stories get darker, weirder and yes, sometimes just plain gross. We're calling it outbreak after dark, because that's when the whispers start, the campfire crackles, and the line between infection and urban legend begins to blur.

Tonight, Sam, Kate and I are doing something ambitious. We're performing A Christmas Carol, but with tuberculosis, because nothing says holiday spirit like an airborne pathogen, and three women attempting Victorian energy levels We absolutely did not rehearse for. But honestly, TB shaped Dickens world. It shaped the real Scrooges, the real tiny Tims and the real families who lived in the shadow of consumption. So this retelling leans into the Gothic truth behind the fiction. Now, fair warning, this episode is heavier than our usual outings, so once the story ends, stick around for what we're calling the post Carol decompression, where we'll chat, breathe again and discuss Victorian medical choices, some of which will haunt me more than any ghost in this script. All right, fire's lit. Ghosts are gathering. Let's begin.

SCENE 1 – MARLEY’S COUGH

NARRATOR: Marley was dead, to begin with — and so were many others. London in 1843 was a city of contradictions: bright with industry, dark with illness; alive with commerce, yet haunted by the slow, wasting deaths that touched every family. The fog clung low, thick as wool, disguising the breath that carried danger.

Here, disease did not strike like lightning. It crept. It lingered. It waited in the lungs.

Consumption, they called it — as though the body were a candle burning down, melting away hour by hour. The pale cheek, the bright eye, the thin frame… all mistaken for beauty. But behind those poets’ illusions lay the truth: rooms without air, wages without warmth, lives without mercy.

In the counting-house of Ebenezer Scrooge, the air was no less heavy. Though the room boasted no fireplace worthy of the name, every corner was thick with the ghosts of ledgers past — debts unpaid, wages withheld, breath inhaled and exhaled without care for who shared it.

It was in this same room that Jacob Marley had once coughed through long nights of labor, pale as the moonlight on his ink-stained hands.

But Scrooge had not listened then, and he would not listen now.

SCROOGE: Bah! Christmas. Nonsense. The poor should learn thrift, not beg for charity.

MARLEY’S VOICE: Ebenezer… do you hear me breathe?

SCROOGE: Who’s there?

NARRATOR: Scrooge turned, but the room was empty. Only the ledger stared back — a neat column of figures, devoid of life though paid for by it.

For Scrooge believed in nothing he could not count. Not spirits, not suffering, not contagion. The very notion that illness might travel through the air was an absurdity. Bad humors, they said. Moral weakness, suggested others.

But in truth, something unseen filled the city’s lungs — a microscopic passenger waiting for the right host… or the right moment.

NARRATOR: Yet the past has a way of returning, and the dead… a way of making themselves known. Marley’s chain was forged not only from greed, but from breath. Every cough unanswered, every suffering ignored, every plea dismissed — each link cold as iron.

And now that chain stirred.

NARRATOR: That night, when the clocks tolled three, the veil between life and loss would thin. The city would exhale across time. And the ghosts — of memory, of breath, of consequence — would come calling.

Clock chimes: One… two… three.

SCENE 2 – THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST: THE WHITE PLAGUE

NARRATOR: The first spirit did not enter so much as appear — rising like a breath exhaled by the fire itself. Its light was pale, almost lunar, casting long thin shadows on the walls of Scrooge’s bedroom. Its eyes gleamed with feverish brilliance, yet its expression was gentle — the beauty of a portrait painted too perfectly.

GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST: I am the Breath of Memory, Ebenezer. And once — long ago — they called me beautiful.

SCROOGE: Beautiful? You bear the look of illness.

GHOST: Indeed. Come… see how they adored me for it.

NARRATOR: Scrooge blinked and found himself in a parlor lit by chandeliers and warmed by the scents of orange peel and burning coal. Ladies in gauzy gowns reclined on fainting couches, their cheeks flushed a delicate rose. Gentlemen recited lines of poetry, their voices thick with admiration — or envy.

