Kitchens
The way in which the Queen, her Household, and indeed her subjects dined changed greatly across Victoria’s reign, but the physical surroundings in which her food was prepared and served changed rather less. At both Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, the kitchens had been set up or renovated by George IV, and so were as up to date as anything else which Victoria inherited. However, modern definitely didn’t mean efficient, safe or pleasant to work in. The practical issues were immense, but they were compounded by a convoluted administrative set-up that took red tape into whole new dimensions. At times, the letters and official reports on the palaces read like a slightly far-fetched farce. After the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert in 1840, the Prince spent many years grappling with the intricacies of the system, in which supposed tradition and very real inertia led to often dangerous situations being left unfixed for years, sometimes decades. The official royal palaces of Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace were, on the face of it, architectural monuments to the monarchy, but they were also places where people lived and worked, and the challenges of running them were huge. Nowhere was this more obvious than the kitchens.
The royal kitchens didn’t just provide meals for the Queen and her growing family: a huge number of people were entitled to be fed at the royal expense. The dining ledgers for the palaces listed all of the groups to be fed on each day. Some groups numbered only one or two people, such as ladies lunching in their rooms, or the provision of picnics for travelling attendants, while others could be counted in their hundreds, especially those eating in the main servants’ hall. Depending on the palace, and the year, the kitchens catered for bishops and choristers, electricians and workmen, nurses and doctors, military bands, policemen, governesses, tutors, and an almost infinite variety of divisions within the upper and lower servant body. Eating took place in tens of different spaces across the palaces, from formal dining rooms to hastily decided-upon nooks and crannies. Almost every class of Victorian was represented within the Household, and meals reflected that social reality. A person walking through the palace would have been able to witness everything from plain working-class food, to middle-class aspiration, right up to the poshest food imaginable, served to the Queen and her aristocratic attendants with all due ceremony. And if this wasn’t enough, state visits and extraordinary events such as balls required that the cooks produce hot and cold buffets for over a thousand mouths at a time, as well as catering to the specific dietary needs and desires of a multitude of guests from Britain and far beyond.
Put 2 chickens, or hens, having first removed their fillets, and 6lbs of fillet of veal, in a stockpot, with 5 quarts of General Stock, and ½ oz of salt: put on the fire to boil; then skim, and add 2 onions, with 2 cloves stuck in one; 4 leeks, and a head of celery; simmer on the stove corner for three hours; strain the broth; take off the fat, and clarify the consommé with the fillets of chicken, or hen … and strain once more, through a broth napkin, into a basin.
Observation: Chicken consommé should be colourless; by following the indications given, it will be obtained perfectly white and clear.1
Cooking at the palace may have looked prestigious and interesting, but this was by no means finely tuned cheffing for a select group of discerning diners. It was mass catering on a factory scale. In March 1865 alone, 8,257 people ate food cooked by the royal chefs, and this was a fairly typical monthly figure.2 The palace’s population was divided into the Household and the wider Establishment. The Household was made up of Victoria and her family, along with the – usually titled – men and women who were her attendants. These were not people who fetched and carried. They were ladies-in-waiting, equerries, and occupiers of specific roles such as the Lord Chamberlain and Lord Steward. They all had duties, mainly organisational, but they also all had large houses and staff of their own. Some were permanent staff members, in which case they usually had London residences somewhere around St James’s Palace, while some worked on rotation and had homes elsewhere in the country. All were entitled to rooms in whichever palace they were needed, as well as all of their meals.
At Windsor and Buckingham Palace, until 1861 the Household generally only dined with Victoria and, after 1840, with Albert, when they were entertaining specific visitors. Given their position in society, this was a pretty regular occurrence. The royal couple did, however, seek privacy when they could, eating together or, as the various children grew up, with one or more of their offspring. These private dinners were fairly muted: a mere snack of two soups, a fish, four entrées, two entremets and some cold fowl was served to them in July 1847. In June 1857, when Victoria dined with the Prince and their eldest daughter, the cosy threesome had soup au oeufs pochés (poached eggs), and a clear chicken soup; sole gratin and fried whitings; roast beef and capon with asparagus; vol-au-vents with béchamel sauce and grilled eggs; and an apricot flan and waffles ‘mit creme’.3 The clerk of the kitchen, who was responsible for writing out the menus, as planned by the chief chef and agreed by the Queen, was probably not a linguist, and a mixture of English, mainly correct French, and horribly garbled German was fairly typical. The meal also included the inevitable cold fowl on the sideboard and would have ended with fruit for dessert.
