The Real Life Downton Abbey (18 page)

The idea of dining outdoors started in the Victorian era. But with the introduction of the motorcar as transportation for food and picnic equipment, picnics became very popular in the summer months. Special picnic recipes evolve and new tableware is created to serve the potted cheese, potted pâtés, sandwiches and cakes that can now be enjoyed more readily outdoors.

For the middle-class families with money to spend, commercially produced foodstuffs are starting to become more common by now. Things like baking powder, gelatine and tinned foods are readily available. In fact, many branded foods that are familiar to us now emerged in the Edwardian era. Brands and products like Marmite, Oxo, Birds Custard, Lyles Golden Syrup, Colman’s Mustard, Heinz Ketchup, Typhoo Tea, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, and Perrier water are first launched at this time. There is even a very early version of Cup a Soup, called Edwards Dessicated Soup.

Street food, or takeaway food, is increasingly popular in London, particularly fish-and-chip shops or the more traditional pie shops, selling meat pies with mash and jellied eels (chopped eels in aspic).

In a very grand house, families dine off gold and silver plate – the closet containing the plate often contains enough silver cutlery to serve hundreds of guests. In homes like Welbeck Abbey, the home to the Duke of Portland, the closet contains a complete cutlery service in gold to serve fifty people. Snobbish aristocrats know that one sure way to spot ‘new’ money at dinner parties is by looking at the cutlery. If the fish knives and forks match the rest of the cutlery, you are dining in a ‘new money’ house. How to tell? Ancestral silver never includes special cutlery for fish.

The origins of kedgeree go back to India: it became a popular breakfast dish in Victorian times – brought back from India by colonial administrators. It’s the ideal leftover dish; it can be eaten hot or cold. Here’s a simple recipe that will serve four people:

• 500g cooked, smoked haddock (cook by gently poaching the haddock in a saucepan for 10 minutes). When cooled, remove any skin or bones and flake the haddock gently into large pieces.
  
• 40g butter
  
• 1 large white onion finely chopped
  
• 500ml stock from the poached fish
  
• 200g washed basmati rice
  
• 1 teaspoon mild curry powder
  
• 2 tablespoons double cream
  
• 2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
  
• 4 hard-boiled eggs, shelled and cut into quarters
  
• nutmeg and ground pepper
  

• Heat a small amount of the butter in a large frying pan. Gently cook the chopped onion.
  
• Heat the fish stock in a separate pan.
  
• Add the rice to the onion and stir well. Lower the heat. Sprinkle over the curry powder and mix well.
  
• Add fish stock and stir through. Bring to the boil, then simmer for ten minutes until rice is cooked.
  
• Stir in the remaining butter and cream. Add a pinch of ground pepper and a very small dash of nutmeg. Add the cooked fish and fold through the cooked rice.
  
• Then add the chopped parsley and finally the chopped eggs.
  

Recipe from chef, Miles Collins

The soufflé is a very popular Edwardian dessert. Here’s a simple recipe for four people:

• 25g butter
  
• 25g plain flour
  
• 150ml milk
  
• 25g caster sugar
  
• vanilla essence
  
• 4 eggs, separated
  

• Heat the oven to 200°C/Gas Mark 5.
  
• Prepare a thoroughly greased 150mm (6-inch) soufflé dish.
  
• Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the flour.
  
• Cook together gently for 1 minute.
  
• Gradually stir in the milk, beating constantly to ensure the sauce is smooth.
  
• Bring to the boil, stirring constantly.
  
• Remove from the heat and stir in the sugar and just a quarter of a teaspoonful of vanilla essence. Leave until the saucepan is cool enough to handle comfortably.
  
• Beat in the egg yolks, one at a time.
  
• Whisk the egg whites stiffly and fold carefully through the soufflé mixture.
  
• Turn into the prepared dish and bake in the centre of the oven for 30–40 minutes.
  
• Serve immediately.
  

From
The Book of Sweets & Puddings
by Myrtle Lindlaw

Longleat House.

 

T
he dining rituals are one aspect of the intense social networking of the wealthy elite. Yet there are many other activities on the calendar that take up a great deal of their time – and create even more party planning for the servants and those working on the estate.

The traditional outdoor hunting, shooting, fishing lifestyle of the country house elite is long established. But as a means of lavishly funded social networking, its importance peaks in the Edwardian years, mainly because the country-house party featuring these upper-crust sporting pursuits has grown, mostly thanks to Edward VII’s enthusiasm for all things related to pleasure and socialising, into a hedonistic, plush toff lifestyle – gracious living in a ‘gilded age’.

The weekend – or Saturday to Monday three-day
country-house
party – can sometimes extend to a party of two or three weeks duration, if it is held on one of the very big shooting estates like Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire (home of the Churchill family), Chatsworth in Derbyshire, home to the 8th Duke of Devonshire and his wife Louise, or King Edward’s own 8,000-hectare estate, Sandringham, in Norfolk, where his own railway station (at Wolferton) has been constructed, just two miles away from his hunting lodge, so that guests can arrive close to the estate for the big shooting parties.

Guests have their servants load up their car with an enormous leather trunk, containing enough outfits for five or six changes of clothing each day. Or the trunk is loaded onto a luggage van in a train, while the guests travel in the
first-class
compartments.

