The Spit Boys Arm Goes Round And Round, Round And Round…

Ok, as promised here are a couple of videos I took yesterday showing the multi armed spit in action. The top one has Ross in action roasting while explaining to a visitor…the bottom one, shot from below, shows the action a little more clearly I think.

 

 

Multi Spit!

So, a few days ago I posted that the plans for the Christmas cookery week at Hampton Court Palace would include the use of the reproduction multi armed spit that we have in store….and true to my word, we fired that beast up yesterday to do some roasting with.

We first came across the idea of a multi armed spit when looking through a copy of Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera in the Brotherton Library in Leeds over a decade ago when we first tackled the idea of the Elizabethan use of the Kitchens at Hampton Court…

Scappi's kitchen tools
Kitchen tools from the 1570 edition of the Opera by Bartolomeo Scappi

Those images leapt off the page and seemed like just the sort of thing that was ripe for reconstructing and testing experimentally but we had to ask ourselves what was the likelihood of a Papal cookbook having any influence at the court of Elizabeth the first? Another research trip a little later on really helped us out with this matter as we found an almost identical image in an English book from 1594,  The Jewell House of Art and Nature by Sir Hugh Plat…

The multi armed spit from The Jewell House of Art and Nature
The multi armed spit from The Jewell House of Art and Nature

This image illustrated Plat’s ‘secret’ no. 14, How to turn five spits at once with one hand… something that any self-respecting spit turner would find a god send, as did we! This showed that the idea that was illustrated in Scappi’s book had travelled outside of Italy and the Papal court, in fact Plat himself says that he borrowed the idea from there at the end of his text, and had come to England where Plat wrote and published. It may not have been common, in fact it might never have been made at all, but the point about experimental history is to test and construct or reconstruct objects, items and theories that exist in the historical record rather than the just archaeological one.

So What does Plat suggest is the way to enable this to happen?

How to turn five spits with one hand
How to turn five spits with one hand

Simply attach five spits together, like a mole spear, ensuring that there’s a handle at one end and that they are spread wide enough apart to allow the meat to be placed onto each respective spit. Add a metal cross to support the free ends of the four bars that do not form the axis of rotation and Bob’s your uncle as they say.

Unfortunately we were much younger then, and less diligent and so weren’t specific enough when it came to the instructions for reconstruction, so rather than have the spits arranged as Plat shows…attached to the central bar in one plane and then the outer two arms bent one way, the inner two, the other; we ended up with the four shorter spits arranged in a cross shape around the central one. It’s not a huge diversion from the original, but it is sufficient enough to annoy the hell out of me whenever I see it!

The empty multi armed spit showing the arrangement of the bars
The empty multi armed spit showing the arrangement of the bars

You’ll notice that we had to use some modern plastic trestles to support the spit whilst it was being loaded with meat; which is why we did it away from public view….yes, yes, I know this is public, but here I can explain the reasons and rationale to all of you, that’s just not possible with a couple of hundred visitors stood around you watching the action unfold…there’s also another reason for the trestles too. I keep calling the multi spit a beast and it truly is. Our normal spits weigh around 10Kg unloaded, this baby weighs in at just over 30Kg (about 66lb) before the meat is added!! Our meat of choice for testing this tool…chicken, simply because it’s the most cost-effective meat to use to fill the spits and test the operation; but in this case we added some beef to the centre spit in order to have all five in use rather than have a second beef laden spit running at the same time.

loading the multi spit
The beef goes on first…

The beef went on first onto the central spit, we’d split the joint into three pieces to try to get it to cook at the same rate as the chickens would otherwise it would mean a lot of mucking about trying to unload the chickens then put the spit back together again to finish cooking the beef.

loading the multi spit
…after the beef go the 12 chickens

Getting the chickens on was a bit of a faff compared to the beef  as the cavity and holes are much too big to hold the birds onto the relatively thin spit bars, so Robin had to run the bar through the body of the birds diagonally from just above the wishbone on one side of the carcass to the diagonally opposite side on the back of the bird.