The rest of the Household dined separately, at the predictably titled Household dinner, at which numbers varied considerably. On the same day that the Queen ate the meal above, unusually, there were also only three people at the Household dinner. They had nearly the same menu, swapping the whitings for turbot; the beef for mutton; and adding mutton cutlets, chickens and veal noisettes. The waffles were replaced by plum pudding, and they also had roast pigeon and capons, plus ham toasts, citron madeleines and waffles. The food was of the highest possible standard: moulded, garnished, clarified, cut and finished off with extreme care and attention. The dining ledger from which these menus come lists quantities for some of the meat – the three members of the Household were expected to consume eight capons or chickens between them, an entire turbot, a lobster (which was in the sauce for the turbot), plus all of the other food. A roast beef joint was also provided, in case of sudden hunger between courses. Many of these dishes would have been served simultaneously as the service style was still à la Française. On this day specific meals were also provided separately for three of the older royal children, as well as for the nursery (roast lamb and roast fowl). The ledgers rarely give a lot of detail apart from that for royal and Household luncheons and dinners, so the various vegetable accompaniments and sweet courses for these aren’t listed. However, they would have been there, along with the equally unspecified breakfasts for the family and Household. On this day, at that level of society, the kitchens also provided luncheons for the royal table and the ladies, along with a dinner for a spare woman of the bedchamber (Lady Barrington, who presumably missed the main dinner), and dinner for the equerries.
Beyond the Household was the wider Establishment. This consisted of everyone who did the actual work, and it was highly stratified. At the top were the private secretaries, tutors, governesses, clerks of the kitchen and high-ranking officials. They ate either in specific groups, or in the steward’s room. Status mattered: the Household dined in the evening, around 8.30 p.m. Lower sorts dined around midday, emphasising the difference in rank. They also ate in small groups, but the bulk of them were fed en masse in the servants’ hall. On this particular day the kitchens provided dinner for the night porters, upholsterers, singers, and the silver pantry, as well as a group of unspecified people eating in the coffee room, and the main servants’ hall. Cooks and kitchen maids ate separately. There was also a ledger entry just for stock, which included large quantities of beef and veal, as well as a fowl for the soup.
The quantity of food cooked every day of Victoria’s reign was stupendous, and the variety of preparations even more so. The kitchens had to be able to turn out the kind of well-presented, intricately flavoured dishes expected by the aristocracy, as well as catering for middle-class tastes and supplying bulk food for the masses. Unsurprisingly, the kitchens at the main palaces were huge, and operated on the same scale as a small factory. Even so, they couldn’t always cope with the level of demand, and, on some occasions, outside caterers were used as well. This was consistently the case with bread, and often so as well with cakes and confectionery, especially at weddings and Christmas, when a large number of cakes were given away to friends, family and hangers-on. However, with the exception of these occasional forays into the commercial sphere, the kitchens provided everything.
Buckingham Palace was the first really royal palace encountered by the Queen. Kensington had once been a proud regal dwelling, but by the 1830s had been so hacked about and subdivided that it was hard to see the original layout. The Kents’ kitchen there was quite a bit smaller than that at the average country house, while William III’s original kitchen had been converted into a chapel. Victoria was desperate to move out, and, with the now Dowager Queen Adelaide still at Windsor, Buckingham Palace seemed like the place to be. True, it was still a building site, barely finished, hardly equipped, and didn’t have any furniture, but it was a royal palace, and it was hers. She announced that she would move in as soon as possible, throwing her officials into an immediate panic, as it was not really fit for habitation. They pointed out its lack of carpets and fittings. She loftily stated that she had no need of carpets, or furniture: she could bring her own. She did demand a throne though, which she duly got. She moved in on 13 July 1837, and was utterly delighted with her new home. It was bright, garish, dripping with gilt and, to many people, utterly tasteless and reminiscent of the bad old days of George IV. Victoria, however, had a thing for gold and, now that she was out of dingy Kensington, she was entranced by its splendour. She was equally happy about the number of rooms, which meant that she could stable her mother at one end of the palace, and herself at the other, in her very own, private, rooms, with a new connecting door through to Baroness Lehzen’s bedroom.