Shooting birds or game is very much the rich man’s sport. Thousands of birds or ‘bag’ are shot in a three-day session hosted by the King for his tweed-suited guests, assisted by a large number of gamekeepers and estate workers (and sometimes locals hired for the purpose). It is, by today’s standards, a very labour-intensive affair.

The gamekeepers have a big role to play in the planning of the shooting party. They work at rearing the game birds, protecting them from predatory poachers. They also have to make sure there are sufficient numbers available to shoot. As many as 20,000 pheasants, for instance, are bred in one year, all looked after by under-gamekeeping staff.

At the big shoot itself many other staff are involved: there are beaters – their role is to walk up from a certain point to drive the birds in the direction of the guns. There are loaders helping load the guns and cartridge boys helping, too. By tradition, the beaters wear white smocks, with large felt hats with wide brims, specially designed for safety reasons – and so that their visibility allows the head gamekeeper to keep an eye on their movements. Shooting itself is now much safer than in the previous century: breech-loading guns, copper percussion caps and self-contained central-firing cartridges mean more reliable firearms.

So great is the demand for, and popularity of, these
high-maintenance
shooting parties that cash-strapped landowners often rent out the rights to shoot, hunt and fish on their estates to the wealthy ‘new money’ entrepreneurs who haven’t yet purchased their own.

Yet no matter how many birds the men, clad in their chunky tweeds, knickerbockers, thick stockings and heavy boots, may shoot, open boasting about exactly how many birds they’ve ‘bagged’ in one session is very much frowned upon: it’s not the sort of thing a gentleman does. It’s also considered uncivilised to discuss sport when ladies are present. Yet a gentleman does not stop to query the cost of a twelve-bore gun and leather case – around £150 at the time – three years’ salary for a butler, shop or factory worker.

Around 30–40 guests at a time may be invited to these country-house parties to hunt, shoot and fish during the day and enjoy a number of different entertainments after dark. Card games and gambling are extremely popular after-dinner pursuits. Games like whist, backgammon and bezique, a French card game for two players, are also popular. Or they might play charades or other parlour games. But baccarat (an illegal card game much loved by the gambling-mad Prince of Wales) goes right out of fashion after 1891 when the Prince is involved in another huge scandal: one of his friends, Sir William Gordon Cumming, is caught cheating at the game and is rejected by society after a very public court case where he attempts to defend his reputation – and fails.

Baccarat is soon replaced with bridge, which becomes even more popular with women after the founding of fashionable ladies clubs in London in the late 1800s. Fancy dress parties are very much in vogue. Musical entertainments are organised. And, of course, the country-house party is the perfect opportunity to gossip, argue, flirt and more – in between indulging at the
overladen
dining table.

These house parties are not just about leisure and pleasure, of course. They are the elite’s big opportunity to push forward their social and political ambitions. And, in the case of families with eligible grown-up children, this is the perfect chance to show them off to each other. In the most favourable light.

A beautiful young woman, attired in a figure-hugging riding habit with matching skirt atop a beautiful horse, ridden side-saddle with style and brio, has a powerful effect on admiring male eyes. Especially if breeding and inheritance are on the agenda.

While horse riding itself is popular with upper-crust women, they do not, as a rule, join the men at the shoot – it’s not really considered conventional for women to do so. Nor is it correct etiquette. ‘Ladies are better out of the way, unless they are very tractable and obediently follow close on the track of the sportsmen,’ warns the aristos’ etiquette bible,
Etiquette of Good Society.

Yet shooting is such a major preoccupation that adept horsewomen, like Dame Mary Russell, Duchess of Bedford at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, become crack shots, as well as riding in foxhunts, or riding to hounds, as it is known. Hunting the fox down in the woods is another aspect of the Edwardian country-house party that is very much taken for granted – as an upper-class sport, it does not create the controversy it does today. And it requires riding skill and stamina, chasing over hills, hedges and travelling long distances for a large part of the day. But nonetheless, the Edwardian elite horsewoman, with her small hard hat, long dark leather boots and looped riding skirt, experiences a rare sense of freedom and abandon as she gallops through the countryside. There is no rule which says the rider can’t enjoy herself in the great outdoors.

There are many other diversions for the house-party guests. Huge lawns and gardens are laid out to promenade in. Guests can ride or walk through extensive parklands or take tea under an awning. Huge private libraries in the house offer a wide range of books or periodicals to browse through. Games of croquet and golf are popular with both sexes (in fact golf has become so well-liked by the early twentieth century that golfers are spending £4.7 million a year on the sport).

By now, many grand houses boast their own tennis court – sometimes more than one – and in the summer months, guests play tennis on the grass (hard courts are viewed as somewhat vulgar). As a sport, tennis is a late-Victorian innovation, so it is still very much a fashionable person’s game. And, of course, another opportunity for a slender, beautiful young woman to show off her sporting prowess – and her shape – to the best advantage.

The outfits women wear to play all sports are very cumbersome, with long, heavy skirts (amazingly, some fashionable women go skiing in long skirts with breeches underneath: trousers for women do not appear until the twenties). Playing tennis in a clinging white skirt, dropping to just two inches above the ground, plus white blouse, white waistband and a light-coloured silk tie and white collar – doesn’t seem like fun on a hot summer’s day. And indeed, it is not unusual for sprained ankles to be a result of tripping over on a skirt hem. Yet for the highborn ladies, tennis is another fashionable pursuit – and women’s fashion, by now, is gradually beginning to move away from the heavy restrictive clothing of the past.