Buttered Beere…Pewter Pot…Just Add Heat!

So I said we would try to incorporate the work on the buttered beere recipe into the Christmas work plan…for those that missed it, it’s this recipe for 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

…and as luck would have it, Marc H turned up for work with somewhat of a desire to give it a go, not only to see if the pewter would melt, but to see what it would taste like. We’ve tried this recipe out before at work, but that was over a decade ago and if memory serves, it was thrown together at the end of a day and there wasn’t much attention paid to trying to follow the recipe in any real way. Now this latter part might seem a little confusing given my comments on the knot garden post where I said that for the comfit making the recipe wasn’t followed explicitly, but merely used as a guide, well you’ll need to get used to that I’m afraid. It’s not just changing the rules as and when to suit, but is all about what is being looked at. In most cases, the recipes aren’t that important, they’re no more a record of what people cooked and ate in the past than my copy of More Rhodes Around Britain by Gary Rhodes is for Britain in the mid 1990’s. (Hey! Don’t judge me, it was a Christmas present from my mum…probably) They are though a record of what some people knew about in terms of ingredients and techniques, as well as foods that the intended audience didn’t know how to cook, as after all, that’s what we use written recipes for, we don’t use written recipes for things we can cook do we? There is a time though when investigating an actual recipe is what is being done and in that case, as with this recipe for buttered beere, following the text is important.

So first decision which beer to use? We only had two to choose from, a mild and an IPA so we opted for the mild to avoid the hoppy bitterness of the IPA, and only having one 500 ml bottle to play with made things a little easier as that’s pretty close to a pre-imperial pint measure, or close enough for us at least. With only one pint to play with, Marc was left with the sort of maths that boils his brains…scale the recipe down to a third of the measures and convert them to metric so that the ingredients could be measured with the scales we have!

Marc took the yolk out of the sack...he was showing off!
Marc took the yolk out of the sack…he was showing off!

So to one pint of beer, add one and two thirds of egg yolks…making sure to account for the variation in egg size that occurs with chicken improvement…then mix together well by passing the whole lot through a sieve several times to strain them together.

Marc pours the beer and egg yolks back and forth through a sieve
Marc pours the beer and egg yolks back and forth through a sieve

You’ll notice that he chose to use a fairly small, shallow pewter bowl for this recipe…well actually that’s a bit of a lie, I chose the bowl and told him to use it. Why a bowl and not any of the other vessels we have? Firstly, we have a fair number of these bowls and could, at a pinch, stand losing one if everything went wrong and the bowl melted. Secondly, all the other pewter vessels (which aren’t plates or bowls) we have access to have decorative foot rings to make them look attractive and help them stand up on the table. This would be a problem if subjecting them to heat from below as it’s the heat sink properties of the liquid that prevent the pewter from melting, just like if you try boiling water in a paper cup

with the pewter though, the foot ring wouldn’t be able to benefit from this heat sink effect and it will start to melt which can lead to holes forming in the vessel if the foot melts all the way up to the body of the vessel (types the voice of experience…though it was a long time ago, before we recorded that sort of cool thing happening). Ideally some sort of pan designed for the purpose would be chosen, but

The bowl sat above the heat on the first trivet
The bowl sat above the heat on the first trivet

that begs the question, did such a thing exist or, if this recipe was followed to the letter, would any pewter vessel that was to hand be used? Now we had planned to do some follow up work just boiling water in the pewter and seeing if the proximity to the heat would cause the bowl to melt before the water began to heat up and maybe look at testing a vessel with a foot, but unfortunately a pastry knot garden and a spit with 34Kg of meat on it rather got in the way…perhaps in the future. For the purposes of this recipe though, we presumed that applying the heat gradually

You can see the bowl is much closer to the heat source
You can see the bowl is much closer to the heat source

would be the best option, so a fairly high trivet was placed over a fairly low bronze chafing dish full of burning charcoal. This set up turned out to be very poor with the temperature increasing by only 0.8° in ten minutes, and with time being a factor, the trivet was swapped for a lower one.  Although this improved things, with the temperature rising by nearly two degrees in the next ten minutes, the chafer then began to give us grief.

