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Change Your Life! |
Dishing up the past!!! |
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August 20, 2000
CAMBRIDGE (AP) - Want to eat like an Elizabethan? Gorge with the Georgians? Savor the Victorians' varied victuals? In many cases, a ticket to a British stately home now offers the key to its cuisine, too. The National Trust, custodian of more than 260 castles, mansions and churches, has instructed its chefs to research and prepare dishes reflecting the high points of Britain's culinary history. A few of the 400 properties run by English Heritage are doing the same. "You usually need to adapt the recipes for modern tastes and presentation," says Keith Goodwin, chef at the 17th-century Wimpole Hall near Cambridge, which began serving historic meals last year. "But they can turn out surprisingly tasty." "We hope it all adds to the experience of stepping back in history," says Sarah Clifford, spokeswoman for the National Trust. "And, of course, we want to revive the best of British cookery." So Wimpole Hall, which celebrated its heyday when Queen Victoria and husband Prince Albert stayed in 1843, serves blue cheese preserved with butter in a pot, a la Mrs. Beeton, doyenne of Victorian cooks. There also is a burned cream dessert first introduced at Cambridge's Trinity College in 1879 and a Victorian farm worker's "docky," a meal of soda bread, cheese, pickled cabbage and meat so called because the worker's wages were docked while he was eating it. Goodwin has added cream to make the potted cheese more spreadable for modern, on-the-run consumers. But the contents of the docky remain pickled - "they wouldn't have had the fresh stuff," he explained. Just north of Cambridge, the 12th-century priory of Anglesey Abbey offers stuffed beef in red wine gravy, a recipe that dates back to the Middle Ages, when the Order of St. Augustine lived on this site. At Little Moreton Hall, a fine Tudor moated manor house in Cheshire, northwestern England, visitors dine out on an Elizabethan dish of smoked haddock in sour cream sauce followed by "Mucky Mouth Pie," a confection of bilberries, apple and mint named thusly because the berries stained the mouth. "In Tudor times, mint was considered an aphrodisiac," said the cook, Deanne Goodwin. Visitors, she added, "love the food and inquire about its origins." Elsewhere, National Trust properties are experimenting with medieval delights such as herb and flower sallet (salad), Elizabethan rabbit and prune trenchers (pies) and salmon koulibiac with tarragon, a Russian fish pie popular around 1900. All very tasty compared to the sheep's trotters in cream, seared hare, elaborately decorated whole tongue and bleached cock's combs currently laid out at Kenwood House, a splendid neoclassical mansion in north London run by English Heritage. Fortunately, this recreation of the Duke of Newcastle's 1698 banquet is fake, part of an exhibition of upscale British edibles since 1600 called "Eat, Drink and be Merry." The details of the dinner served up to King William and Queen Mary were meticulously documented by the duke's chef, Patrick Land, who managed to retain both his kitchen - and his head - through four turbulent reigns. "This was high baroque ritual food," said food historian Ivan Day, who helped recreate the feast. John Hollis, Duke of Newcastle, "had slaughtered a lot of men in Ireland during the glorious revolution, and he was rewarded with not only the dukedom but a garter," Day said. Day also has put together a groaning early 17th-century dessert table. Set in an arbor, where well-heeled Jacobeans would go to gorge further after a banquet, it features an intricate carved sugar centerpiece in the shape of a castle surrounded by a miniature garden made of almond paste and marmalade. The table is covered with biscuits and sweets shaped as letters and coats of arms, and glasses crafted in sugar that were used to sip hot, spiced wine "for the griping in the guts," Day said. Other exhibits explore the fad for French food in Georgian England of the early 1800s, with salads, jellies and crystallised fruit, and - perhaps inevitably - the history of tea. During the exhibition, which runs until Sept. 24, Kenwood's Brew House Cafe is serving a range of historic dishes, including "green pease soop," a staple in Britain's monasteries in the Middle Ages. But not everyone has a taste for history. "The dishes didn't go well when we tried them last year," said Irene Davey, catering manager at the National Trust's Buckland Abbey in Devon county, southwest England, which was originally a small but influential Cistercian monastery and still incorporates the remains of the 13th-century abbey church. "Further north, I imagine historic dishes sell well to tourists, who are interested in that sort of thing," Davey said. "People who come here want modern favorites - steak and kidney pie and cream teas."
On the Net: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk http://www.english-heritage.org.uk |