(upbeat orchestral music)
Hello. My name is Kathy Hipperson.
And I'm Annie Gray.
And we are here today for you,
the English Heritage Members,
to look at some food from the past.
We wanted to show you how to put on
an English Heritage-inspired street party
to celebrate the jubilee.
And so we have looked back
to the five longest reining monarchs.
And what we've done is we've picked our favorite foods.
I think it's fair to say. From their era.
So we have modernized them a bit.
You will be able to cook them in your ovens at home.
We didn't think that you necessarily
have a brick beehive oven the size of a bus,
or want to go out and shoot larks
even if that was actually legal.
What we've done, I suppose,
is create recipes a little bit like the ones
from "The Victorian Way,"
the Victorian cookbook about Mrs. Crocombe.
Yes. So they are inspired by the past.
They are very much a taste of the past,
but you can cook them with your average home setup.
So shall we get started? Mhm.
Our monarchs are
Ta! Queen Elizabeth II.
And she ruled for, or has ruled,
is ruling for just over 70 years.
Next up we have Queen Victoria.
63 and 2/3 of a year.
Then we have George III.
Just over 59 years.
And now James I of England,
but VI of Scotland. So maybe it's a fudge,
but our ruling is final.
And because he began to rule at such a young age,
he ruled for nearly 58 years.
He was only one when he came to the throne.
Finally, ta da, Henry III.
Another young monarch,
he was nine when he became king
and he ruled for 56 years and 19 days.
Oh, we're gonna start with him I think, aren't we?
Mm, yes.
Yes. We're going to go from the oldest to the newest.
So you can see food really changing
as we work our way through what? 800 years.
I know.
Sounds daunting, doesn't it?
So let's start with Henry III known for his piety,
for castle building and something else. Oh.
And the Baron's War, the civil war that he had to face.
And what were you going to cook for him?
Well, we're going to cook a massive meaty pie.
Well, should we get started?
Yes.
(gentle music)
If you do want to go and visit an English Heritage site
associated with Henry III,
you're best off visiting Kenilworth Castle,
which he besieged,
or Dover Castle, where he did substantial building works.
So we are making a meat pie.
How are we doing this?
Well, we're going to start off with, obviously, pastry.
This is an enriched shortcrust pastry.
So it's just flour, fat, salt, and egg.
In this case, I've used all butter,
but you could also use a mixture of butter and lard.
So it's not a hot water crust.
There's no need to boil it.
It's just a nice edible crust,
which you really put together quite hard,
chilled to within an inch of its life,
and then used it to line a pie tin.
And while you were doing that,
I'm made a forcemeat and the forcemeat here
is made out of mince. Different kinds of mince.
What I've got here is some pork mince,
and I've actually got some venison mince in here as well.
But to give it that true medieval flavor,
you need to add fruit as well.
So it's got chopped dates.
It's got currants,
it's got the spices that were most celebrated at the time.
Like, what did I put?
I put cloves in and mace, it's got some ginger,
little bit of cinnamon, tiny bit of salt in there as well,
just to give it that medieval smell.
And it definitely has that, doesn't it?
It's quite strong. It also really expensive.
This is a prestige dish.
People will often say, "Oh my goodness.
The past was so meaty. I dunno how I would've survived."
But the point was that probably 80 or 90% of the population
were vegetarian because they couldn't afford meat.
So to have something like this pie,
which is completely meat, very expensive.
Spices, all imported, very expensive.
The dried fruit as well, imported, very expensive.
This basically says dish fit for a king.
And whilst we do have some of the cheaper meats
such as pork in this one,
we also have a bit of chicken here as well.
I am, over my chicken, going to sprinkle some saffron
and that will give it a really gorgeous colour.
Saffron, expensive then. Mhm.
Although, grown in the UK at one point.
Yes. I'm not sure in Henry III's time.
No, not in Henry III's time, a little bit later.
So Saffron Walden,
for those of you familiar with Audley End
and where it is, Saffron Walden was named for the saffron.
I actually did also put a little bit of saffron
in the forcemeat.
So this is a truly expensive medieval pie.
People often think that the past was very brown
because of course,
what you see today is brown and beige and dull and dusty.
But actually it was very, very colourful.
