A LICK OF HISTORY

Some of the dining delicacies of our ancestors may raise a few eyebrows, but one dish that Dorset’s grand houses always had on the table in summer was ice cream

- Fanny Charles

Visitors to stately homes and historic houses are often as fascinated by the life downstairs as they are by the elegant rooms and furniture upstairs. Grand country houses like Audley End, Montacute and Tyntesfield, or the fictional Downton Abbey (filmed at Highclere Castle in Berkshire), give an insight into the huge kitchens and vast armies of servants that worked behind the scenes.

At Hampton Court Palace you can get a taste of royal cuisine through the centuries, watching demonstrations by Tudor and Stuart re-enactors, cooking with huge open fires, turning spits, cauldrons of simmering stews or vats of bubbling vinegar. The Hampton Court kitchens were the largest in Tudor England, with 200 cooks, sergeants, grooms and pages working to produce 800 meals a day for the household. The King even had a private kitchen. Two hundred years later, Hampton Court had a Chocolate Kitchen, serving the fashionable drink to the Georgian kings and their families.

We know a lot about food consumed by the Victorians. Writers such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Mrs Gaskell and Henry Mayhew give vivid descriptions of how the middle and lower classes ate, while Downton Abbey has lifted the silver covers on the lavish cuisine of Edwardian England.

We even know a little about the plight of poor rural families in the 19th century. Just over the border from Dorset, George Mitchell, a tenant of the Phelips family of Montacute House, gives a shocking description in his book, The Skeleton of the Plough, 182746