This bronze chafer is supposed to be a copy of the one found with the apothecaries equipment on board Henry VIII’s warship Mary Rose, and would correspond to a type ‘A’ in the descriptions given in Lewis, J. M. (1973) ‘Some types of metal chafing-dish’, The Antiquaries Journal, 53(01), pp. 59–70. doi: 10.1017/s0003581500021855. The problem with this reproduction is that it has never been finished properly and the air

This set up was much, much better
This set up was much, much better

holes in it are tapered in section rather than being parallel through the wall of the vessel and this restricts the airflow. It also requires regular tending and manipulation to ensure that the charcoal burns well and this was unfortunately just not possible with all of the questioning visitors that were in the kitchens that day. With all that in mind, Marc opted to swap the chafer out for one of the larger, tubular iron ones based on images found in Scappi’s Opera, and to revert to the original taller trivet. The increase in heat from this larger chafer saw the liquid rise in temperature by nearly 2.5° in five minutes and it was at this point that the spices and sugar were added.

Calculating how much of these ingredients was a bit of a headache. The recipe calls for half a pound of sugar, one pennyworth of nutmeg, one of cloves and half a pennyworth of ginger, all of these having been beaten.

"brewe them together"
“brewe them together”

Not having any tables of prices and costs to hand, Marc opted for using a pennyworth in weight or 1/240th of a pound as the measurement of the nutmeg and clove and half of that for the ginger. All of that calculated out as: 75 grams of sugar, 0.5 grams of nutmeg and clove and 0.25 grams of ginger (all rounded to work with the scales we had to work with). In the ten minutes it took to calculate those figures, the liquid had risen to 40.5° celsius and it was after adding them that Marc followed the instruction to “take another pewter pot and brewe them together”, which he did several times before returning it to the heat.

Giving the charcoal some air after a re-fuel of the chafer in an attempt to raise the temperature of the liquid
Giving the charcoal some air after a re-fuel of the chafer in an attempt to raise the temperature of the liquid

It then took another 50 minutes for the temperature of the spiced beer mix to reach 70°, with the underside of the bowl fluctuating in temperature from 109° to 133° and the charcoal, around 12 cm below, from 454° to 680° c with this latter temperature only being attained with some vigorous bellows action to increase the air flow to the recently topped up charcoal! As the end of the day was rapidly approaching it became very clear that the liquid wouldn’t reach boiling point before we had to finish up, so Marc chose to add the butter at this point,  but how much is a “dish” of butter? The only reference we have found so far to the quantity a ‘dish’ may have been is in Zupko, R. E. E. (2001) A dictionary of weights and measures for the British Isles: The middle ages to the twentieth century. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. on p110 where it says “the dish was also a wt of 24oz for butter (c1800) in Cheshire”…not a lot to go on, but better than a random guess based on the size of any dish we happened to have to hand. So 226 grams of butter was added to the mix, dissolving in less than a minute.

The final liquid, at just under 70° was “brewed” a final time before being poured into a drinking vessel for the acid taste testing.

Bottoms up!
Bottoms up!

As he’d made it, Marc was the gallant guinea pig first to try it, and on watching him take the first swallow his face painted quite a picture…

If a picture paints a thousand words...this look speaks volumes!
If a picture paints a thousand words…this look speaks volumes!

After a moment of silence accompanying the quizzical look, the verdict…”hmm, not bad!” Turns out he was right, not bad at all; very, very smooth and velvety with a sort of butterscotch taste that when you put your mind to it actually tasted of liquid hot cross buns. Very tasty in small quantities, very spiced but not too spicy, all in all highly recommended and well worth the effort, just a shame we couldn’t get it to the boil.

As it happened, Marc gave it another go on the last day with a pint of the IPA to see if the hoppy nature of that bitter would impact on the flavour…it didn’t! What did happen though was that Robin pinched the chafer when Marc wasn’t looking, removing the beer from the heat so he could cook his custard for the pastry knot garden. By the time he’d given the burner back to Marc to finish off the beer, the time was again against him and there was no chance of getting to the magical boiling point that time either…oh well, never mind.

So would the pot have melted? Very probably not, though clearly without actually trying this is only supposition; however with the melting point of the pewter around 100° higher than the maximum temperature that the underside of the pot ever attained, I would be very surprised to see the bowl melt before the liquid boiled. If we can, I’d like to try this again as I said earlier, just boiling water to test the principle, but whether that will happen in the near future I couldn’t say. I vaguely remember that I might have promised graphs with this post when I originally mentioned it on Twitter so I’ll stick one below that shows the temperatures of the liquid, underside of the bowl and the charcoal fire throughout the cooking; I’ll also stick another gallery up with all the images I took for this, poor though they may be. I’ll finish with a couple of caveats.  I have not found out the composition of the alloy that the bowl is made from and in an ideal world I would be able to compare it to surviving sixteenth century pewter. To be honest I can’t see that comparison happening with what is for us, a fairly rough and ready ‘throw away’ little side project but if anyone fancies taking that on then just let me know. Clearly, the ingredients we used are modern and bear little resemblance to their historic counterparts but this is always going to be a problem with reconstructing recipes from history, you simply cannot get ingredients that are the same as they were in the past; in short, you can’t recreate the taste of the past, only our modern pastiche of it!