And the medieval period in particular,
a lot of foods were dyed with natural colourings,
like saffron, sandalwood, cochineal which is beetle,
that kind of thing.
So now we've got all our ingredients.
We've got also going to layer in some dates here
that I've chopped.
We've got some more spices that are going to go in.
A bit more mace and some cloves and some black pepper
we've got to go in there. And some egg yolks.
What are we going to do next, Annie?
Right. Well, pies like this
would've been much bigger than this one.
This one is a Victorian pie mold.
You can see straight away it's bigger, but of course,
pie molds like this really very much in their infancy
in the medieval period, if they existed at all.
So, first of all,
I want you to imagine a much bigger pie than this.
Something that was hand raised.
So no supporting case,
probably about the size of this board,
or at least half the size,
and what you wanted to do for a big pie like this,
they were often known as great pies.
The first thing we're going to do is line this
with our forcemeat, and that's gonna keep the meat inside
very, very succulent.
So if I.
Move, yes.
I can.
If I just move that over,
what we're going to do is line the bottom, the sides,
and all of it, really, with this wonderful forcemeat.
And of course the venison as well, incredibly prestigious,
because if you were the king, you had your own deer herd.
Did they eat the pastry in a dish like this?
Well, yes and no.
So the people who had the pie
probably didn't eat the pastry.
There's this kind of myth,
that the pastry was just a vessel for cooking in.
And to some extent, that is true,
because of course these dishes that we would casseroles
and things in like that today, didn't exist.
But this pastry is very edible.
This is all the ingredients we would eat today.
It's not a salt crust, anything like that.
And the way a pie would've been eaten in the past,
imagine a big round in particular,
us you'd cut the lid off, 0:07:36.260,1193:02:47.295 certainly the medieval period,
move the lid to one side, often a richly decorated lid,
and then cut out the bits of the inside.
So you would have the inside on your plate, not the pastry,
but pastry's pretty good.
So either you would reuse the pastry case
and there are incidences of recipes where it says, you know,
use the pastry case for this and then reuse it again.
Or the pastry would have broken up and fed to servants
or to the poor.
Pastry cases like this were known as coffins.
This is a 14th century recipe?
Yes, this is based on 14th century manuscript,
but there are so many recipes that are just like this,
sort of miniature variations in spices or in the meats,
and of course, recipes at this point, they're very,
they're sort of aide memoir more than recipes.
There are no printed recipe books at this point yet.
So these are all from manuscripts
and a lot of them were kept by professional cooks
who really just wrote down kind of vaguely
what they needed to remember.
So it's take some meat, chop it up, add some spice.
There's no quantities.
There's no put it in your oven at 180 degrees
and check for it to be golden brown
or all the things that you'd expect in modern recipes.
And then we're going to,
what we're going to do next is layer in some of the chicken.
Yeah.
Layered with the dates, they're gonna go in next.
Then I shall crumble in some of the egg, add the spices.
We might add a little bit of water?
It's worth putting a tiny bit of liquid in.
Point of the hard boiled egg yolks
is they also thicken the whole mixture
and add a pleasingly eggy creamy note,
but you often get dried hard egg yolks
used in things like that.
So there's our forcemeat.
Do you want to do this bit or shall I?
Well I've already got meaty hands.
You do the chicken.
So you can see this beautiful saffron color
that's going to mean that this pie is really vibrant.
Can I take it just a minute,
just so we can show the colours.
Look at that. It's really getting a nice yellow.
Yes.
I'm going have yellow fingers for the rest of the day.
Now we've chopped our chicken,
but actually a lot of the recipes involved-
They would've had whole birds!
Yeah.
So whole larks and whole occasionally
sort of things like quail or partridges or anything really.
And the idea was that you chopped it
and then you would have your whole bird.
Oh yes. Serve it out nicely.
That sounds like a nice idea.
I think it's quite cool. It's really gone outta fashion,
but it survived really into that the 18th century.
Well, I can contribute a little bit now.
Can't I, by adding a few, it said a handful of dates.
I have a sweet tooth, so there's a bit more than that.
And also the cook would've been a man,
so you're looking at quite a big hand.
Yes.
That's a good reason to add anything sweet.
