All the King's Cooks (5 page)

Having to prepare most of these dishes virtually every day of the year presented major problems for the kitchen staff. As a Spanish visitor to the court noted only a few years later, in 1554:
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The Queen spends over 300,000 ducats a year on her table, for all the thirteen councillors eat in the palace, as well as the household officers, the master of the horse, the master of the household, the Queen’s as well as our own … and the wives of these gentlemen into the bargain. The Queen’s ladies also eat by themselves in the palace, and their servants, as well as the councillors’, governors’ and household officers’, and then there are the 200 men of the guard … There are usually eighteen kitchens in full blast, and they seem veritable hells, such is the stir and bustle in them … the usual daily consumption is eighty to one hundred sheep – and the sheep here are very big and fat – a dozen fat beeves, a dozen and a half of calves, without mentioning poultry, game, deer, boars and great numbers of rabbits. There is plenty of beer here, and they drink more than would fill the Valladolid river …

Even for such a great household, ‘eighteen kitchens in full blast’
sounds like an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that eighteen was the number of major rooms in permanent use whenever the court was resident at Hampton Court. Moving inwards from the park, they were:

The hall-place kitchens prepared all the basic foods for the lower ranks of the household, who ate in the Great Hall, while the Lord’s side kitchen provided better fare for those dining at the Lord Great Master’s table, and sometimes that of the Lord Chamberlain. The best food of all was cooked in the King’s and Queens’ privy kitchens.

We shall now visit each of these offices in turn, to find out more about their equipment and their operation.

From the medieval period through to the late nineteenth century, bakehouses and similar places that produced smoke, smells, potential fire risks and a bustle of activity at unsocial hours were located in the outbuildings of most great houses. This was certainly the case at Hampton Court, where a block of outer offices was built in the Outer Court, the present lawned area extending from the entrance gates along to the main west front of the palace (fig. 3).

Construction started in the spring of 1529 at the east end, incorporating materials from Wolsey’s old bakehouse in the park, while new timber frames were prefabricated at Reigate by a carpenter called John Wylton.
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These were carted to Hampton Court, then erected to form ‘a ryshe house [for rushes] … a grete bakehouwse and a prevey bakehouse with a crosse howse betwn them … a brede howse, a panlever [?] and a scalding house’. The yard walls, chimney-stacks and ovens were built in brick for additional security and fire protection, while the roofs were covered in earthenware tiles by one “William Garret in November 1529. All this is clear evidence that the whole of this large building, measuring some 300 feet (91m) by 90 feet (27m), was constructed within some seven months.

3.
 
The houses of office
Situated in the Outer Court (the present lawned area in front of the Great Gatehouse), this timber structure of 1529–30 was built with brick ovens and chimney-stacks to accommodate the Scalding House for preparing poultry and rabbits, the Bakehouse for breadmaking, and the Woodyard for preparing and storing wood, fuel and rushes.

1, 2.
 
Scalding Rooms (?)

3.
 
Poultry Yard

4.
 
Privy Bakehouse

5.
 
Bakehouse Yard

6.
 
Stairs up to granaries

7.
 
Bread House (?)

8,9.
 
Great Bakehouse

10.
 
Stables for purveyors’ horses

11.
 
The Woodyard

12.
 
The Woodyard Offices

The west, or outer, end of these offices was occupied by the Poultry and Scalding House, which was controlled by the sergeant of the poultry and his clerk. All the birds required for both the King and his household were purchased around London and beyond by two yeomen purveyors, using a scale of set prices which was revised from time to time as the economy dictated. Those confirmed by the Lord Great Master and the Counting House for William Gurley, purveyor of poultry, on 27 March 1545, were as follows:
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Although some of these items are still cooked and eaten today, many have not appeared on English menus for centuries. Relatively few descriptions of their basic preparation survive, and I include some of them here. As a Venetian visitor to England around 1500 recalled, ‘It is a truly beautiful thing to behold one or two thousand swans upon the river Tames … which are eaten by the English like ducks and geese’
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Although eaten in most great households, particularly around Christmas and the New Year, large swans were usually fairly tough and could have a fishy taste. The cygnets made much better eating, and are still served with great ceremony by Mr Swan Warden at the annual feast of the Vintners’ Company of London.
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Among the large wading birds, the heron, bittern and shoveller were all highly regarded, the bittern in particular having much the flavour of the hare, and none of the fishiness of the heron. In his
Castel of Helth
of 1541, Sir Thomas Elyot, diplomat and writer, stated that these birds ‘being yonge and fatte, be lyghtyer digested than the Crane, and the Byttour sooner than the Hearon … All these fowles muste be eaten with muche ginger or pepper, and have good old wyne drunk after them.’
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The stork was certainly a much rarer bird, but, according to the medical writer Tobias Venner’s
Via Recta ad Vitam Longam
of 1620, it ‘is of hard substance, of a wilde savour, and of very naughty juyce’!
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Both the snipe and the godwit, smaller waders, made very good eating. According to Sir Thomas Browne, physician and writer, Godwits … [are] accounted the daintiest dish in England; and, I think, for bigness, of the biggest price.’
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As for ducks, the wigeon and the smaller teal were greatly appreciated too – ‘Teal for pleasantnesse and wholesomeness excelleth all other water fowle’,
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commented Venner.