Buttered Beere Cooking Temperatures. At 2.25 more charcoal was added to the chafer. At 2,55 constant application of the bellows began.
Buttered Beere Cooking Temperatures. At 2.25 more charcoal was added to the chafer. At 2,55 constant application of the bellows began.

I Never Promised You A Knot Garden….Oh Wait, I Did!

Some of you might remember that for the 2014 Christmas cookery event at Hampton Court we made some cokentryces over the course of the week. For those that missed it, have a look here to see them in all their glory, and to see why and how we did what we did. Well in the lead up to the 2015 event, pretty much the only instruction I was given was to organise something “just like that, but Elizabethan”…so not a whole lot to go on really. Whatever it was to be, it needed to be sufficiently large scale to occupy a large percentage of the team that would be working on any given day as well as being interesting and visual for visitors. It was a given that we would have roasting at the center of the work being done, and a couple of other tasks were chosen because of the available team members, but what was to be the cokentryce of 2015??

A sugar model of Hampton Court Palace approx 3ft x 2ft, made for the 1999/2000 millenium celebrations Photo courtesy Ian Franklin
A sugar model of Hampton Court Palace approx 3ft x 2ft, made for the 1999/2000 millennium celebrations
Photo courtesy Ian Franklin

Well, after a lot of thought and discussion which discounted the suggestion of a series of Christmas boars heads kindly suggested by Marc H, the notion of a sugar subteltie was settled on…but what form would it take?

A sugar version of the image from the painting of The Embarkation of King Henry VIII at Dover, made in 2001 Photo courtesy Ian Franklin
A sugar version of the image from the painting of The Embarkation of King Henry VIII at Dover, made in 2001
Photo courtesy Ian Franklin

We’d already made some pretty impressive and interesting stuff including sugar versions of Hampton Court Palace and the Embarkation from Dover painting in the Royal Collection (and clearly when I say ‘we’, I actually mean Adrian, David, Lawrence and Alex, with minimal input from the rest of us) and I was well aware that these large scale sugar builds were responsible for a LOT of arguments and animosity amongst the team; so what would I get them to make that wouldn’t cause ructions and fitted the criteria for the event? The answer, a sugar knot garden in the Elizabethan style; fairly large scale but, and this was the most important part, modular in make up so that it didn’t matter if the whole thing wasn’t completed as it would show the construction process…the making was to be more important than the finished item.

Knot borders at Penshurst Place in Kent
Knot borders at Penshurst Place in Kent

Initial planning work took place early in December with what could be described as a rough and ready round table session in which photos of knot gardens, paintings, documents and scribbles were thrown about until a plan began to coalesce

 

The Gardeners Labyrinth by Thomas Hill, 1577
The Gardeners Labyrinth by Thomas Hill, 1577

Central to all of this was the book The Gardeners Labyrinth by Thomas Hill, 1577 which details plans and methods for laying out a gentleman’s garden in the latter half of the sixteenth century and includes images of suggested knot designs for planting. I’d allocated the task of planning and executing the garden to Jorge and Adrian, and with Adrian not available for the initial meetings, the bulk of the work fell to Jorge to arrange, which he did with gusto!

The suggested knot designs that caught Jorge’s eye the most were the ones found on pages 81 and 84 (below) and he quickly settled on the left most pair from page 84 (beolw right) as being the most suitable to use.

The plan was to transfer the patterns onto a sheet of paper and then to build the garden in sugar plate and comfits directly on top of this. The design was to be repetetive on the paper so that each knot could show progress towards a finished one, but that the whole could easily be imagined as a complete design in progress…if that makes sense; so of the four knots on the page, one would be complete and the other three would be in various states of competion showing the trail of work…or that was the plan at least!

We knew that the design would need an amount of comfits to fill all of the spaces and represent the plants and paths between the knotwork hedges, and that these would need to be in a selection of colours. There would also be a need for sugar plate to be made to construct the ‘hedges’ from and that would clearly need to be green in colour,but how that colour would be applied was still a discussion point when we arrived to set up the kitchens on Boxing Day 2015.