Shall I just, I'll just pinch each of these in.
It smells amazing.
It does, doesn't it?
It's got a really nice what I class as a medieval,
good medieval scent. Well, I always think
things like mace and those sweet spices
that we now associate with Christmas really are.
I'll crumble this in next.
Yeah.
I said crumble.
I'm just gonna wash my hands.
One.
Really giving a nice scent.
Even despite the smell of hard boiled egg.
And then you wanted a bit of water.
Yeah. Not too much.
(indistinguishable)
Yeah.
This looks fantastic.
And looks completely unlike a modern pie.
Hang on, hang on.
There's some more currants.
You know what I'm like about my dried fruit.
There we are.
Isn't that lovely?
Right, lid.
(gentle music)
So people did used to richly decorate these crusts,
often with their family crests.
So I have made an English Heritage logo.
Very good!
Dyed of course, with cochineal,
not at all with modern red food colouring, but first of all,
I'm going to put a chimney in
because that way any of the liquids that are inside
that want to bubble out will bubble out through the chimney
and they won't create problems with the crust.
So let's put one in here.
Take out a little bit.
And is that why we use the bird in the modern pie?
It is, or you can make a chimney out of pastry as well,
but this is just a sort of easy cheat,
obviously grease your nozzles well.
It's gonna be really, really solid.
So pies were amazingly good gifts.
So Christmas or coronations, you know,
if you want to send it, you can do.
Right, let's stick our logo on top.
And then we'll bake it for about three hours
at 150, 160 degrees.
Lovely!
So now it's time for us to move on to our next monarch.
And this is James I, James VI of Scotland,
the first king to unite the crown.
We are moving to the Stuart age.
(gentle music)
If you would like a James I inspired visit
to an English Heritage property,
then you can go to Apethorpe Palace,
which was one of his most favorite haunts.
He paid for an extension there.
And it is said he had commodious entertainment
while he was there.
We're going to cook a recipe inspired
by Apethorpe Palace because
the mistress of Apethorpe, Lady Grace Mildmay,
was very well known for her skill with confectionary
and confectionary at that point meant
really anything to do with sugar,
distillation, and ladies arts.
So we are cooking sugar plate,
which is a type of pastillage, really.
So it's a sort of icing sugar that sets very, very hard.
And it was very, very popular for the banqueting course,
which was a course you had after your dinner
where you'd leave the hall and you'd swoop over
to a small building in the gardens
or perhaps up to a rooftop and you'd have a whole course
just made out of sugar and sugar craft and sugar syrups
and beautiful things that you would eat with your fingers
and perhaps a fork.
So forks, not in general use,
but used for the banqueting course.
And the name banquet just comes from the French for a bench,
banquette.
So the idea was that you'd be seated
and you were eating these beautiful confections,
which were often very, very playful.
And so to icing sugar,
although I don't think there are amounts
written down for this. No.
I have added some gum trag.
And this is gum tragacanth.
It's a resin, a sap that comes from a tree.
This technique was discovered in what is now the middle east
and gum trag sets this stuff hard.
So if you do want to get hold of it,
it is a bit specialist as an ingredient,
but it's not that difficult to get a hold of.
You can easily find it in a specialist cake decorating shop,
or it's widely available online.
And there are also other substitutes,
modern substitutes, for it now.
And you want me to mix this now
to make it a sort of malleable paste?
Yes.
So the gum trag has been soaked overnight
in a little bit of rosewater,
which is an incredibly common flavour at this point in time.
So end of the Tudor period,
beginning of the Stuart period
and a bit of lemon juice as well.
So what you're going to do is mix it all in.
It's a bit like mixing pastry and bread crumbs,
and then we are going to add in a little bit of egg white,
just enough to bring it together.
So again, the egg white will help as it dries out.
The egg white will help to make it set firm.
It does dry out very quickly as well.
Okay.
I would say stop there.
Right.
And we're going to wrap it.
It can dry out really quickly.
So we need to protect it all the time.
So even though,
do you want me to take a little bit of this off now?
Yeah.
So even though Annie's going to cut out some shapes,
how much do you want? A little bit.
Yes? Yeah.
With that bit, we're going to protect this bit
by wrapping it in some bees wax paper here,
just to keep it nice and protected.