 

loading the multi spit
…that’s nearly all the chickens

With all of the meat in place the supporting metal cross was added to lock all of the free ends together and secure the spit as one…

loading the multi spit
finally the metal cross piece to secure all of the spits together

With that part complete, the chickens needed to be secured in order to stop them from simply staying still whilst the metal rotated as if it was a miniature chicken Ferris wheel rotating around the beef. This was achieved by the deft use of long skewers pinning pairs of birds on adjoining spits rather like this…

skewers secured the chickens from spit to spit to stop them rotating independently of the spit
skewers secured the chickens from spit to spit to stop them rotating independently of the spit

Now fully loaded with 12 chickens and 1 beef knuckle joint, the weight of the spit had increased a little. The chickens weighed just about 17Kg (about 37lb) and the beef 6Kg (around 13 lb) so the whole shebang weighed in at around 53Kg (just under 117lb)…not exactly lightweight!

Roasting with the multi spit
Robin and Ross put the spit in front of the fire

Robin and Ross carried the spit through to the fire to the “ooh’s” and “ahh’s” of the assembled visitors and selected a rack to use for the roasting

 

A few quick turns in order to check that nothing was moving that shouldn’t have been and then the meat was in for the duration.

Ross shields his eyes from the heat whilst checking for unwanted movement
Ross shields his eyes from the heat whilst checking for unwanted movement

Now Plat says that this tool enables the use of less fuel than if you had multiple spits one above another upon the rack and if by this he simply meant that your fire doesn’t need to be as high and thus uses less wood then this is correct; the single multiple armed spit takes up much less vertical space before the fire than five similarly loaded spits would do. It also allows one person to do the work of three and removes any need to swap spits up and down the vertical face of the fire to ensure even cooking of all the meats…but it does present similar problems to using five spits in that it becomes virtually impossible to tend to the fire as the spits and meat block the way. So in this case, rather than try to build a small fire and maintain that at a constant level throughout the cooking time, the State Apartment Warders responsible for the fire built what can only be described as a monster of a pile of burning wood then simply left it and we used a fire that was constantly, but slowly cooling. It worked a  treat! There was no problem with the cooking or the fire over the two hours of roasting, yes it took a little longer then it normally might if we were simply roasting chickens on a single spit (we would expect that to take around an hour at most) but that is because the fire was cooling all the time; it did however have the benefit of less time and labour expended on dealing with the fire and the Warders only needing to keep a watchful eye on it as opposed to the constant manipulation that we ask of them when we usually roast.

 

Robin slips the meat off as easy as pie
Robin slips the meat off as easy as pie

When it came time for the meat to be removed from the spits, we decided to work in situ rather than try to carry the hot spit back out away from the public to a more convenient area. Ross held the handle end fast while Robin dealt with the business end so to speak. The metal cross was released, it’s held in place with a pin that passes through the central bar and stops it from sliding off of the end, and then it was pushed back out of the way. With the ends of the four outer spits floating freely, there was enough space between the spits and the rack to allow the chickens to be easily removed, and once the skewers retaining them were removed then they slid off in the blink of an eye into waiting bowls and trays. The beef on the central spit proved a little more tricky to deal with and though one piece slid off, the remaining two had to be cut off.

hmmm...roast chicken!
hmmm…roast chicken!

With the meat removed…to substantial applause I might add…all that was left was to wash up the spit and drip tray and store them ready for next time. So when is next time? Currently we’re planning on finishing the week with a bang and firing this up again on the last day…but this time adding more chickens (16 in total rather than 12) and possibly some more beef…we might even try beef on the outer arms rather than just the centre, but I haven’t run that idea past the guys yet…if you hear distant screams of Nooooooooo!!! then they weren’t up for that idea 😎

I took some video of the spit in action, but IT restrictions mean I can’t include it in this post….I’ll upload them as soon as possible and let you all have a look as seeing it in action makes it much easier to understand.