This is not the knot garden I was thinking of!

Leaving the guys to sort out the jobs that needed doing and who was going to do them resulted in Robin starting the comfit making off with Zak observing and helping (as much as Robin would let him) and Adrian and Jorge getting a start on making some sugar plate and some green colouring for it. For those of you that don’t know what comfits are, they’re seeds or particulates covered in multiple layers of sugar syrup, each layer being dried off before the next is applied. If you think of ‘hundred’s and thousands’ for decorating cakes or gobstoppers then you’re on the right lines…the inestimable Ivan Day has a page that describes their manufacture and it’s a good place to start if you’re interested. For a closer period description, you’d need to look out for Delights for Ladies by Sir Hugh Plat  from the turn of the seventeenth century, and whilst not readily available online, transcriptions of the pertinent section are a Google search away! (other search engines are available as they say).

Now I know that if I don’t cover it, I’ll get questions on it, so I’ll just point out that when making the comfits, as with pretty much everything that we do in the kitchens, the guys used the Plat instructions as a guide, rather than a hard and fast series of rules to follow. All measurements and quantities for the syrups they used were done by eye and not to specific measures as that’s how a cook works. If the syrup was too thin and not building up quickly enough then it was thickened with more sugar or by re-boiling, if too thick then water was applied to thin the solution out. The same held true with the colours; all were made up by eye in batches considered large enough to get the current task finished…something I suspect was a major factor in the change of tack that occurred with the hedge making as we’ll see in a moment or two!

Zak fires up the chafer ready for a day of comfit making. photo courtesy E. Griffith-Ward
Zak fires up the chafer ready for a day of comfit making.
Photo courtesy E. Griffith-Ward

Robin set up the balancing pan and frame for the comfits over on the charcoal stove as that enabled the chafer for the heat source to sit within the stove opening itself at exactly the right height to provide a gentle and controllable heat. Over a drink (or possibly two) on Boxing Day we chatted about what actual comfits were going to be made, and Robin had become slightly obsessed with comfiting grains of paradise so that’s what he started with. A largish spoonful of seeds went into the pan to warm through while a gum arabic solution was made for the first couple of coats and when these were dry, the sugar syrup coating could begin.

Robin adds more syrup to a batch of grains of paradise comfits
Robin adds more syrup to a batch of grains of paradise comfits

After ten or so coats, this batch was taken out of the pan and put into a paper packet then left in the airing cupboard in our office to thoroughly dry as it was the warmest place to hand. I think the second batch he started were fennel seeds, or possibly caraway…to be honest, I wasn’t paying that much attention I’m afraid, but whatever they were, it gave Zak a chance to get his hands into the pan and have a go.

While Robin and Zak were getting stuck in to the comfits, Adrian and Jorge were making very rapid progress with the sugar garden design itself. Jorge had extracted some green colour from a bunch of parsley by pounding it in a large mortar and washing the resultant paste with a little water, this was then strained through a cloth to remove the solid matter and the green liquid used along with some egg white and rose water to make sugar plate, roughly following the instructions in The Second Part of the Good Huswifes Jewell by Thomas Dawson.

That's still quite a way to go!
That’s still quite a way to go!
Adrian arranges more 'hedging'
Adrian arranges more ‘hedging’

Adrian then took this paste and fashioned the first ‘hedges’ on top of the paper plan and all looked remarkably impressive. Over the next couple of days, both comfits and hedging progressed apace. When Robin had a day off, Jorge and Zak could take the reigns of the comfit production and try making some cinnamon ragged comfits.

Their first attempts, whilst being pretty good and very tasty, were fairly tiny in actual size. A second go with slightly larger strips of bark proved to be less succesful but I think that’s more likely due to this being their second ever attempt at comfit making than anything else. Over the rest of the week, all three of them worked on comfits, adding coloured coatings to various batches leading to some quite impressive results.