The palace was one of George IV’s caprices. As at Brighton Pavilion, George had been determined to mastermind the construction of a palace that was truly fit for a modern monarch. Britain didn’t really do decent palaces. St James’s had sort of grown, piecemeal, around Whitehall, until a fire in the 1690s took most of it out of commission. Kew was ramshackle, with detached buildings of different periods making an impractical whole. Kensington was small and falling down. Hampton Court had been reasonable in 1540, but was now a mixture of styles, with Wren’s massive extension sitting uneasily with the gloomy Tudor core. Where was the equivalent of Versailles, or the Winter Palace? Blenheim was the depressing answer, called a palace, but inconveniently not actually royal (and too far from London to have been of any use anyway). George IV was determined to change all of that. He presided over huge changes at Windsor, converted a seaside villa in Brighton into an exotic fantasy, and focused on an unprepossessing house in the middle of London – acquired by George III as a residence for his Queen – to convert into a palace that Britain could be proud of. Poor George. It all went wrong at Buckingham Palace. From the start he didn’t seem able to work out quite what he wanted, and his architect, the usually reliable John Nash, panicked under pressure and designed a bizarre building, criticised from the outset. His structural calculations proved dodgy; his building methods crazed; and, as the palace took shape, his budgeting was way out of control. He was eventually dismissed, but not before the new palace became a laughing stock. A particularly vicious – but brilliant – satire was published in one of the newspapers, purporting to be ‘from a Frenchman’:
I shall now give you an account of de royale palace, called here de Buck-and-Ham palace, which is building for de English king in de spirit of John Bull plum pudding and roast-beef taste, for which de English are so famous. It is a great curiosity. In de first place, de pillars are made to represent de English vegetable, as de sparrow-grass, de leek and de onion; then de entablatures or friezes are very mosh enriched with de leg of mutton and de pork, with vat they call de garnish, all vary beautiful carved; den, on de impediment of de front stand colossal figure of de man-cook with de large English toasting fork in his hand, ready to put in de pot a vary large plum pudding behind him, which is a vary fine plum pudding, not de colour of de black Christmas pudding, because de architect say it would not look vell in de summair time – it is vary plain pudding … On de wing of the palace, called de gizzard wing (de other wing was cut off), stand de domestique servant, in neat dress, holding de trays of biscuit and tart … Dere is to be in de front of de palace vary large kitchen range made of white marble, vich I was told would contain von hundred of goose at von time. De palace, ven complete, will be called after von famouse English dish, de Toad-in-de-Hole.4
The ‘toad’ was George IV. The pudding referred to a dome, which originally peeped obscenely over the balustrade and looked ridiculous, while the kitchen range was the marble arch, intended as a triumphal entrance until someone thought to see if the state coach would go through it. It wouldn’t. Food metaphors abounded. The pillars on the front of the palace were criticised as being raspberry-coloured, or, less politely, as resembling raw sausages.5
When George IV died, William IV refused to have anything to do with what Creevey called, ‘this monstrous insult to the nation, this cumbrous pile, this monument to reckless extravagance’.6 Proposals were circulating to turn it into a national gallery, or a college, and when the Houses of Parliament burnt down in 1834, William delightedly offered up Buckingham Palace as a replacement. Parliament, who were aware of the state it was in, as well as the money pit it had become, declined to take it on. Instead, the decision was made to try to finish it. So much money had already been spent that it seemed silly not to see the thing through. However, with no pressure from the current monarch, by 1837 the palace was very far from a functional living space.
The kitchens at the time were under the main body of the palace. In theory they had the usual full contingent of main kitchen, scullery, pastry, confectionery, bakehouse, larders and outdoor space. In practice not all of these rooms appear to have been finished, and, as time went on, there were proposals to shift some rooms around and remove others. The fittings were fairly standard: ranges and charcoal chafing stoves, provided by the leading manufacturers of the day, including Jeakes, and Bramagh and Prestige. A lot of the fittings were also supplied by the new builder, Thomas Cubitt, who, with architect Edward Blore, who replaced Nash, took on the mammoth task of wrestling the palace into submission in the 1840s. These fittings were clearly subject to a hard life, and not entirely up to standard: in 1843 a list of alterations and improvements included installing an additional oven in the pastry room, filling in ‘the opening in the pastry table’, repairing the pastry sink, as well as the kitchen range and steam apparatus, and altering all of the windows so that they would open.7
The kitchens, like most of the palace, were gas-lit, though all of the cooking took place on coal or charcoal. Charcoal was odourless, smokeless, and, in the form of chafing stoves, highly controllable. The stoves were very simple in their design: just a metal grill, set into a brick surround, which held the burning charcoal while allowing the air to circulate and the ash to fall through. Cooks controlled the temperature equally simply, by raising or lowering the pan, using trivets where necessary to support it: primitive, perhaps, but far more instantly manageable than later electric or halogen hobs. The disadvantage was that they gave off carbon monoxide. They were entirely unventilated, and what little effort had been made to improve the issue – namely, opening the windows – was a ‘disgrace to science’. Since the kitchen door was habitually kept open in a – futile – attempt to increase the air circulation, these fumes worked their way up the building and into the royal apartments. The ventilation debate continued, with occasional half-hearted attempts to tinker with the windows and install chimneys, concluding when an exasperated Lord Chamberlain wrote to the Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Woods, ‘with reference to the special works to be done at Buckingham Palace for the year ending 31st March 1847, I have the honour to state that great inconvenience as well as detriment to the health of the persons employed in the Kitchens at Buckingham Palace having been experienced from the fumes of the Charcoal used in the stoves not having proper means of escape, it is considered highly advisable immediately to construct hoods over the stoves with a communication to the ventilating shaft at present in use’.8 The kitchen was described as, ‘hot, unhealthy, and altogether unfit’.9
There were wider problems than those of ventilation. When the kitchens were being constructed, workmen excavating the foundations discovered a handy brick floor, which they left in place to form the floor of the kitchen. Any of them who were local would have known what it really was: a conduit which served most of the surrounding area as a sewer, and which turned out to have a somewhat porous structure. The consequences of this became apparent as soon as Victoria moved in. The kitchens were quickly described as, ‘foul and offensive’. Raw sewage leaked from the floor and piled up around the walls while the cooks worked. To add to the anguish, the rooms next to the kitchen contained dustbins, ‘filled with garbage of a very bad description’, and urinals for the male cooks.10 There were still workmen around, finishing off bits of the palace, and the mingled stench of urine, rotten food, glue and human effluent drifted upstairs and through the staterooms like a particularly noxious relative. And, in the palace proper, it got even worse.
