Here’s a rather welcome apparition for sunday brunch that’s sure to scare off any frightful of sore heads and resurrect even the most undead.
This Bloody Mary comes from the The Abbey Inn in North Yorkshire, a historic country pub with rooms located a short stroll from the idyllic country garden at Shandy Hall, where we gather some of the ingredients for our awfully English vodka’s recipe.
The inn overlooks the imposing ruins of Byland Abbey — once a principal monastery in the North of England but perhaps most notable for housing one of Europe’s most important collections of ghost stories during medieval times.
Scribed by a resident monk, the stories describe a dozen different spine-tingling tales about local people whose rotting corpses rose from the dead to seek redemption for their sins.
Far from being blood-curdling monsters, these forlorn, ghoulish characters were more of a nuisance to those they put the willies-up, and were stuck in purgatory for some surprisingly minor moral infractions.
One ghost failed to seek confession over the matter of ‘just a sixpence’ while another was an unrepentant clergyman from nearby Newburgh Priory who had been pinching silver spoons.
And in one yarn, a deceased farmhand failed to reach heaven because he secretly fed the oxen his master’s best corn and was guilty of ploughing the fields too shallowly.
Luckily, the only confession we have for this Bloody Mary is its saintly satisfaction— Thomas Collier and the team have created it using Broken Clock Vodka and a homemade fermented pepper hot sauce, crafted with ingredients from their own local farm and garden.
And it’s a perfectly piquant potation to slurp on before you tuck into the pub’s seasonal menu from Charlie Smith and Michelin-starred Chef Director Tommy Banks.
You can even explore the Abbey ruins after lunch — that’s if you’re not too scared of course.