Now I understand the moulds would've been for the sugar,
sugar craft paste.
Would've been something similar to this, wouldn't they?
Yes. And then we've got modern resin replicas.
So this one you can see is,
I suppose that's Anne of Denmark, so James's wife,
in her resplendent Tudor gown.
And we've got a bunch of flowers. That's a boar and a lion.
But it turns out that we have between us
quite a lot of biscuit cutters.
It's embarrassing. "I kept thinking oh, more cutters!
Oh, oh, another."
So I've only brought a few.
Oh, only.
But I do quite like them. I like the smiley faces.
They're quite nice.
Well, they're quite kind of happy, aren't they?
Yes.
I think street party style, quite good.
And I've got big ones. Although what do you fancy doing?
There's a Dalek one here.
Yes.
Should we do a Dalek one?
I've also got a tractor.
Of course, you've got a tractor.
Why would you not have a tractor?
You've got a hippo. I've got a hippo.
I might make some hippos.
We're to let them dry out overnight.
And they should dry to be a nice, hard crisp.
And that way they can be picked up and eaten.
And a lot of the time people would've made things
like plates and sort of edible kind of tablets out of them,
as well as funky things like this, plus buildings
and you could write mottoes on them.
They're a bit of fun really,
but because they are flavoured with rosewater,
they're also kind of a breath freshening as well.
And sugar was regarded as being incredibly good for you.
It was regarded as being very good for
whatever your humoral makeup was,
sugar would cure all your ills.
So this is going to be all of our spare time
between now and then. We'll just make lots of sugar.
Yes.
I think that's probably the best thing to do. Isn't it?
Maybe more Daleks?
I think so.
And I'm going to try my hippo.
Yes!
So is that James I covered?
I think it is, yes.
We can just carry on making sugar
pretty much till the cows come home.
And then just as long as it dries.
The key thing to do is not to let the mixture dry out
and really to have a lot of fun.
(gentle music)
Now we're moving on to George III,
best known for losing America, having a mental illness.
And because of that illness,
he was king during the Regency period,
which is a time when his son,
the Regent, was ruling in his stead.
Think Jane Austen.
And also, I suppose, Bridgerton these days.
Yes. Hmm.
If you want to have a taste of the Georgian era,
then you could do worse than head to Apsley House in London,
which is an absolutely splendid property.
So go there and immerse yourself
in all things gloriously Georgian.
George was actually quite a picky eater,
very well known for his frugal appetite.
So we've picked something that is relatively frugal,
but also rather lovely in the shape of queen cakes.
They're very similar for fans of Mrs. Crocombe,
they're very similar to the queen drop biscuits,
but just slightly more cake-like,
and they're perfectly shaped.
They're sort of on the evolutionary scale
between biscuits and cakes, I suppose.
So we've got the modern equivalent of a heart shaped tin.
Yes. And they were traditionally made in heart shaped tins.
Now to begin with, we've already separated our eggs.
We need to whisk those separately
and we need to cream the butter and the sugar,
and we're gonna do it all at once.
Yeah.
So historic methods meet modern methods
and save washing up as they do so.
Should I get this going first?
Yeah.
(gentle music)
So now what has to happen?
Well, according to the recipe,
we add everything into our mixing bowl
and then we beat it for an hour.
But the advantage of living in the 21st century
is that we can beat it for about five minutes fast
in the stand mixer.
So let's add everything in.
Quite a lot in this recipe.
Yes. We probably could have halved it.
But on the other hand, cakes are such a crowd pleaser,
aren't they? They are.
If not a Kenwood pleaser.
I always overfill, as you know.
So this sponge recipe is quite traditional.
Yeah.
This is a recipe based on one in Maria Rundell
who was writing in the very early 19th century.
So during the Regency period.
In fact, her book's success is what led her publisher,
John Murray, to take a punt on this sort of unknown woman
fiction writer called Jane Austen.
Ah!
So without Maria Rundell, we wouldn't have Jane Austen.
(upbeat music)
So these are going to go in for 20 minutes.
And while they're in, we will move on to our next monarch,
who is...
Queen Victoria! Yes!
(gentle music)
Our next monarch is Queen Victoria.