SCROOGE: This is… society.

GHOST: Yes. The upper rooms of London — where the wealthy gathered to admire death in slow motion.

INTERACTION #1 — The Admirers

YOUNG WOMAN: Oh, Mrs. Clay, your daughter looks more angelic every day.

MRS. CLAY: Her doctor says the slenderness is quite… becoming.

YOUNG WOMAN: And that blush! Like the bloom of a dying rose.

NARRATOR: The girl coughed then — a thin, papery sound — and the room fell silent for half a heartbeat, not out of concern, but awe.

SCROOGE: They admire her illness?

GHOST: They admire what they imagine it to be.

NARRATOR: The spirit swept her hand, and the parlor blurred at the edges.Scrooge found himself in a corner of the same room — quieter, dimmer — where a poet hunched over parchment, fever brightening his eyes. His voice trembled. His handkerchief, too quickly hidden, bloomed with red.

INTERACTION #2 — The Poet

POET: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense…

NARRATOR: His hand trembled as he wrote, each line fueled by fever he pretended not to feel. His cough — sharper, redder — stained his handkerchief.

SCROOGE: Is he dying?

GHOST: He believes he’s transcending. A delusion the world applauded.

NARRATOR: The poet’s cough deepened — then faded like an ember smothered.And as it did, another figure sharpened into view.

NARRATOR: Across the room, an artist painted a young woman reclining on a chaise. Her gown shimmered — but her breath fluttered, thin and frantic.

ARTIST: Yes, Miss Fairchild — hold still. That hollow of the cheek… perfect. It speaks of longing. Of purity. Of something beyond the mortal.

MISS FAIRCHILD: Mother says I’ve never looked lovelier.

SCROOGE: They call that lovely?

GHOST: They see art. I see a life burning down to embers.

NARRATOR: The painted world trembled around them — color draining, faces dimming — as if the illusion itself grew too weak to stand.

---

HEATHER (breaking the fourth wall): It feels unbelievable now — that so many people looked at this level of suffering and declared it beautiful.

SAM: Right? I mean… I need a cocktail after that one.

KATE: Yeah. Victorians could be breathtakingly wrong. Deep breath, everyone — the reality only gets harsher from here.

---

NARRATOR: And with that…The walls around the artist’s world dissolved, replaced by cold night air.Scrooge now stood behind the same grand house — the alley stark, the moon sharp, the cold merciless. A young maid leaned against the brick wall, coughing into her apron.

SCROOGE: She… she works for them.

GHOST: voice heavy with consequence): And sleeps in a cellar with six others.Their beauty is built upon her breath.

NARRATOR: Through a bright window above, the parlor glowed — warm, safe, oblivious.

SCROOGE: This cannot be the same house…

GHOST: Memory has two faces: the one told… and the one hidden.

NARRATOR: The spirit stepped back, and the alley darkened.Above, the parlor’s glow flickered like a lantern running out of oil.

GHOST: This was the age of illusion, Ebenezer. They painted consumption as poetry. They crowned it with tragedy and ribbons. But beneath every drawing-room dream… lay bones.

SCROOGE: I… I did not know.

GHOST: You did not look.

NARRATOR: And as the past dissolved like mist, Scrooge felt the world shift beneath him.The next memory awaited — not draped in lace…but in soot.

SCENE 3 – THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT: THE CROWDED BREATH 

NARRATOR: When the second spirit came, it was not clothed in lace but in soot.Its cloak was woven from smoke, its breath a fog rolling off the Thames.And its eyes — sharp with compassion and fury — reflected the fires of a city that never slept.

GHOST OF PRESENT: Look around you, Scrooge. Here is the city that built your fortune — and buried its workers.

NARRATOR: The counting-house vanished. Scrooge now stood in the heart of London’s crowded market district — a maze of stands selling bread, boots, and cheap cloth, the air thick with breath and winter damp.