Edward Blore was one of several people to prepare reports on the palace in the 1840s. He wasn’t a fan. One particular gripe was – again – lack of ventilation. There were 200 fires in the palace, and they were notorious for smoking and refusing to stay alight. He attributed this to a closed system of air, which led to the fires pulling air from wherever they could, namely the water closets. While not every water closet actually worked – another cause for complaint – most were connected to some degree or other with the sewers. The traps leaked. The sewers stank. ‘The emanations drawn into the palace were so powerful as to produce nausea, and feelings of sickness when we went close to the sinks.’11 Furthermore, when people did manage to open a window, they were exposed to the area which surrounded the palace, and in which many of the lower servants lodged. Directly opposite was a street called Princes Court, ‘which is used as a public urinal, the roadway through it is always drenched and covered with urinary deposits and others of a still more objectionable description. The walls on either side, saturated with urine, are falling to pieces the mortar being completely decomposed thereby … all the buildings there being of an inferior description, and entirely without any drainage other than the open gutters of the unpaved streets … the slops thrown out from the houses, cover an extent of many hundreds of square yards … from which are constantly emanating exhalations of a most disagreeable and unwholesome character, and which during three quarters of the year are wafted by the south westerly winds right into the palace windows.’12 Residents blamed a local gas works for the tarnished brass, and paint which blackened only hours after being applied, but no, it was just the effects of hundreds of people, all cooking and eating and defecating in the palace and its surrounds.
There were knock-on effects, too, on the neighbouring area. While plebeian turds were oozing up through the royal kitchen floor, royal effluvia were finding their way through the floorboards of the neighbouring houses. There was no effective sewage system in place for many of the surrounding streets, and residents complained about the devaluation of their houses due to the effects of the inadequate sewage systems of the new construction meeting the non-existent systems outside. If they’d stepped inside the palace, though, they’d have found human waste pooling in the courtyards, despite the best efforts of extra night-soil-men, who were employed to take it all away. They dumped it in the gardens, next to Albert’s new summerhouse.
Security was an issue as well. Frequently, drunken soldiers or passing tramps had to be extracted from the palace gardens in the morning, and a couple of well-publicised break-ins scandalised a nation that assumed that its monarch was kept reasonably secure. On one occasion an obsessed silversmith was found a few yards from the Queen’s bedroom, declaring that he had come to ask Victoria to marry him. And on four separate occasions between 1838 and 1841 a boy called Edward Jones gained entry through open windows or gaps in doors. On the first occasion he was found, covered in soot and grease, wearing two pairs of trousers, and with various stolen objects, including ladies’ underwear, hidden about his person. On the second, Lehzen and Mrs Lilly, the Princess Royal’s nurse, dragged him out from under a sofa while a rather useless page looked on. On the third and fourth, he came in, established that the security had not been improved, went home to get a meal, and came back again the next day. Questioned in court he admitted to having helped himself to ‘victuals in the kitchen’, leaving fingerprints in the stock. On the final occasion he was found with cold meat and potatoes, which he’d filched, wrapped up in a cloth.13
The place was a shambles, both physically and administratively. A large part of the problem lay with the ridiculously complicated administration of the palaces. Over hundreds of years, structures had evolved which simply did not work. In addition, both high-ranking officials and lower-down servants had grown used to playing the system. Notorious abuses eventually came to light, including ordering candles for rooms which had been gas-lit for years, and ordering wine for people or purposes which had long since become obsolete. Looking back, one book from the end of the period commented that: ‘The perquisite system was in full force, and wine or candles, and other imperishable items which had been produced for any particular occasion and had remained untouched, were calmly annexed by certain officials and their underlings, although perfectly fit to be brought forth again. Those were the days when scores of people outside the palaces lived in luxury on the proceeds of robbery and waste within.’14