She's known as the grandmother of Europe
because she had so many children
and all of them married into various royal families
in Europe.
She's also known for her love of food
and her apparently diminutive stature.
She was only 5ft. 2,
but I think that's not that short.
Are you 5ft. 2?
I might be.
Yes. It is a perfect height.
Exactly. Yes.
So we are making trifle.
Which both of us hate. Yes.
And the bit we hate particularly about trifle
is the soggy cake bit.
However, we've chosen a recipe that is a trifle
that doesn't have any cake. No.
It's kind of more like a fool
if you think that trifle has to involve cake,
but we don't think that trifle does have to involve cake.
Nope, it doesn't.
Because soggy cake is horrible.
We've got apple puree here which is just eating apples,
12 of them stewed down. Or did you do half recipe?
No, it's got 12.
So 12 stewed down apples.
You could use any apple that's a decent eating apple.
So Cox or a braeburn, if you want to use a modern apple,
that kind of thing.
So after the apples, our next layer is going to be.
Custard.
Yeah. I can't remember how many eggs.
I think there were four egg yolks in there.
And a bit of cornflour, I think as well.
Yes. Nice trick to stop it curdling,
add some cornflour.
The final layer is going to be cream,
which I'm going to whip.
I've got a pint of cream just here.
Should I add the sugar now?
I would half whisk it first.
What I will add is a little bit of pink.
Oh you do love your food colouring.
Well, the original recipe suggests
that you use food colouring to colour your cream pink,
because it will look very jolly.
And I think, you know,
this is a good excuse for a party
and nobody wants food that's just beige do they?
So I'm gonna whisk this in a modern style.
(gentle music)
Right.
So we've just added some sherry to that.
Rather messy.
We're better off with our historic methods.
(gentle music)
I think that looks lovely. Don't you?
Yeah. I mean,
normally I'd say more is more because it is Victorian,
but I think actually given the colour of the cream.
Yeah.
So that gives us one more monarch to go.
It does.
It is Elizabeth II.
Yes. Our current queen.
(gentle music)
Our final monarch is the one whose Platinum Jubilee
we are celebrating, Queen Elizabeth II.
She came to the throne in 1952
making her the longest reigning monarch in British history.
Obviously we are cooking coronation chicken.
But it wasn't made coronation chicken.
The recipe for a coronation, was it?
Well sort of.
So it was originally called poulet Reine Elizabeth,
and it was put together by Rosemary Hume
who was a leading society, caterer, chef,
and indeed she ran a cookery school as well.
She's best known for writing with Constance Spry,
"The Constance Spry Cookery Book."
So this recipe is often attributed to Constance Spry,
but it was Rosemary Humes'.
And she designed it for a coronation banquet,
but not the one that the queen was eating.
So it was for a big banquet full of sort
of London's brightest,
but not one's invited to the actual coronation feast.
And it's probably a kind of riff
on quite a lot of earlier dishes, actually.
There's one that was supposedly eaten by Georgia VI
but it's also, and this was what Rosemary Hume said,
it's loosely based on a sandwich
that was liked by Queen Adelaide, who was Edward VII's queen.
So it's got quite a long history in terms of its flavours,
but this is very much of its time.
This is 100% 1952.
So what do you have in there?
This is the basis of my coronation chicken,
and it's a sauce,
which we are just going to strain through this sieve.
So what's in it?
Well, it's a kind of fairly basic curry sauce, really.
You start off with some oil,
fry off some really finely minced onion.
Then you add some curry powder or curry paste.
So that's just curry powder with a bit of garlic, tomato,
tomato puree.
There's some red wine in there as well,
bit of sugar just to temper the sharpness,
lemon juice and a slice of lemon as well.
And all of that's gone in with a little bit of water
and just been simmered down
until it forms this nice thick sludgy sauce,
which just needs to cool enough
so that we don't curdle our cream.
So once it's cool, I think it's quite cool now.
Do we need to test it?
Mm, I think so.
Would you like me to add some mayonnaise?
Yes.
I think most people think of it
as being basically yellow mayonnaise with some fruit in,
and it is true that in subsequent years
it has been rather bastardized.
And of course, I always think of a dish with chicken,
but sultanas in as well.
Yes.