The design progresses...
The design progresses…

While progress on the comfits was good, that of the sugar hedging was not quite as expected. Initial progress had been swift, and as far as I was concerned, looked pretty damn good, however Jorge and Adrian clearly didn’t see it that way as they decided to explore a different method of making the sugar green…painting it with the parsley colour. I believe the main reason was to try to make a more ‘realistic’ looking hedge rather than the solid green plasticine looking

The second sugar knot..painted with parsley juice colour rather than dyed
The second sugar knot..painted with parsley juice colour rather than dyed

product that using the colour within the paste gave them. It also helped with speed too as the sugar plate wasn’t reliant on the green colour being ready at the same time, it could be applied any time after the sugar was shaped; and this was convenient as they’d found that drying the liquid before the fire slightly to drive off some of the water but not alter the colour with the excessive heat of boiling, helped to produce a darker green.At the same time as making the knots, there were also small

The extent of the sugar garden as originally conceived.
The extent of the sugar garden as originally conceived.

medallion roundels being made as these allowed visitors to try their hand at the sugar work, and also some barley twist poles that might end up with King’s beasts atop them as can be seen in the Chapel Court garden at Hampton Court and in the background of the painting of the Family of Henry VIII in the Royal Collection. Then some time around mid-week things took a turn, I don’t know why as I was busy doing other work behind the scenes and by the time I noticed what was happening it was already done…not that I would have changed things, just asked why they did what they did so I could tell you. So what did they do? Well all along the plan was to use pastry jam tarts to add to the garden design in some way, but now

The paste sections were slab built and 'glued' together with an egg wash
The paste sections were slab built and ‘glued’ together with an egg wash

Adrian and Robin were working on an entire jam tart knot design…I thought to add to the two already done, but apparently not. Now there was to be the painted sugar knot and the pastry one, displayed not on or part of the original paper plan but separately on pewter plates; not that it mattered as the overall idea was for people to see the production and get a sense of the work that making a subteltie involved…but it is a shame it didn’t come to pass as originally planned.

Baking the cases was always going to be slightly tricky. We only have a modern gas oven to use rather than a period wood fired one, so blind baking is always a bit of a fiddle as it’s very difficult simulating working in the mouth of the oven. The best Robin has managed in the past is to fire

The pastry knot garden pieces ready for blind baking. Here Robin used some split peas to support the walls in the oven. Photo courtesy E. Griffith-Ward
The pastry knot garden pieces ready for blind baking. Here Robin used some split peas to support the walls in the oven.
Photo courtesy E. Griffith-Ward

the oven up to full power then when the past goes inside, sit by the oven and check through the door every 30 seconds or so and if he notices the cases deforming, to open the door and man handle the paste back into shape. This works fine with a single tart case, but wasn’t going to be easy or efficient with the number that Adrian had made for the knot design. The solution, a simple and obvious one, but one that’s not occurred to any of us before as we’ve never had low enough cases for it to work, or enough peas…dried split peas covering the whole thing. Once

After the blind baking, the cases were filled with jam. Photo courtesy E. Griffith-Ward
After the blind baking, the cases were filled with jam.
Photo courtesy E. Griffith-Ward

the whole lot had been baked for a few minutes, the peas could be dispensed with, the cases filled with differing coloured jams and the walls decorated with the green colouring before the whole lot was put back in the oven to finish cooking. I had thought that this was where they were going to leave things, but I should know by now not to underestimate Adrian and Robin and their desire

The first phase of the pastry knot completed
The first phase of the pastry knot completed

for ‘perfection’ and so the last day of the cookery saw a fairly mad dash to add a border of custard tarts to the knot design which unfortunately had a distinct impact on another recipe that was being worked on, but I’ll write about when I’ve done with this topic. For now, it’s safe to say that Adrian pulled out all the

The second phase of the pastry knot takes shape
The second phase of the pastry knot takes shape

stops to make and bake the tart cases while Robin made the custard to fill them.

So at close of play on the eighth day what did we have?

We had an amount of comfits of all flavours and colours…the grains of paradise were simply spectacular, innocuous at first and then BLAM, a whole mouth and throat full of spice and flavour, highly recommended if you’re having a go at comfiting. We also had two subtelties to display, one sugar knot design infilled with comfits:

The second sugar knot
The second sugar knot

and a pastry, jam and custard one:

Another view of the finished pastry knot
Another view of the finished pastry knot

So that was the knot garden subteltie from Christmas 2015. I’ve added all of the pictures that cover the subject to a gallery that you will see a link for in the sidebar (when I add that part…those of you working faster than I can add features!) Most are sub-par due to lack of light and duff camera on my part, but they should give you the idea of the way things progressed.

Coming next….cooking in pewter and buttered beer….just give me a while to type it  😉

 

Multi Spit…..Redux

I really should have learned after 24 years that there’s almost a snowball’s chance in hell of my camera taking useable images in the kitchens at Hampton Court over the Christmas event….just not enough light. Still, while I try to sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of acceptable images for you all to see and to illustrate a couple of posts I have planned, have a short update on the use of the multi armed spit, for as I hoped, we managed to get it into action on the last day of the recent Christmas cooking week.

