purpletigron (In case you didn’t want to be identified any further!) – It’s in the genitive, so pirorumua, I guess. Awkward word! “pirum” is a pear, so translating it as “perry” keeps the parallel with the Latin much more closely.

Arnold – Thank you for the recipe reference! I’m particularly glad to have an eighteenth century one since, with this handful of evidence, I have more documentation for the late nineteenth/early twentieth century for liquorice water than I do for anything earlier.

See also Mason and Brown, Traditional Foods of Britain (1999), on ‘Pontefract Cakes’ (which aren’t cakes as such, but liquorice tablets): ‘The town of Pontefract in south Yorkshire was first noted for liquorice cultivation in the mid-1600s, though the plant had probably grown there for longer. The juice from its roots was used to treat colds and chest complaints.’

Except not, of course, here is some moron translator doing that to him. For the record: cider is a drink made from apples. Perry is a drink made from pears. “Pear cider” isn’t even an oxymoron, it’s just ignorance. Grr.

I stole some bread, some rind of cheese, about half a jar of mincemeat (which I tied up in my pocket-handkerchief with my last night’s slice), some brandy from a stone bottle (which I decanted into a glass bottle I had secretly used for making that intoxicating fluid, Spanish-liquorice-water, up in my room: diluting the stone bottle from a jug in the kitchen cupboard), a meat bone with very little on it, and a beautiful round compact pork pie.

That still puts it as a possibly categorized as a young person’s drink by the mid-nineteenth century when he wrote Great Expectations.