Twenty five years is a long old time to be doing something, even when you love it as much as we all do working in the kitchens at Hampton Court Palace.
Since we started cooking in the Tudor kitchens way back at the start of the 1990’s, an awful lot has changed. Staff have come and gone, and indeed gone on to greater things like an MBE (we’d like to think because of what was learned with us), and we’ve dallied with all sorts of periods of historical interpretation from mediaeval and Tudor, through Stuarts and Georgians, right up to the 1940’s and beyond. Through all that time, the one constant has been the use of surviving recipes to drive what we have done.
Propre New Booke of Cokery, 1545
Recipes have been the foundation of the interpretation work, driving the search for equipment, ingredients and techniques…but the problem is there’s absolutely no evidence for the sort of things we’ve been doing ever taking place in the space that we have to work within and no evidence that any of the surviving recipes we have to work from were ever cooked at Hampton Court!
Last year we took some small steps to help address this by instigating the Daily Roasting within the Kitchens as part of the 500th anniversary celebrations for Hampton Court Palace. The main rooms we have to work in were designed for roasting meat in, that’s what the six large fireplaces around the walls were for, so having roasting on display for our visitors to see and interact with, truly was history where it happened, one of the core principles for interpretation within Historic Royal Palaces. This period of 151 consecutive days of roasting was an immense success…in short, everyone loved it from staff to visitors; it ticked so many boxes that define what a successful interpretation project is that we’d be stupid to leave it as a one-off thing.
With this in mind we’re bringing it back for the upcoming 2016 but with one subtle tweak!
From March 25th through to October 21st we will be presenting Encounters in the Tudor Kitchens where the Tudor kitchens of Henry VIII at Hampton Court Palace will be brought to life with the sights, sounds and smells of daily roasting. The Historic Kitchens Team and the State Apartment Warders within the kitchens, will be working together to give our visitors a sense of the function and history of the surviving roasting kitchen by demonstrating history where it happened and roasting a knuckle of beef each day.
During this time we’ll be lighting the Great Fire a little later than usual to give visitors the chance to see all the steps that go into the process of roasting meat before an open fire, we’ll then spend the rest of the day roasting beef and talking about all things associated with the gargantuan task of catering for Henry VIII’s Court. 
As well as roasting beef, we’ll be using the opportunity that over 200 consecutive days of cooking will give us to collect data on the temperature of the fire, the meat as it cooks, and the metal spit; as well as looking at speeds and direction of rotation to see how much of an impact, if any, this may have on roasting. Add to that some possible investigation of the temperatures within the chimney and we have a busy time ahead of us trying to add to our knowledge of this fundamental process within the food production areas of Henry VIII’s Palace.
All of this does come at a small price though. In order to expand the daily offer through into October and to spread the work through the whole Historic Kitchens Team, rather than a small subset, we will not be holding our regular monthly cooking weekends this year, with that work being subsumed by the daily Kitchen Encounters. We will though be bulking out the work on a couple of selected weekends, to support the Summer Palace event in mid July and the August Bank Holiday event at the end of that month. On these weekends we’ll branch out to cover more tasks than just the roasting and actually be able to treat these special events as just that, special and not part of the regular monthly programme, and the same holds true for the Christmas cookery as part of the Tudor Revelries between Christmas and New Year.
I’d like to reassure our regular visitors that this isn’t the end of the cookery as you know it, nor is it simply change for the sake of change; this is a decision that we thought long and hard over and a conclusion that was reached with the aim of providing the best experience for visitors that we can produce. Our aim is to knuckle down and really focus our work on one single theme rather than spread our effort thin on looking at everything at once. From here we’ll have created a solid foundation from which to expand back out from…if we know how meat was roasted we can then move on to look in detail at how it was served, or perhaps how it may have been baked and these thoughts and questions will then give us a new focus to work upon, eventually bringing us back to where we were but much better than before and better than we could have been if we hadn’t taken this opportunity for change
So that’s that then! Please feel free to comment and let me know what you think…love the idea? Loathe it? Can’t wait to experience it? Let me know either way, feedback is always appreciated.