In a slight change of plan from the previous outing…and because we had sufficient spare beef due to some logistical juggling…we were able to

Two 6Kg beef knuckles cut into six pieces awaiting larding with some belly pork for added flavour
Two 6Kg beef knuckles cut into six pieces awaiting larding with some belly pork for added flavour

load the arms up so that there was beef on the outer spits for this second go, rather than just in the centre bar as before.

When we originally talked through the plans for this event, I’d allocated the roasting to Ross to arrange and he’d expressed a desire to try larding some of the beef as he’d never tried that before. I’d ordered some belly pork for this purpose but we’d simply not got around to using any of it earlier in the

Ross lards the beef with belly pork while Dave looks on
Ross lards the beef with belly pork while Dave looks on

week because it had slipped all of our minds that this was what we had planned. It was only when we noticed the pork at the back of the fridge that we remembered it, so Ross decided that he might as well give it a go with this last opportunity of roasting until the February cooking weekend.

So, cutting the pork into strips and with the aid of a rudimentary larding needle, he set about passing it

Some of the larded beef ready for roasting
Some of the larded beef ready for roasting

through the beef as best he could. Once the beef was larded it was time to put it, and the 16 chickens we had this time, onto the spit, however unlike the first time during the week that we used the multi spit, this time it was heaving down with rain meaning that the spit would have to be prepared in the kitchen and not outside in the courtyard. Using the courtyard meant that we could use the modern plastic trestles that we usually use to hold the drip tray and spits when cleaning, to support the 30Kg multi armed spit whilst loading it with meat.

Ross arranges two trestles ready to support the multi armed spit
Ross arranges two trestles ready to support the multi armed spit

This was not an option and whilst we thought of ways to overcome the problem,  Dave’s quick thinking came up with  a solution as he dismantled one of the tables from another room to use the oak trestles for the job! Ross arranged the trestles where it would be most convenient to work and with the help of Tom to steady the metal work and Robert to hold extraneous spit bars out of the way, he set to the job of loading the meat onto the spit.

Ross puts the larded beef onto two of the outer arms of the multi spit
Ross puts the larded beef onto two of the outer arms of the multi spit
Ross puts chickens on the other arms while Robert holds the beef out of the way
Ross puts chickens on the other arms while Robert holds the beef out of the way
Yes....that IS a lot of meat!
Yes….that IS a lot of meat!

Whilst they finished the job of loading the meat onto the metalwork, I was busy doing some quick calculations and worked out that the whole affair,

With the weight of the spit included, that's around 64Kg of meat and metal in motion!
With the weight of the spit included, that’s around   64Kg of meat and metal in motion!

both meat and metal now weighed in at around 64Kg (around 141 lb)! As before, this was placed in front of a rather sizeable fire built by Paul and Ian from the State Apartment Warding team, and once again the meat was roasted using an ever cooling fire as there simply was no easy way to stoke the fire with fuel once the spit was in place. This time, Ross was a little concerned that the chickens at either end of the spit weren’t cooking too well and left the whole lot in front of the fire for a little longer in order to ensure everything was cooked through. After two and a half hours, it was time to remove the meat and Ross essentially

Dave strikes a heroic pose to help Ross remove the meat from the multi armed spit!
Dave strikes a heroic pose to help Ross remove the meat from the multi armed spit!

copied what Robin had done before, removing joints with the aid of a bowl to catch them and then transferring each piece to a waiting tray…all the while assisted by Dave and his heroic pose and Tom holding the spit still.

Rumour had clearly gotten round amongst the staff on duty that day that we had planned to finish the week with a bang and a lot of meat on the spit as we had numerous colleagues appear towards the close of the day….on the “off-chance there might be some spare meat” they all said with a hopeful air  🙄 …still it was good that it all went to a good home. That which wasn’t removed by our friends and colleagues has gone into the freezer to be used in pies and stews at a later date, the only waste being what had fallen out of the meat into the drip tray.

I have to say that Sir Hugh Plat’s description….how to turn five spits at once with only one hand…is dead on the money. With the meat on the spit the balance of the whole apparatus was superb, making it childs play to turn the spit around. The only problem with it is the manhandling of the weight, especially when compared to a single spit bar; but I think that if one had to roast five spits worth of meat and you had the choice between five individual spits, possibly needing three people to turn them, versus one of these…I’d plump for one of these I think.