By 1837 it had become virtually impossible to get anything done. Examples of confusion included window mending: a broken kitchen window required a requisition signed by the chief cook, countersigned by a clerk of the kitchen, signed by the master of the Household, and then authorised by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office before being passed to the Department of Woods and Forests for the actual work to be scheduled and – eventually – carried out.15 Another was fires. Again, different departments were responsible for laying fires and lighting them. Even Victoria herself struggled to get any sense out of her officials, and her complaints, via the inevitable chain of officials, that the dining room was damp and cold, were met with excuses rather than anything as useful as actual fire-lighting. The problem wasn’t so much that no one knew who was responsible for various tasks: more that there were so many competing interests, and no cross-communication, that nothing ever got done efficiently. Guests complained that there was no one to show them to their rooms, and that when they did get there, if they left, they could never get back again. One man spent the night sleeping on a sofa after failing to relocate his room after dinner. The housemaid who found him called a policeman, assuming he was a random drunk. Servants cleaned guests’ shoes in their own rooms as no boot room had been provided amid the ongoing building works, and if they managed to provide water for guests for washing, it invariably arrived cold, due to inadequate plumbing provision, and filthy, thanks to the general atmosphere.16 Victoria either didn’t notice, or was prepared to ignore it all. In her early years she was far more preoccupied with partying and politics than dusting and drains. She put Baroness Lehzen in charge of running the Household on a day-to-day basis, and forgot about it. However, the situation had become so farcical that it required a wholesale reorganisation, something that Lehzen had neither the power, nor the inclination, to carry out.
In 1840, however, Prince Albert had arrived, and was raring for a challenge. He was frustrated by Victoria’s refusal to trust him with confidential political documents, and her determination to retain absolute authority as Queen, despite the fact that she now had a handsome and accomplished husband. Victorian men did not expect to play a subservient role to their wives, and Albert had entered into his marriage with a certain trepidation about Victoria’s wilful character and the efforts he would have to make to achieve a harmonious relationship. Harmonious, to Albert, meant that he was not sidelined as a wife would be, but able to play a significant role as Victoria’s advisor, as well as being a significant figure in his own right. One of the sticking points was Lehzen, who was jealous of the Prince, and deliberately caused trouble between the couple. It took him two years to prise Lehzen out of her privileged position as the Queen’s closest confidante, but at the end of 1842 she was persuaded to retire on an annual pension of £300, and shipped off to Germany. With her departure, Albert was able to take control, both of Victoria, who became increasingly reliant on him now that no one else was around to support her, and of the internal running of the creaky royal household. Much to her outrage, Victoria was also pregnant for large swathes of her early married life, and repeated bouts of related illness, postnatal depression and confinements wore down her early determination to always do everything alone. Together with Baron Stockmar, his advisor, personal secretary and friend, Albert systematically investigated the various departments, and instigated reforms. He caused outrage by removing long-held perks and rooting out abuses of the system that were costing significant amounts of money. He slashed the salary bill, both by tweaking the number and type of office-holders, and by simply reducing wages or associated extra payments. He properly delineated the responsibilities of the Lord Chamberlain and Lord Steward’s departments, making the political appointees largely honorific positions, and giving the master of the Household the real responsibility for ensuring that things got done. It wasn’t perfect, but by the time he had finished, it almost resembled a working administration.
One of the most pressing aims of the newly streamlined royal Establishment had to be sorting out the Buckingham Palace kitchens. By the late 1840s, Victoria and Albert had decided that the palace was too small for their ever-increasing family, and didn’t provide proper reception space for state occasions. Albert disliked central London living anyway, and, as he and Victoria gradually stopped having ferocious rows, and his influence upon her grew, she started to agree with him. Their main preference was for the intimate environment of Balmoral or Osborne, but they weren’t ideal for attending to government, or entertaining ambassadors and heads of state. Where possible, they used Windsor, but Buckingham Palace still needed a revamp, and in 1851 it finally got it.