The original had dried apricots in, not fresh.
Some people put fresh in,
but dried apricots that had been re-hydrated
in a bit of boiling water.
Yeah. Just put them in.
This is a really exotic dish for the 1950s.
I mean, bear in mind in 1952 or 1953 when the coronation happened,
rationing was still in full force.
So yes, it had lessened
and you could certainly get lots of imports now,
you know, you could get bananas and oranges and things,
but this is, you know, it's pretty out there.
And chicken was really expensive in the 1950s.
It didn't start to come down in price
until we really started battery farming chicken
later on in the sixties and seventies.
So we think of this is quite a sort of plebeian dish today.
That's a bit sort of like whatever, you know,
you get it in your cheap, horrible sandwiches,
but actually in its day, this would've been quite the,
"Oh, okay. coronation chicken.
Yes, please."
And now we're going to add the chicken.
The chicken has been poached with carrot, celery,
and a pinch of salt, and then left to cool.
And then I've just diced it up.
It's a small chicken that I've done here.
That's it
A lot of chicken. Okay.
But the point is that it shouldn't be
sort of sloppy mess, but something quite beautiful.
Right. Right.
So is this it then?
We're gonna serve it just like this in the bowl?
Well that would be the 1980s way, wouldn't it?
But no, the original recipe
suggests that it's served on a border of rice salad,
which is just cooked rice with diced cucumber and peas
and a few other bits and pieces like that.
So we'll make that.
But I think we've probably done enough for today.
I think so.
We have still got a little bit left to do.
I've got to make some more sugar craft.
Yeah.
Check the pie comes out of the mold.
Yes.
Pack the car. Make the rice.
Bring some bunting.
And then we'll be ready?
Yes.
For Framlingham Castle.
So we shall see you at Framlingham Castle
ready to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee,
English Heritage style.
(gentle music)
Well, here we are at Framlingham Castle.
One of my favorite castles to work at.
And we're here to have our
heritage-inspired street party. Woo!
So this is our Jubilee street party with historic dishes,
but would they have had street parties
like this in the past?
Yes, they would.
Certainly for about the last 300 years.
We know that people had street parties
for well, any occasion they had an excuse for, really,
so coronations, jubilees, coming of age,
parties for the local squire, that kind of thing.
But they wouldn't have eaten food like this.
So the standard thing at any big party,
beef and plum pudding.
Christmas pudding and just roast beef?
Oh yes.
Lots of beer, tea, snuff, that kind of thing.
But I think we've gone,
we've gone one bit better than that.
But although that's pretty much all from us,
we have invited the staff here at Framlingham Castle
to come and taste our coronation meal inspired by the past.
And so I think we should let them get at it, don't you?
One more thing though,
if you decide to cook yourself
a historic inspired street party,
especially if you cook any of the foods
that you've seen us cook today,
then do tag us on social media
because we'd love to see the kind of things
that you come up with.
Shall I go and get them? Yes.
(people chatter) (upbeat music)
It's got delicate flavour
And a beautiful texture.
That's very nice indeed.
I've had a little bit of everything.
My favorite things were the trifle,
I really like the trifle
and I really liked the coronation chicken,
but I'm not such a fan of the pie.
I think the pie, the sweetness was getting to me,
but the trifle in particular was my absolute favourite.
I think that would be a crowd pleaser with families today
and things like that on if you're having a Jubilee party
or something like that.
I think the trifle would definitely go in no time at all.
So I had the three desserts.
I love all three of those.
The trifle I liked because it didn't have the soggy bottom.
It had the apple instead that I found unusual
because like I said, I don't usually go for the trifles.
The sugar work I love
because I've got a sweet tooth
and the cakes, I like the unusualness
because it was like a biscuit crossed with a cake
and just amazing.
Yes. The heart shaped shakes
because they just remind me of shortbread biscuits.
And I think that's also something
I really associate with Jubilee
and kind of parties and being together with friends
and especially with the sugar cakes as well,
because they're easy to make, kids are gonna love them.
And they reminded me of history as well
because sugar is such an important part
of historical cooking.
And so it's something that you,
I think, could bring together a lot of things,
cooking, history, and eating lots of sweet things,
sweet treats.
(gentle music)