A mother coughed into her shawl as she bargained for potatoes.A butcher wiped blood from his hands, then from his lips after a fit of choking.Everywhere, lungs strained like overworked bellows.

SCROOGE: They sound… half-dead.

GHOST: They are half-alive.

NARRATOR: The spirit led Scrooge into a narrow alley, darker than twilight though it was only midday. Clotheslines crisscrossed overhead like a spider’s web. Buckets of coal dust stood beside doorways blackened by smoke.

Inside, voices whispered. A family of seven lived in a single room no larger than Scrooge’s wardrobe.

YOUNG MOTHER: Hush, darling. Don’t breathe so fast. The room is warmer if we share our coats.

SCROOGE: Seven? In there?

GHOST: The breath of one is the breath of all.

NARRATOR: A little boy lay on a pallet of rags, his eyes glassy, his breaths shallow — the telltale rise-and-fall of a chest fighting for air. His mother stroked his hair with trembling fingers.

MOTHER (whisper, choking up): We prayed the fever would break… but he only grows colder.

SCROOGE: Won’t a doctor help them?

GHOST: Not for a shilling. Not for ten. And not soon enough.

NARRATOR: Suddenly, Scrooge stood in the belly of a textile mill. Dust hung heavy in the air — motes of cotton, soot, and shattered hopes. Workers bent over looms, each motion tearing a bit more breath from their bodies.

WORKER: Faster! The overseer says we’re behind!

NARRATOR: A young girl — no more than twelve — coughed so hard she nearly fell into the gears. A fellow worker caught her by the arm.

OLDER WOMAN: Careful, child! If the cough doesn’t take you, the machine will.

SCROOGE: Why do they work in this filth?

GHOST: Because you pay them less than it costs to breathe clean air. Because they cannot choose their air, Scrooge — but you chose their wages.

NARRATOR: The spirit brought Scrooge to a makeshift infirmary in the workhouse.Rows of beds — some shared — lined a cold hall. The walls sweated with damp. The air tasted of vinegar, sweat, and sorrow. A frail man clutched his chest, each cough sounding like a rip in cloth.

WORKHOUSE PHYSICIAN: He needs clean air… fresh broth… rest.But the workhouse gives only work.

SCROOGE: This is… unbearable.

GHOST: And yet they bear it. Every day. Every night.

NARRATOR: The room they were in dissolved into shadow. A beam of light shot through the dark — the view through a microscope. Glass. Shadows. Then… something long and thin swimming into view. In 1882, Robert Koch would reveal the culprit: Mycobacterium tuberculosis — a rod-shaped ghost seen under glass. Invisible. Patient. Everywhere.

SCROOGE: That tiny thing? That wretched speck brings a city to its knees?

GHOST: A ghost will do anything to be heard.

NARRATOR: Then came the sanatoriums — great white buildings perched on mountainsides, promising clean air, rest, and hope. But for most… there were no mountains. Only the endless fog of the city. Only the crowded rooms and the breath they shared.

GHOST: Even charity can’t cure what neglect creates.

NARRATOR: Scrooge stiffened — wounded by the truth. But the spirit did not relent.

GHOST: You built ledgers tall as chimneys. But compassion, Ebenezer…you built none.

NARRATOR: For the first time, Scrooge looked upon the people not as debts or wages — but as faces. Sick. Pale. Human.

A woman clutching her ribs as she leaned on her husband’s arm.A child wheezing through the cold.A man coughing blood into the gutter.

SCROOGE: Spirit… must it be so?

GHOST: It is so. Until you choose otherwise.

NARRATOR: The breath around them grew thinner, colder.A new shadow crept in — sterile, bright, and merciless. The final spirit was coming.

SCENE 4 – THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS YET TO COME: THE RESISTANT FUTURE

NARRATOR: The last spirit did not burst in with fire or fog. It entered with silence. From the dimness of Scrooge’s vision came a figure clothed in white —not the linen of shrouds, nor the wool of comfort, but the sterile fabric of the modern ward.Its mask hid its face. Its gloves hid its hands.And the only sound it made……was its breath. Steady. Unnatural. Inhuman.

