The Trough

I took so much in from this visit that I’m not sure where to begin. To begin with we walked along the entrance track to the main gates. It was the bank holiday friday and we were surrounded by tourists. Its not often you get the chance to feel like a visitor in your own city, but we were stood in the rain with cameras around our necks and looking at leaflets about Henry and his eight wives.

Making pastry

We walked towards the kitchen and saw the usual plastic men, flame styled flickering lighting and plastic fishes flopped over barrels (apparently they are made of thermo-plastic that you can just microwave and drape in the desired form to make them look realistic). Sound effects of bubbling stews and synthetic smells of beef.  We arrived in the pastry production area, surrounded by dark green ceramic and eggs.

We spoke to the chefs, who explained a million and one things about their findings. The had previously been involved in reenactments and had been hired by the palace for their enthusiasm to learn so much about the subject.

During Tudor times they used pastry as a cooking vessel more than edible treat. They would remove the ‘lid’ of the pie and continue to cook from the base until the pastry broke, when it could then be fed to the pigs. I suppose metal could leave quite the flavour if it were used to cook with. It does make me wonder why they didn’t just use ceramic?

Spit roasting chickens

We passed a grand fire in the hall of the Kitchen, guarded by racks ready to spit roast 100 chickens. Spit roasting was the thought of as the most luxurious form of cookery as it used up a vast amount of fuel. What we call a roast is actually closer to baked food and boiled meats came lower down the luxury scale as it is the most efficient way to cook.

They had an incredible access to spices in the palaces which I could image to be a welcome addition to the other wise plane ingredients available in the 1500’s. Spices like Cubebs were imported from islands near Australia, along with Mace, Nutmeg, ginger, galangal from the east,  Grains of Paradise (what a great name! It’s also called Alligator pepper and comes from West Africa). What flavours! I can imagine the taste might have been slightly like a Moroccan Pigeon Bastilla. You can imagine that the recipes must have moved by word of mouth with the food not to mentioned the shear cost of importing the spices over land for months.

Spices

Almonds from Italy were turned into spiced milk by grinding and boiling them with wine and spices. They served a Lent (I can’t quite remember the name but it might be similar to a Kent Lent Pie ) tart filled with almond milk.

Cleaning knifes and a lent tart in the back ground

They didn’t use forks at this point in time, but instead used the their two fore fingers and thumb to hold the item of food still as the cut it. Then either used the same hand to eat it or a spoon. A handy napkin would be placed over their left shoulder to clean their fingers throughout this process. In the fore ground you can see this feaster cleaning his knife with his bread before diving into another dish on the table.

Bread was featured at the palace, but much less than I expected. The chefs reminded me that this was Henry VIIIs kitchen and to prove his wealth he would feed his staff fresh meat to prove the country’s affluence and power. I would imagine that bread would be such a standard part of the the Tudor diet. The standard bread, Maslin was a mix of rye and wheat flours but white, sifted flours existed for the lucky few.

It was a peaceful setting. So much history, cooking techniques and flavours. It was great to see how manners at the table have evolved as well, and from respect for food.

I’ve found some interesting recipe sites that might be of interest if you happen to be holding a Tudor party of your own and  if you want to see more images of the visit go here. The chefs also have a blog that you can go and see called cooking the books www.tudorcook.blogspot.com if you are keen to see or hear more.

http://www.godecookery.com/godeboke/godeboke.htm

http://tudorhistory.org/topics/food/recipes.html

http://expositions.bnf.fr/gastro/enimages/anglais/index.htm

http://www.historicfood.com/RecipesIndex.htm

This entry was posted by Gallus bankiva on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 10:38 am. It is filed under Eating, History and has these tags: cookery, feast, kitchen, roasting, spices, tudor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.