Money, as usual, had been one of the stumbling blocks, but Victoria and Albert devised plans that would mean that the upgrades would cost the nation practically nothing. They were both careful housekeepers, in stark contrast to Victoria’s predecessors. Part of the money for the rebuild came from the sale of Brighton Pavilion, which, despite her love of the garish, Victoria hated. Some of the furnishings were, however, transferred to Buckingham Palace and reused, notably in the Chinese breakfast room. The glorious Brighton kitchens, however, were left on site, being part demolished as the town council converted the building for new uses. The new kitchens at Buckingham Palace were not a patch on those at Brighton, though they were vastly improved. They were bigger, with all the auxiliary rooms fully planned for, and decently ventilated. They were also better positioned in the building, under a new ballroom and entertaining space. The ballroom had central heating, gas lighting, and was huge. The kitchens also benefitted from gas lighting, but otherwise made a lot of use of the fixtures and fittings from the old kitchens. This made sense: they were, after all, less than twenty years old. This time around they were connected to working chimneys and drains. The new kitchens had decent hot-water apparatus, a state-of-the-art roasting range (the spit mechanism is still there), and enclosed water closets. Despite this, there was a certain sense of déjà-vu. The fit-out was completed in October 1852. Already by June 1853 the kitchen passages were being labelled as dark, gloomy and unventilated. A memorandum written on the 25th urgently called for better circulation of fresh air, in order to stop tainted air in the larder coming into contact with joints and other articles of food.17
Another key area to be addressed by Albert’s reforms, both at Buckingham Palace and at Windsor, was food waste.18 The kitchens got through enormous quantities of food. In October 1842 up to 90 loaves of bread per day were consumed across the Establishment, along with 24 rolls, 6 cottage loaves and 6 fancy twists. The standard loaf was a quartern, which weighed four pounds. Several suppliers were used, as was also the case for the 36 pounds of butter per day, and over 800 pounds of Cheshire Cheese that month.19 Although supplies were recorded in detail, as they were purchased, there doesn’t seem to have been anyone keeping much track of them after they were cooked. À la Française service was predicated on supplying gargantuan amounts of food on the table, and much of it was eaten. It was a more physical age, and everyone needed more calories than modern dietary advice recommends. Plus, from Melbourne to the Queen herself, there were some notoriously big eaters at the palace at every stage of Victoria’s reign. Leftovers were an integral part of the system, though, especially cold roast meats, as they could be transformed into a huge range of puddings, soups and stews (hashes) for the rest of the Household (or breakfast, lunch or nursery teas). Even left in the state in which they came off the table, roast meats from the aristocratic table provided cold meals for servants across Britain, and the royal Establishment was no different: ‘If the servants could not have a little cold fowl or turkey for supper they felt they were very badly treated indeed.’20 This wasn’t a question of petty pilfering: it was built into the system. The upper servants, those who ate in the steward’s room, ate a sit-down supper after the Queen’s dinner had finished, at 9.30 p.m., when the uneaten dishes would be transferred from the upstairs dining room to the downstairs steward’s room, ready for a rather tepid feast. Nevertheless, there were still leftovers, and still more general waste from cooking. Peelings and scraps could go for pig slurry, but prepared dishes were effectively part of the social welfare system, which at the time was based largely on philanthropy and a strong sense of duty towards the poor, and which formed the basis of upper-class education, particularly for women. Most country houses had developed a sort of edible almsgiving system, based on cooked food waste, which aimed to provide basic sustenance to those members of the local community who were unable to provide for themselves.21 At the palaces, the poor would queue up in the hope of receiving food, but it was open to abuse, as there were no checks in place to ensure that would-be diners were actually in need. A new structure was put in place, therefore, which ensured that food would be distributed, not to hopeful individuals, but via designated charities who could send representatives on a rota basis. In December 1855, the palace ledgers recorded that 650 ‘poor of Windsor’ were fed, and, where numbers were recorded, they are all in the hundreds.22 This worked so well that when, in 1902, the coronation feast of Edward VII had to be postponed due to an emergency operation, rather than panicking about what to do with the food for 250 guests, the more perishable dishes were seamlessly – but discreetly – used to feed the poor of Whitechapel. It was presumably the first and last time most of them ate immaculately clarified pheasant soup, or woodcock stuffed with foie gras.23
By the late 1850s, with decent sewerage being installed, and the kitchen rebuilt, Buckingham Palace was almost habitable. However, Victoria and Albert increasingly spent most of their time when they were needed in London at Windsor Castle. In 1849 the Slough–Windsor branch line opened, so the whole journey into central London could be made by train, which was easy and convenient. The vast majority of state visits were conducted at Windsor, and Buckingham Palace became the unloved site for vast balls, drawing rooms, and fleeting stays when it was otherwise unavoidable. Windsor was bigger, with more accommodation for the Household and Establishment alike; it was easier to get away from, for trips to Osborne, or the south-coast ports; and it had much, much better kitchens.