Whispering: Drug-resistant. Forgotten. Airborne still.

SCROOGE: Spirit… I fear you most of all.

NARRATOR: The ghost said nothing. It only extended a gloved hand and pointed — not to a graveyard, but to something far more frightening: A hospital…alive with illness.

Scrooge found himself in a ward unlike anything he knew. White lights glared from the ceiling. Machines beeped like mechanical heartbeats. Behind each curtain… lay a story that had not yet been written in his time.

---

HEATHER (breaking the fourth wall): This haunts me. We like to imagine tuberculosis is a disease of the past. But the truth is… the future isn’t as distant as it feels.

SAM : Okay. I’m officially scared. Someone hold my cocoa.

KATE: Keep your ears open. This part hits close to home — in ways we don’t always talk about.

---

NARRATOR: All right, let’s pick back up with Scrooge looking around the unfamiliar, blinding white hospital rooms.

SCROOGE: Where… when are we?

GHOST OF TB FUTURE: The future, Scrooge. And yet — not the future many imagined.

NARRATOR: Inside were patients from every nation. Young. Old. Wealthy. Poor. The disease no longer chose poets or paupers — it claimed without prejudice.

Some wore masks. Some breathed through tubes. Some clutched their chests with the same desperate hope as the families you saw in the alleys of old London.

SCROOGE: They’re all… ill?

GHOST: Not with the disease you knew — but with its descendant. Renamed. Mutated. More stubborn than ever.

Multi-drug resistant. Extensively drug-resistant.Treatable only for those who can afford to wait — and pay.

SCROOGE: Spirit… does no one help them?

NARRATOR: The spirit’s silence was answer enough. The spirit guided Scrooge toward a single isolation room. Inside, a young man lay in a glass-walled chamber — alone, pale, exhausted. His breath rattled like paper. His chart lay thick with failed treatments.

DOCTOR: The strain is resistant to nearly everything. We’re out of time… and nearly out of drugs.

SCROOGE: How did this happen?

GHOST: Through years of neglect. Years without funding. Years when people decided tuberculosis was an old ghost… not worth fearing.

A ghost ignored grows stronger.

NARRATOR: Screens on the wall flickered with maps — red clusters spreading across continents. Numbers rose like smoke. Hospitals filled faster than they emptied.

SCROOGE: But surely… surely by now… we can save them?

GHOST: We can. But not all do.

NARRATOR: Then the spirit lifted a mirror — cold, stainless, unyielding. Scrooge leaned closer. And saw himself. Gaunt. Coughing. Afraid. Not felled by bacteria — but by his own indifference.

SCROOGE: No… no, Spirit — tell me I may yet change this! Tell me this shadow may be dispelled!

GHOST: It will be…only if compassion spreads faster than contagion.

NARRATOR: The spirit lowered the mirror. Its glow dimmed. Its breath grew quieter, fading like mist in morning sun. Scrooge reached out — not to push the ghost away, but to hold onto hope. A single heartbeat echoed between them.

SCENE 5 – EPILOGUE: THE MORNING BREATH

NARRATOR: When Scrooge awoke, the city still coughed — a reminder that dawn does not banish every shadow. But something inside him had cleared, as though the ghosts had swept the soot from his lungs.

He sat up, touched his chest, and felt — for the first time — the weight of the breaths he’d hoarded…and the possibility of the breaths he could give back.

He crossed the room, fingers trembling not with fear, but with resolve. And when he threw open the window, Ebenezer Scrooge breathed not for profit…but for purpose.

Ghost: He sent medicines where money once went. He funded clinics instead of counting houses. He hired physicians to treat workers without asking for shillings. He warmed poorhouses and opened windows in his own. He learned that generosity, too… can be contagious.

SCROOGE: The ghosts were right. The cure begins with the living.

