Category: experimental history

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??

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?

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.

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

 

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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:

and a pastry, jam and custard one:

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  😉

 

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

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

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

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.

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.

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,

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

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.

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…

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…

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?

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!

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.

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.

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.

 

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…

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…

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!

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.

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.

 

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.

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…