So what’s the upshot of this? What have we learned? Well the principle of having five spits attached to one another so that one person can turn them all is pretty sound. The meat cooks well and evenly through even though you might presume that it may not as it would be shielded from the heat of the fire by the other pieces of meat when it rotates away from it, and that the side facing away from the fire when the meat is at its closest to the heat is much further away when that side is turned to face the fire. I don’t think I could say with any certainty if it was indeed more fuel-efficient as without using carefully controlled firewood such as kiln dried timber, the amount of moisture in each piece will vary considerably meaning that two similar looking fires can generate vastly differing amounts of heat and burn for very different lengths of time…perhaps something to think about investigating in the future? What we can say is that there is a degree of labour and time-saving in that the work tending the fire is offset from the duration of the cooking to the time before the meat is placed on the rack. This time spent preparing and building a larger than normal fire appears to be much less than would be needed if the fire was constantly tended and refuelled. I suspect that this practice would need to be the norm if multiple spits as opposed to the single multi-armed spit were filling the rack in front of the fire as in both cases, actually being able to reach the fire to add fuel or manipulate the shape of the fire is extremely difficult. The fact that you do not need somebody dealing with the fire during the roasting time also means that they could be used elsewhere in the kitchen, perhaps looking after multiple fires simultaneously with less effort than if they were having to load fuel onto several fires through the roasting process or doing other tasks and this may help to explain why there are no staff listed within the surviving staffing lists of the kitchens of Henry VIII or Elizabeth I that appear to be responsible solely for the fires….again, food for thought and future investigation I suspect.

So, long story short, does the multi armed spit work well…

Roast chicken sandwich....can't beat it!
Roast chicken sandwich….can’t beat it!

 

Pewter Pots as Cooking Vessels…A Christmas Addendum

About a week ago I drifted into a conversation on Twitter about the use of pewter vessels for cooking in rather than serving in…the question being asked was, did anyone know of any medieval or early modern recipes that used pewter vessels as cooking pots. As it happened, I’d been scanning through recipes planning the Christmas week of cookery at Hampton Court so some pertinent recipes were fresh in my mind, such as How to make buttered Beere from The Good Huswives Handmaid for cookerie in her Kitchin 1597

recipe for buttered beere
Buttered Beere from The Good Huswives Handmaid for Cookerie in her Kitchin , 1597

as well as a smattering of early seventeenth century examples and a nice recipe from the eighteenth century telling you how to use a pewter plate in your cooking pot to turn stewed pears purple, but to be wary that you don’t get the plate too hot and melt it (when we’ve tried this in the past that’s one of the two outcomes we got from following the recipe, the other being stewed pears that weren’t purple and a hot plate in the cooking pot!)

Anyway, I was asked to visit the original discussion which had started the whole thing off here and long story short, as I was planning on having the ingredients for the buttered beere recipe in stock for the Christmas cooking week, I thought we might as well kill two birds with the one stone and changed the plans for buttered beere from “if we get time” to “make time to do this”…all I have to do is find a suitable pewter pot that we don’t mind sacrificing to the greater cause of experimental history!

So add that to the list of what’s on next week in the Kitchens at Hampton Court Palace and keep an eye out for photos of melted pots and spilled beer on Twitter!

 

An Elizabethan Extravaganza Of Sorts

Those of you who have been paying attention can’t help but have noticed that Hampton Court Palace has been celebrating its 500th birthday this year. We’ve had interpretation all through the Palace looking at many of the different slices of history that Hampton Court has been host to and we’re finishing off the year with the reign of Elizabeth 1st.

Upstairs in the State Apartments you’ll be able to join some of Elizabeth’s courtiers as they celebrate Christmas at the end of the sixteenth century with gift giving, dancing and music; whilst down in the Kitchens we’ll be turning our hands to banqueting stuff as well as the staple of roasted meats. We’ll have beef roasting each day of the 8 day event (27th December to 3rd January inclusive) where you can come and experience the life and work of one of Elizabeth’s kitchen galapines, turning the spit for yourself and seeing just how difficult or easy, not to mention hot, the job would have been. Twice in the course of the week we’ll be firing up our multiple armed spit to roast some chickens…

multi-armed spit being used to roast chickens
Need to roast a *lot* of chickens but only have limited time and one fire? Use a multi-armed spit and get the job done in one fell swoop! Photo by Robert Hoare

