Oh I shall never be ready,
I’ve got all this food to cook for the feast.
Where are the eggs and the vinegar?
Oh hello, well you must be my new apprentices, what’s your name?
Olivia
Adham
Well, Mistress Olivia and Master Adham,
welcome to Gainsborough Old Hall, my name is Thomas Griffin,
and I am the cook here to Lord William Burgh.
Now, we’re cooking a feast because there is a very important merchant coming from Lincoln.
I’m actually making some special biscuits, for the banquet right at the very very end.
So let me take those, and over there, put your clothes on.
Ready and waiting
That’s much better, well there’s lots to be getting on with so first thing, I need lots of breadcrumbs,
so take a piece of bread and start breaking it up in to those bowls there.
So what’s it like in the kitchen?
It’s always very very busy
we’re up very early in the morning and we can’t go to bed
until Lord William has gone to bed as well, in case he wants something to eat
and there’s always something to cook, there’s always things to be getting ready and preparing for the next day as well.
I have to look after the kitchen, I’m in charge of everything, I talk to the merchants who sell me the food
I make sure all the ingredients are ordered
I roast, I boil, I bake, I fry,
I do absolutely everything and make sure all the staff are doing it as well.
What do you have for the dessert?
So Lord William likes lots of sugary, spicy things
so there will be dishes with fruit in
there will be sweet wine from Spain and Portugal.
I’ve made some roses using this mould
and I have also made a coloured marchpane chess board
and we can use little biscuits to move the counters around
But what’s marchpane?
Well marchpane is almonds,
egg yolks and sugar, and you
grind it all up and make it in to a sort of a doughy pasty like stuff.
Oh marzipan.
What do you use for the food colouring?
Plants mostly, that’s why I’m chopping this parsley, that’s going to give us some green.
And there's some special bark from brazilwood or madder, that’s going to make us red
and we even have a special kind of beetle called cochineal that comes in from overseas and that’s going to make a lovely pink colour
I tell you what, there’s a job that you can help me do
we can colour some marchpane to decorate the Shrewsbury biscuits for later on
would you like to do that?
Yes!
First you need to pound the herbs in a pestle and mortar
then we’ll add some water and a little vinegar or wine,
and simmer gently over the fire to release the colour and make a paste.
We then pour the liquid into a cloth or a mesh and we strain the liquid through it to make a fine dye
and finally we are going to knead it in the marchpane.
We are just going to roll the marchpane.
If we cut a little bit off.
Now, I want you to place that on there and give it a good squish down, that’s it.
Very very good, now then if you gently peel it off and put it on the table
That's it, lie it down, and now we have the shape of the leaf.
Now I’ll quickly cut around them. There we are.
So now, take a biscuit each
take a quill and just dip the end in the honey.
Take the back of your leaf and now just paint a bit of honey on, that’s it.
And now, glue your leaf on to the biscuit.
So there we are, biscuits fit for Lord William himself or maybe Queen Elizabeth.
Thank you for teaching us how to cook.
Thank you for being my apprentices today.