NARRATOR: But Scrooge’s transformation was only one breath in a much longer story. Tuberculosis remains among the world’s deadliest infections — claiming more than a million lives each year. It is curable, preventable, and still neglected.

Two centuries have passed since the days of lace-draped parlors and soot-choked streets. Yet the same invisible ghost walks among us — quiet, persistent, forgotten by those who have the luxury to forget.

The ghosts of consumption do not rattle chains or moan in attics. They whisper through crowded rooms and quiet clinics. They linger in prisons, hospitals, and homes where air is shared and odds are unfair.

But so, too, does compassion linger — in every life touched, warmed, or saved by those who choose to care.

May we keep Christmas — and compassion —in every breath we share.

SAM (whisper-ghost voice): OooOOOooo… behold… the Ghost of Indoor Air Quality…

KATE: Sam. Stop haunting the listeners. We JUST finished a serious story.

SAM: I’m not haunting — I’m offering constructive feedback about their ventilation.

HEATHER: Honestly? That is the most Victorian ghost energy possible.

KATE: Do we need to sage the room? Or just invest in a HEPA filter?

SAM: Both. Always both.

HEATHER: If you think there’s no HEPA filter in ere already you don’t know me very well. Okay. Ghost break over. Decompression session officially begins… now.

POST-CAROL DECOMPRESSION SESSION

HEATHER: Okay… okay. We are officially back in the present and out of Dickens’ tuberculosis-filled London. That was a lot. Everyone take a breath — a clean one, ideally filtered through a 21st-century HVAC system.

SAM: Honestly, I feel like I need to lie down in a sanatorium veranda for emotional reasons.

KATE: Only if they bring you blankets. And not the Victorian “fresh air cures everything, including frostbite” treatment.

HEATHER: Speaking of cures… I prescribe snacks. Because after marching through Victorian drawing rooms, tenements, workhouses, and modern hospital wards, we all deserve something comforting — and decidedly not historically accurate.

Tonight’s menu: Chimney Sweep Crostini, London Fog Truffle Bites,and our drinks —the Winter Wraith cocktail and the Snow Wisp mocktail. All recipes are after the signature at the end of this post.

SAM: Let’s start with the savory: Chimney Sweep Crostini. Black bean purée, charred onions, smoked paprika — basically Victorian chimney contents, but make it delicious and not lung-destroying.

KATE: The crostini actually look like little soot shovels. I want to apologize to a Victorian chimney sweep before eating one.

HEATHER: Oh wow. If the Ghost of Christmas Present had handed Scrooge a plate of these, he’d have repented in Scene One.

KATE: Same. Honestly, if 1843 had had appetizers this good, the industrial revolution vibes would’ve been slightly less bleak.

KATE: For dessert, we have London Fog Truffle Bites — Earl Grey–infused dark chocolate dusted with powdered-sugar fog. It’s like a tiny edible weather event.

HEATHER: These taste like cozy despair. In a good way.

SAM: They taste like a Christmas ghost who also shops at a fancy tea store.

KATE: Exactly the intended experience.

HEATHER: Kate lobbied hard for us to make the Victorian classic Spotted Dick — yes, that's its actual name, and no, I’m not explaining it further. But there was zero chance I was asking our listeners to make a steamed suet pudding in the year of our Lord 2025.

SAM: Also, the name alone would get us flagged by every content filter.

KATE: It would’ve been delicious! …Probably.…Maybe. Okay fine, these truffles are better.

HEATHER: And to wash everything down: the Winter Wraith cocktail — pear vodka, rosemary, lemon, a frosty foam — and the Snow Wisp mocktail for a zero-proof but equally magical version.

SAM: This Winter Wraith is gorgeous. Pale, icy… I feel like a Victorian ghost but glamorous.

KATE: Agreed it tastes like a frost fairy decided to fix my life.

HEATHER: Same for the Snow Wisp. Delicious. OK We’re hydrated, sparkly, and slightly ridiculous — the Outbreak After Dark trifecta.