The Windsor Castle kitchens are iconic. Even under Victoria, they were a must-see attraction for her attendants, and lords, ladies, statesmen, their wives and underlings all visited them. The structure dates back to the medieval period, when the Great Kitchen was constructed as a massive, barn-like space, edged with roasting ranges and brick-built charcoal chafing stoves, and it remained largely unchanged until the 1820s. There were significant building works to repair the kitchens under Elizabeth I, by which time they had disintegrated to the point that they were unusable, and under Charles II, who added a second kitchen and reworked all of the auxiliary rooms, especially the bakehouse. Many of these changes were in turn swept away under George IV, who employed Sir Jeffry Wyatville to rebuild most of the upper ward (the highest part of the castle, housing the staterooms and royal apartments), creating the interiors that are still in use today. Wyatville also created the kitchens that Victoria would have known. Completed in 1828, they were both an unsubtle homage to fine dining, and a practical working space. They were fitted out with a vast new batterie de cuisine, in gleaming copper, with each piece crested and numbered. There were pans of every description, including specialist fish kettles, plain saucepans and huge stockpots. There were culinary moulds for jelly, cake and blancmange; along with dariole moulds for making tiny, exquisite moulded puddings and cakes, and all of the other highly specialised equipment which high-end French-style cookery demanded. There were bain maries for sauces, baking sheets for pastry, and waffling irons, pancake pans and all the rest. There was a confectionery, a bakehouse, a pastry room and extensive larders, all kitted out to the highest level. That meant not only the obvious things – hot water on demand from a cistern on the roof, steam-heated hot tables and warming closets, boiling coppers for large joints and puddings, brick ovens with cast-iron doors – but also a level of ornamentation and design which was decidedly not the norm. There were gothic-style cast-iron bases for the chafing stoves, which were moved from sitting against the walls, where the fumes wafted gently into the kitchen, and installed instead in place of some of the roasting ranges, neatening up the whole kitchen by streamlining the edges, and giving them direct ventilation up the chimneys. The remaining ranges were refitted with modern smoke-jacks: spit mechanisms driven automatically by the draw of the fire, which turned a fan positioned a short way up the chimney and which was then connected to a system of cogs and pulleys, with ornate hasteners (roasting screens) in front of them. They, and the fireplaces they screened, had their own battlements. The floors were spread with sand, which was replaced several times a day, ensuring that all scraps and spills were captured and cleared efficiently. Gas lighting was installed, along with lantern windows in the ceiling to maximise light. Whitewash and tiles replaced bare stone and wood. Gabriel Tschumi, who worked in them for many years from 1898, described his first impression of them as being like ‘a chapel, with its high domed ceiling, its feeling of airiness and light, and the gleam of copper, well-worn and burnished, at each end of the room’.24
In 1855 one of the Queen’s dressers, Frieda Arnold, went on a trip to the kitchens, an obligatory experience for servants and served alike. She was awed by its size, saying she got, ‘quite lost in it’. She went on:
There are twelve ranges, with a huge iron table in the centre which is heated from below, and on which the dishes are set. On both sides are huge fires over which roasts are suspended on spits, with great iron chains driven round constantly by a machine. On one of these fires alone five zentner [approx. 250kg] of charcoal are burnt every day. At Christmas a whole ox weighing 400lb was roasted here; it was brought to the table: that was indeed a roast beef. I saw a Welsh capon in the kitchen which weighed 24lb – everything here is on this scale. But the greatest calm and order reigns, as if nothing was happening.25
Even the newspapers got in on the act. The Illustrated London News published a picture of the kitchens in 1850, accompanied with a description: ‘Large fires at both ends of the kitchen look enormous, and, with the viands slowly revolving on the spits, present a wonderful picture. On either side there are charcoal stoves for the more delicate cookery – for the chefs d’oeuvres of French invention – aided by certain mysterious utensils used in the process that sadly bewilder the uninitiated, whose astonishment is moreover excited by the great size and number of the culinary vessels displayed ostentatiously round the huge fire-places.’ The master cooks all worked on their own preparatory tables, which surrounded a steam-heated hot table. As they finished each dish, they placed it on the central table in the position that it would occupy in the dining room upstairs, ready for the footmen to collect. The dishes demanded intense concentration, which was reflected in the atmosphere: ‘The scene in the kitchen is one of great order; no bustle, no confusion; all the details, even of the largest dinner, being so subdivided and arranged that each person has his own part to attend to, and, in consequence, there is no disorder. The quiet is remarkable.’26
The quiet was relative, especially for a journalist almost certainly writing from second-hand accounts. There was little talking, but the noise of cooking made for sensory overload, as this account from 1897 makes quite clear:
Under the brilliant glare of numberless gas jets, the two great open fires roar up their wide-throated chimney, while all before the fierce blaze two score of glistening, juicy joints, all crackle and splutter. White-clad cooks hover round monstrous coppers which fill the air with the hum of their bubbling. At his desk the storekeeper checks the quantities of food in course of cooking, or sends messengers flying to the storeroom for supplementary supplies. With the monotonous jangle of the endless chains that turn the spouts, mingles the noisy stoking of the many different fires and the clang of the oven doors as they are sharply open and shut … the bain maries hiss forth a most savoury steam of appetising sauces, while before their particular blaze, fat chickens frizzle contentedly under the attentions of a roasting cook and his basting ladle.27
The book from which this is taken, The Private Life of the Queen, was banned on publication. It was probably written by a servant to one of the maids-of-honour, and is very detailed on the fabric of the building, the paintings, ceramics, and contents of the storerooms, but it’s quite clear that the author was not part of the Household, and had never dined with the Queen. She or he was confused about salaries and numbers of staff in the kitchens, but knew the contents of the China Room extremely well. As a guide to the workings of the kitchens, however, it is invaluable. As with almost every visitor to the kitchens, the roasting ranges clearly made the biggest impact, but a smaller range, used just for cooking the Queen’s daily cold roast fowl, is also noted. The cook’s room is described as well: ‘a cosy apartment, furnished with a chest of drawers, washstand, table and a most comfortable armchair. There is also a writing desk. Above the fireplace, which faces the window, hangs a china plate, mounted on a velvet plaque. It is emblazoned with the royal arms, and was presented to the Queen some years ago by the Cook’s Guild. The wide window-sill is piled up with blue-paper covered books, in which the Royal and Household menus are daily entered.’28 There was also a room specifically for the master cooks, at least in 1843, when it was re-carpeted, but the chief cook always had his own place of quiet contemplation, where, according to one architectural guide at the time, he could ‘consult his authorities’.29 Even the most advanced cook needs a reference library. Pictures from the 1860s to the 1890s show that there was also a small octagonal table with a couple of stools in the main kitchen. This is probably the storekeeper’s seat described above.
