All the King's Cooks (16 page)

The equipment for roasting, as listed in the 1659 inventory, comprised spits, racks and dripping pans, all of which are shown in use in the painting of
The Field of the Cloth of Gold
, where a roasting hearth is set up in just the same way as the remaining roasting hearth in the Lord's-side kitchen at Hampton Court. In order to contain the fire, two nine-inch (23cm) English-bond walls were built six feet (1.8m) apart in the middle of the fireplace, each with its front face sloping back at 20° from the vertical. These served as supports for two great wrought-iron racks, or cob-irons, each with a wide horizontal foot to keep it upright, and eight projecting bars with semicircular notches cut into their upper edges to receive the spits or ‘broches'. In this way
any spit could be securely rotated in any one of fifty-four different positions. Since the spits had to bridge six feet nine inches (2.1m) between the two racks and had to carry substantial moving weights, they needed to be at least one inch (2.5cm) square in cross-section and over nine feet (2.7m) in length. Those spits shown in contemporary continental paintings, as well as early examples in museum collections, usually have rectangular-cross-sectioned central working lengths, sometimes with holes punched through them at regular intervals. These features demonstrate an attempt to overcome one of the main problems with spit cookery: it is easy enough to slide a piece of meat on to the pointed end of a spit but quite another to keep it rotating, because its natural tendency is to hang still while the spit rotates uselessly inside it. The rectangular section helped to prevent this, especially if the meat was secured with a pair of skewers passing tight across each broad side of the spit, and if another was stuck through both the joint and one of the holes in the spit the process was further aided and accelerated. The alternative method, using ‘dogs' – forked brackets that slid along the spit to impale the joint on its sharp prongs – appears to have been introduced at a later date.

The actual turning of the spit was a simple manual operation. With one person sitting and another standing behind him, both protected from the heat behind the sloping wall and turning a spit with each hand, four spits could be operated from one side; this meant that twenty-four feet (7.3m) of spit could be in continuous use, with room on the upper bars to hold the roasted joints in the gentler heat before being served. It may even have been possible to double this capacity if another four spits were turned from the opposite side. Spit-turning had to be done at a steady pace, so that the surface of the meat closest to the fire could absorb a body of heat without burning, while allowing the heat to be absorbed into the joint during the rest of the rotation. It was important, too, to keep the meat at a sufficient distance from the fire – if it was too close it scorched on the outside, which prevented the heat from penetrating further. As Thomas Tusser stated:
¹⁰

Good diligent turn-broche and trusty withall,

Is sometimes as needfull as some in the hall.

In addition to turning the meat, it was also necessary to baste it to keep in the flavour and moisture. As later authors tell us, beef, mutton and goose, the principal meats to be roasted in the Hall-place kitchen, were first basted with a little salt and water from the dripping pan, the shallow trough placed beneath the spits to catch the juices. Once this had dried, the meat was dredged with flour, and then basted with butter to create a thin crust or froth all over the outside. This was quite unlike the usual continental method, which involved inserting strips of fat bacon or ‘lard' across the surface of the meat – one contemporary visitor to England observed that ‘in this country the men, as well nobles as traders and husbandmen, never lard their meat, but only anoint it with butter'.
¹¹

While these basic operations were being carried out in the Hall-place kitchen, similar activities using a better quality and range of ingredients, and more elaborate techniques, were taking place in the Lord's-side kitchen (no. 41). This had been built as Cardinal Wolsey's household kitchen sometime after he had obtained the lease of Hampton Court in 1514. Its 39-by 28-foot (11.9 x 8.5m) floor space and three large fireplaces were large enough to serve his household of about five hundred, but totally inadequate to cater for the court of Henry VIII. From around 1530 it therefore became the ‘Lord's-side kitchen', cooking for those who dined on the dais of the Great Hall and in the Great Watching Chamber. The only major alteration at this period of transition was the rebuilding of the arch of the north fireplace, reducing its width from some 18 feet (5.5m) to 15 feet (4.6m). No culinary requirement would make this necessary, and so it may have been done for structural reasons, particularly if the wider arch had showed signs of failing. Wolsey's boiling house, set in a small room off the north-west corner of this kitchen, was retained intact, so that it could provide similar facilities to those in the boiling house back in the Paved Passage.