So… let’s decompress. Because that story was heavy. And the real history behind it is heavier.

SAM: Like — I knew people romanticized consumption, but actually acting it out? And then stepping back? Yikes.

KATE: I’m still stuck on the idea of people thinking a slow, wasting disease was… aspirational? Make it make sense, Victorians.

HEATHER: You know what this also made me think about? Even in Dickens’ time, the science didn’t speak for itself. John Snow — the physician who figured out cholera came from contaminated water — had the data, the maps, the whole thing… and people still didn’t believe him.

KATE: John Snow, you know nothing. Before it happened,

SAM: Kate beat me to it. I don't know if you were looking at my cheeks, but I was like, you know nothing. You know nothing. John Snow.

HEATHER: look, I had a crush on that John Snow.

SAM and KATE: Who didn't, Right, for sure.

HEATHER: So….It took storytellers like Dickens helping the public see the living conditions — the overcrowding, the sanitation issues — before anything changed. It’s this pattern we still see today: evidence is necessary, but narrative is what moves people. And TB sits right in the middle of that intersection of science and story.

HEATHER: They had a talent for making terrible ideas fashionable. But tuberculosis wasn’t a metaphor — it was an epidemic. And even today, it still kills more than a million people every year. Most of them without access to diagnosis or treatment.

SAM: Yeah. That part hit me. The modern ward. I wasn’t ready.

KATE: Same. It’s one of those diseases we think of as historical, but it’s still right here.Still airborne. Still neglected.

HEATHER: And still curable… if we pay attention. And this story… it isn’t just Victorian history or a spooky retelling for the holidays. Tuberculosis has touched so many families — including mine.

I never knew him, but one of my uncles died in a TB sanatorium in Washington State. He was a young man. And the treatment options were… what they were back then. He ended up addicted to morphine inside that facility, and he never came out.

SAM: That’s awful.

KATE: Yeah… that’s heartbreaking. It’s wild how close this history still is — like, we think of sanatoria as ancient, but they weren’t. Not really.

HEATHER: Exactly. This isn’t some far-off Victorian problem — it’s within living memory for a lot of people. TB shaped families, entire communities. And it still does. That’s one reason I wanted to tell this story tonight — not just to explore the gothic part, but to acknowledge the real people behind it.

SAM: I’m glad we did. And I’m glad we can talk about it honestly… and then take a breath together afterward.

KATE: And pass the snacks. Respectfully. But also immediately.

HEATHER: Okay, yes — snacks, drinks, and feelings. The official Outbreak After Dark treatment plan.

Thank you all for sticking with us through a very different kind of Outbreak After Dark episode. We wanted to honor the science, the history, and the people behind it, and then land somewhere safe and warm together.

KATE: Warm… or boozy.

SAM: Or both.

HEATHER: Stay with us for one last moment — a tiny echo from the sanatorium era —and then we’ll send you back into your holiday season with a full stomach, a warm heart,and hopefully a better ventilation system than anyone had in 1843.

Heather, Kate, and Sam:

By the fire we meet…

With food, drink, and infectious creep…

And when the tale is heavy,

we hold space for those we keep…

This is Outbreak After Dark.

RECIPES 

WINTER WRAITH (Cocktail)

A pale, frosty pear + rosemary cocktail with a haunting, silky foam.

Ingredients (1 drink):

• 2 oz pear vodka

• ¾ oz fresh lemon juice

• ¾ oz rosemary simple syrup

• 1 egg white (or 1 oz aquafaba for vegan/egg-free foam)

• 1–2 oz tonic water or club soda (for topping)

• Garnish: small rosemary sprig or a single pear slice

Rosemary Simple Syrup:

• ½ cup sugar

• ½ cup water

• 2 rosemary sprigs

  → Simmer 3–4 minutes, steep 10, strain.