Visitors to the kitchens rarely ventured beyond the main space. There were sculleries and storerooms galore, many occupying Charles II’s second kitchen, which had been subdivided into an absolute maze of rooms. Frieda Arnold described the confectionery room and pastry kitchen as ‘very interesting’, but said no more. These were both quite separate to the main kitchen, with their own staff, and own responsibilities. The confectionery in particular was a specialist area, ‘a most fascinating apartment, and the variety and beauty of the shapes and moulds to be found there, the charming little ovens and stoves which go almost all round the room, and the dainty appliances for “piping” and the more delicate parts of confectionery would delight any woman who is possessed of a “sweet tooth”’.30 Confectionery had a long history of association with women, especially gentlewomen, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was regarded as one of the ladylike domestic arts to which upper-class women should aspire. However, by the Victorian era it had been professionalised and Frenchified, and its practitioners were largely men. That didn’t stop sugarcraft, with all its connotations of purity, delicacy and whiteness, continuing to have feminine associations.
The Windsor kitchens remained the hub for royal dining for the whole of Victoria’s reign. The confectionery and bakehouse in particular were not readily replicated elsewhere, and, although other palaces had such facilities, they were not on the same scale. Windsor was used as a catering facility, supplying cakes, bread and biscuits to all of the other palaces several times a week, where necessary. It made logistical sense: the royal kitchen gardens were consolidated at Windsor after 1850 – another of Albert’s reforms – and so deliveries were heading off in other directions anyway. The kitchens didn’t change much. There were minor repairs, and occasional additional installations, but nothing substantial until after 1901. Although some sources – though never anyone with experience of cooking in the kitchens – mention gas stoves in addition to the charcoal ones, it doesn’t seem as if gas was actually installed at Windsor for cooking during Victoria’s reign. Many large houses continued to cook on coal and charcoal until well into the twentieth century and, although gas ranges were installed at some of the wealthier clubs and hotels from the 1840s, they were much rarer in upper-class domestic environments. By the 1890s, therefore, the kitchens were pretty much as up to date as they had been in the 1830s, and just as impressive to those who went round them.
Windsor was by no means beset by the issues that dogged Buckingham Palace, but it did have a few problems, including paralysing cold in many parts of the castle. Again, sewerage was inadequate, and, again, there was a large forgotten underground sewer, this time under part of the boundary wall, which was found to be slowly washing away the foundations in the 1820s. The main complaint about Windsor from an Establishment point of view was that it seemed to consume dusters, which led to a mildly hilarious flurry of letters in the 1850s. It was clearly very serious for those concerned, mainly housemaids, but also silver room staff, table-deckers and anyone else who felt the need for a stout linen cloth – which would have included the kitchens. ‘This duster business’ culminated in the loss of 24 dozen dusters, and a stern warning to the housekeeper, whose department was deemed responsible for most of them, that ‘if the matter is to be gone into again, as it should be, I should recommend that all the dusters should be issued, and accounted for, by a man’.31 With such pressing concerns at the forefront of their London life, it is perhaps no wonder that Victoria and Albert sought somewhere to retreat to which was new, fresh, and not ruled by the myriad customs of the official royal Establishment. In 1844 Victoria wrote to Uncle Leopold, ‘Windsor is beautiful and comfortable, but it is a palace, and God knows how willingly I would always live with my beloved Albert and our children in the quiet and retirement of private life and not be always the constant object of observations, and of newspaper articles.’32 Life in the Isle of Wight and the Highlands beckoned, not only for the royal couple and their children, but also for the Household, and the Establishment, including the cooks.