It’s a reconstruction based on images found within Opera di M. Bartolomeo Scappi, Cuoco Secreto Di Papa Pio V, seen here in the 1570 edition which you can find online HERE

Scappi's kitchen tools
Kitchen tools from the 1570 edition of the Opera by Bartolomeo Scappi

Although Scappi was the private cook to the Pope, his ideas and writing did travel and we find reference to the multiple armed spits in The Jewel House of Art and Nature by Sir Hugh Plat from 1594; a copy of a later edition can be found online HERE for those interested. In Plats work he refers to the spit as a method for “How to turn five spits at once with one hand, whereby also much fire is saved” and explains that “This secret I have borrowed out of Pope Pius the fifth, his Kitchin”…and we in turn “borrowed” it too in order to have one reconstructed to try out. It’s a bit of a beast and needs a lot of meat to fill it, making chickens the most cost-effective means of demonstrating it (prompting all kinds of discussion about our modern obsession with cheap meat, most specifically cheap chicken and all that brings with it!)…I’m still not sure which days we’ll have the multi-spit on the go, it’s been in store unused for over 10 years (which is how long it’s been since we looked at the kitchens in the reign of Elizabeth I) and needs a damn good clean before we can use it so it’ll be at least the 2nd or 3rd day of the week before it sees action, and we’ll fire it up over the last weekend as well, presuming that the second delivery provides all the chickens we need to use it with. If you want to see it in the flesh, keep up with my Twitter feed (@Tudorcook) and I’ll let you know then when it’ll be in operation but fret not if you miss it or can’t get to the Kitchens to see it in person, I’ll pop images up on Twitter and possibly here after the fact so you can see what we did.

So roasting aside, what else is planned? Well, I said banqueting stuff and so we’ll be trying to make a large table decoration or subteltie out of sugar over the course of the 8 days. It’s planned to take the form of a Tudor knot garden with sugar “hedges” and grass and gravel paths and in-fill made of comfits and other sugar sweets as well as hopefully some jam tarts and pies, and possibly some sugar beasts for a final flourish; though I’m contractually obliged to point out that I’m promising nothing and this could all be pie in the sky as the main task is to talk and interpret for the visitors so if they’re interested and ask lots of questions the result is a little less gets finished. Again, keep an eye on Twitter for progress reports and such like.

Initial planning for the design was started over the last working weekend at the beginning of December when Jorge took designs and inspiration from The Gardeners Labyrinth by Thomas Hill, 1577 and roughed out a basic design on paper

roughing out the plan on to paper
roughing out the plan on to paper
Jorge uses designs from The Gardeners Labyrinth to plan the sugar garden
Jorge uses designs from The Gardeners Labyrinth to plan the sugar garden
Jorge starts roughig out the design for the sugar garden using photocopies and sketches
Jorge starts roughing out the design for the sugar garden using photocopies and sketches

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

apparently this is waht Jorge means by "rough out a design"
apparently this is waht Jorge means by “rough out a design”

To be honest, I’ve not really got much idea what the final design is going to look like as I just put the idea of the garden to Jorge and the guys and left them to it. They seem happy enough with what they’re working on so I’m confident it’ll all come good in the end but as with so much of what we’re doing at the moment, only time will tell!

So that’s the plans for the next 8 days, or at least the bits the visitors will get to see, we’ll arrive at work and start setting up on Boxing Day and then crack on from the 27th. On top of all of that we’ve the audit of the stores to finish with contents of the store room shelves to double-check and then labels for them to create, planning for the February cooking weekend and if that wasn’t enough there’s some behind the scenes training for one of our apprentices, with 2 of the others doing some hands on learning in front of the public…no pressure then!

A Holding Action

Consider this a holding action for now….still deciding what to do regarding starting blogging again or not.

For now, I’ve added a link to the old blog site in the sidebar…why not just import it all to here? Reasons, as I  am lead to believe the youth of today say; two of them actually, firstly I think I want to keep the two seperate and not have all the old stuff here (new broom and all that) and secondly, there was a technical issue in exporting the old data and importing it here and I couldn’t be bothered to solve that issue, so if you want to see the drivel I wrote before, then follow that link