The appearance on the list of seabirds such as mews (common gulls), gulls and puffins may surprise us, but in fact they had all been eaten for centuries. The puffin’s flesh tasted so fishy that one writer in 1530 described it as ‘a fysshe lyke a teele’, and the Church actually classed them as fishes which could be eaten in Lent.
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In Cornwall puffins were chased out of their holes near the cliffs using ferrets and then, being ‘exceeding fat, [they were] kept salted, and reputed for fish, as coming neerest thereto in taste’.
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Prepared in this way, they were considered something of
a delicacy. Gulls, meanwhile, were caught in nets and fattened during the winter in poultry yards, where they were ‘crammed with salt beef ready for the table’.
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Of the wild land birds, the most impressive was the great bustard, the largest wild bird in Europe. Before it became extinct in this country around 1860, it was remembered as having particularly delicious flesh, weighing some fifteen pounds or more, with a six-foot wing span.
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The much smaller quail, plover and dotterel were equally desirable, especially the first of the three – fat and tender, it was lured into nets using a whistle called a quailpipe.
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In contrast, the delicate yet nourishing larks were taken either by a small hawk called a hobby, or by using a mirror and a piece of red cloth to distract them until they were netted. In Shakespeare’s
King Henry the Eighth
the Earl of Surrey alludes to this practice when taunting Cardinal Wolsey about his red cardinal’s hat:
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If we live thus tamely,
To be thus jaded by a piece of scarlet,
Farewell nobility! Let his grace go forward
And dare us with his cap like larks.

The lark was considered to be ‘of all smale byrdes the beste’, whereas sparrows were ‘harde to digest, and are very hot, and stirreth up Venus, and specially the brains of them’, Sir Thomas Elyot tells us.
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Presumably this is why they were a luxury at the palace, while remaining a poor man’s food, netted and caught beneath sieves from the earliest times through to the middle of the twentieth century.
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Of the tame birds, many of the geese, hens and pheasants, for instance, were fed in the poultry yards attached to some of the palaces, as well as being purchased in vast numbers. Peacocks and peachicks made very impressive dishes at table, but had to be eaten when still quite young. Dr Andrew Boorde, physician and traveller, states in his
Dyetary of Helth
(1542) that ‘yonge peechyken of half a yere of age be praysed, olde pecockes be harde of dygestyon’, while Henry Buttes complained of their ‘very harde meate, of bad temperature, & as evil juyce. Wonderously increaseth melancholy, & casteth, as it were, a clowd upon the
minde’.
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However, when a year-old bird was recently roasted at Hampton Court, it was found to be very toothsome – somewhere between a chicken and a pheasant in flavour and texture. To prepare it for the kitchen, the Tudor cooks first cut its throat and hung it with a weight tied to its heels for two weeks in a cool place.
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Turkeys were also available at this period: they were brought into Europe from Mexico and Central America about 1523–4, and into England at about the same time by the Strickland family of Boynton near Bridlington in the East Riding. The crest adopted by the Stricklands for their coat of arms showed a white turkey cock with a black beak and red wattles – probably representing the colouring of those early birds. Listed as one of the greater fowls by Archbishop Cranmer in 1541, the turkey soon gained an excellent reputation, being ‘very good nourishment; restoreth bodily forces; passing good for such as are in recovery; maketh store of seede; enflameth Venus’. For preparation, they were simply hung overnight and cooked quite fresh.
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