Directions:

1. Add pear vodka, lemon juice, rosemary syrup, and egg white/aquafaba to a shaker.

2. Dry shake (no ice) for 10–15 seconds to build the foam.

3. Add ice, then shake again until the shaker chills.

4. Strain into a coupe or Nick & Nora glass.

5. Top with 1–2 oz tonic water or soda for a shimmering lift.

6. Garnish with a rosemary sprig or thin pear slice.

7. Whisper something ghostly over it for effect.

SNOW WISP (Mocktail)

Soft, sparkling, fairy-like, with pear + rosemary + a bright winter shimmer.

Ingredients (1 mocktail):

• 2 oz pear nectar or pear juice

• ½ oz lemon juice

• ½ oz rosemary simple syrup

• Sparkling water (plain or pear-flavored)

• Garnish: baby rosemary sprig or thin pear curl

Directions:

1. Add pear nectar, lemon juice, and rosemary syrup to a shaker with ice.

2. Shake gently — you just want it chilled.

3. Strain into a chilled coupe or tall glass.

4. Top with sparkling water.

5. Garnish with rosemary or pear.

6. Optional: a tiny pinch of edible glitter for a frosty “wisp.”

CHIMNEY SWEEP CROSTINI

Smoky, black bean + charred onion crostini that look like soot… but taste heavenly.

Ingredients:

For the crostini:

• 1 baguette, sliced into thin rounds

• Olive oil for brushing

• Pinch of smoked paprika or chili powder (optional)

For the black bean spread:

• 1 can black beans, drained & rinsed

• 1–2 tbsp olive oil

• 1 tbsp lime or lemon juice

• ½ tsp smoked paprika

• ½ tsp garlic powder or 1 clove fresh garlic

• Salt & pepper to taste

For the charred onions:

• 1 medium red or yellow onion, thinly sliced

• 1–2 tsp olive oil

• Pinch of salt

• Optional: splash of balsamic or Worcestershire if you’re feeling fancy

Directions:

1. Make the crostini:

   • Brush baguette slices lightly with olive oil.

   • Toast in a 400°F (204°C) oven for 7–8 min until crisp.

   • Optional: sprinkle with a whisper of smoked paprika.

2. Make the black bean spread:

   • Blend black beans, olive oil, lime/lemon, garlic, smoked paprika, salt & pepper.

   • Add water 1 tsp at a time if you want a smoother purée.

3. Char the onions:

   • Heat a skillet on medium-high.

   • Add lightly oiled onions.

   • Cook until edges are dark and caramelized — a little burnt is perfect here.

   • Optional: splash with balsamic or Worcestershire for depth.

4. Assemble:

   • Spread a thin layer of black bean purée on each crostini.

   • Top with a tangle of charred onions.

   • Finish with a flick of smoked paprika.

Presentation tip:

Serve on a dark slate or baking sheet — they look very Victorian–gothic this way.

LONDON FOG TRUFFLE BITES

Earl Grey dark chocolate truffles dusted with sugar “fog.”

Ingredients (makes ~12–16 truffles):

• ½ cup heavy cream

• 1 Tbsp loose-leaf Earl Grey (or 2 tea bags)

• 8 oz dark chocolate, chopped

• 1–2 Tbsp butter (optional, for silkiness)

• Cocoa powder or powdered sugar for coating

• Optional: tiny sprinkle of edible gold dust to make them “Victorian opulent”

Directions:

1. Warm heavy cream in a pot until steaming (not boiling).

2. Add Earl Grey tea. Steep 5–7 minutes.

3. Strain cream to remove tea leaves.

4. Pour hot infused cream over chopped dark chocolate.

5. Let sit 1–2 minutes, then stir until smooth.

6. Add butter if using.

7. Chill mixture in fridge for ~1 hour.

8. Scoop teaspoon-sized portions, roll into balls.

9. Coat in cocoa powder or powdered sugar “fog.”

10. Keep chilled until serving.

Flavor notes:

Rich, aromatic, slightly citrusy — perfect with Winter Wraith.