Just as the hall-place kitchen had its smaller kitchen-workhouses in which the more delicate cookery tasks were carried out, the Lord's-side kitchen had its own equivalent (no. 45). It was a single room located some twenty feet (6.1m) to the east of this
kitchen, at the opposite side of the large servery area called the Great Space (no. 44). It measured about twenty feet (6.1m) square, with a wide fireplace arch in its south wall suitable for either a stove or a raised roasting hearth, and had a dresser hatch cut through its west wall. Its size and location suggest that it had been built as Cardinal Wolsey's privy kitchen, where the finest food was prepared for him and his chief guests. It may have been one of the first structures he built here, for an account of 1515 mentions ‘red okre for the chymny of the prevey kitchin'.
¹²

In the Lord's-side kitchen, cooking equipment of the same size and description as in the Hall-place kitchen would have been used, but the superiority of the ingredients available here would have permitted much more interesting recipes.

Around Christmas, the cooks would also boil large quantities of brawn in the Lord's-side kitchen for the upper household. The demand for this particular dish at this time of year was so great that at Greenwich Palace new ranges had to be built for the ‘say-thing and boyling of brawnes'.
¹³
In the sixteenth century ‘brawn' was not the jellied preparation of chopped pig's head and so on that we would recognise today, but a major joint of boar-meat. The forequarters, being the fattest, formed the ‘brawn' for the upper households, and the remainder, called ‘souse', went to the serving-men's tables. It was usually made of tame boar, since wild boar was already becoming extremely rare and would shortly become extinct in England. To ensure that the boars were in prime condition, they were usually penned up and specially fed from September.
¹⁴

Put Boar in stye

Till Hallontide nigh.

With boar, good Ciss,

Let naught be amiss.

And then, in December:

Let boar life render,

See brawn sod [boiled] tender.

The meat was rolled up and tied with bulrushes, osier or linen tape, and then plain-boiled until it was so soft that its fat could be pierced with a piece of straw or dry rush. It was lifted out and left to go cold, then put into barrels, which were filled up with either wine, ale or beer, plus cider vinegar and salt. Then it was stored in this way until required for use. Today brawn is best cooked in spiced wine stock and consumed shortly afterwards:

29.
 
The Lord's-side kitchen
Originally built for Cardinal Wolsey, this kitchen was later used to cook the meals served to the nobles and senior household officers who dined in the Council Chamber and Great Watching Chamber. It had its own boiling house (left) and doors leading left to the service road, forward into the Great Space, and right into the Scullery Yard.

To serve the brawn in the sixteenth century, it was cut in slices and neatly arranged on a large dish. A stem of yew or gorse was dipped into egg white beaten to a froth or doused in water and sprinkled with flour, to resemble snow, and then stuck in the
middle of the meat. Alternatively, a branch of gilded rosemary would be used. Small pieces of gold and silver leaf were then dotted on to the brawn, and three concentric rings of bay leaves stuck in vertically around its edge. A wide circle of red and yellow jelly was arranged just inside the well of the dish, and the rim then decorated with the same jellies, more brawn – sliced or stamped out with metal cutters – plus carved lemons, oranges, barberries, gilded bay leaves, beetroot, pickled barberries, gooseberries and grapes.
¹⁵

The boar's head – the kind of brawn most celebrated of all at Christmas – was made by boning the head, stuffing it with a rich forcemeat, simmering it until it was cooked through, allowing it to cool, and then garnishing it in a similar manner to the dish just described.

It appeared as the first dish served on Christmas Day. In 1521 Wynkyn de Worde's
Christmasse Carolles
included one to accompany the bringing in of the boar's head:

The bore's head in hande bring I

With garlandes gay and rosemary.

I pray you all synge merely

   
Qui estis in convivio.

The bore's head, I understande,

Is the chefe servyce in this lande.

Loke wherever it be fande

   
Servite cum Cantico.

Be gladde, lords, both more and lasse,

For this hath ordayned our stewarde,

To chere you all this Christmasse,

The bores head with mustards!

Further details of how boars' heads were decorated in great houses at this period come from the household accounts of Hengrave Hall in Suffolk, where in December 1535 payments were made ‘for 3 sheetes of thick grose paper to decke the bores heade in Christmas 12d. More payd to Bushe of Bury, paynter, for the paynting of the bores heade with sundry colors 12d'.
¹⁶

The more routine Lord's-side dishes prepared at Hampton Court included not only the usual joints of beef, veal, mutton and lamb (roasted for approximately 20 minutes per pound (450g) plus 20 minutes, given a good fire), but also a much more varied range of poultry and game. The birds were plucked and drawn – any trussing done with linen tape, skew ers and bodkins – then prepared as follows:
¹⁷

The fish cooked in the Lord's-side kitchen was simmered and broiled as in the Hall-place kitchen, but, as Alexander Barclay enviously noted, fish for the more important members of the court was also:

Roasted or sodden in sweet herbs or wine,

Or fried in oil most saperous and fine.

Although salad ingredients do not occur in the royal ordinances and dietaries – probably because they were grown in-house and so did not need to be purchased and financially accounted for – they do appear on menus and in other sources from this period.