The Real Life Downton Abbey (17 page)

Strict dining etiquette dictates which cutlery must be used:

• Soups are eaten with a tablespoon – always spooned away from the diner.
  
• Fish is eaten with a fish knife and fork.
  
• ‘Made’ dishes like rissoles and patties are eaten with a fork only.
  
• Poultry, game, asparagus, salads are eaten with a knife and fork.
  
• Peas are eaten with a fork.
  
• When eating game or poultry, diners must not touch the bone of either the wing or the leg with their knife.
  
• Sweets like jellies, blancmanges and puddings are eaten with a fork.
  
• Cheese is eaten very carefully. Small morsels are placed – with a knife – on small pieces of bread, brought to the mouth via thumb and finger.
  
• Grapes, cherries or pitted fruits are tricky: the pits and skins are spat discreetly into a hand and then placed on the side of the plate.
  
• Dessert is served to guests in the same order as dinner.
  

A lady wanting a second glass of wine must not help herself: the gentleman seated beside her must fill her glass. (The wine decanters are handed to the male guests only after the servants have left the dining room.) Around ten minutes after the wine has been passed round the table, it is the hostess who gives a signal for the ladies to leave the room, bowing to the lady of the highest rank. The gentlemen rise with the ladies, the women leave the dining room – in order of rank with the hostess last. Then the men are left to their port and claret, to smoke their cigars or cigarettes; the ladies move to the drawing room for coffee. The men join them later. Dinner ends officially about 30 minutes after this. However, in many country houses, the dinner group plays cards or bridge into the small hours.

Here’s a dinner menu of six courses. (On special occasions there can be many more – between eight and twelve.):

• Caviar
  
• Fish soup
  
• Poached salmon with crayfish sauce
  
• Cutlets of pigeon
  
• Chicken Valencia with peas and creamed spinach
  
• Roast woodcock with peas and apricots
  

Other popular dishes include: Oyster Patties, Braised Celery, Roast Goose, Potato Scallops, Vanilla Soufflé.

Drinks at dinner include French wines, spirits, scotch whisky, sherry and port. They also drink hock, champagne, Sauternes and claret. (Non-alcoholic drinks served during the day include lemon barley water or, in summer, iced tea.)

Dessert is equally elaborate: blancmanges, hothouse fruit from the greenhouse, arranged in silver fruit dishes carefully lined with vine leaves, with the fruit built up in tiers. Often dessert fruit is arranged down the middle of the table amid the flower displays.

Jellies come in huge, fantastic moulds. A tall pillar jelly mould may be created with jellies of different colours, turned out so that each slice is presented in a multi-coloured pattern. A dinner table for twenty people may be decorated with up to a dozen ice-cream moulds in huge shapes.

The preparation and presentation of food is complex enough, the table etiquette complicated, yet a younger, newly married and less experienced hostess might also face another small dilemma when planning a dinner party – deciding between two distinct styles of serving dinner:

• The fashionable
  service à la russe
  (Russian style). Here an array of different dishes are cut up on a sideboard, then handed round to the guests who take each dish as a course in itself. Or…
  
• The more traditional style, known as
  service à la française.
  This means the food is carved at the table and two large courses, each one including a variety of different dishes, are placed on the table by servants, one after the other. This way, a dinner guest can help themselves and offer their neighbour dishes within reach – and ask for other dishes to be passed, either by another diner or by a footman.
  

According to the toffs’ bible,
Etiquette: Rules & Usages of the Best
Society, this traditional style is more complex: ‘A soup or fish course would have been on the table at the same time and would have been removed when the entrées (cutlets, fricassees, boudins, sweetbreads or pâtés) were served followed by the roast.’

The
Etiquette Rules
recommend the more fashionable (
à la russe
) style for the confused hostess: ‘It gives an opportunity for more profuse ornamentation of the table, which, as the meal progresses, does not become encumbered with partially empty dishes and platters.’

As a consequence of all this, by 1914, the fashionable set have virtually abandoned the traditional style of presentation – but a hostess might still need to consider it when entertaining older relatives, like the fictional Dowager Duchess of Grantham, who still hankers for her mostly lost world of the ‘old’ ways.

Given the amount of food to be consumed at one sitting, you can’t help wondering how the privileged women manage. They are beautifully clad yet tightly encased in stiff corsetry underneath, making movement extremely difficult. How do they cope with all this stuffing of the face? Put simply: with great difficulty. Fashionable women are expected to have a very small waist with curves above and below. (Very thin women don’t become fashionable until after World War I.) Pecking at each course rather than tucking in with gusto is the only way to maintain a fashionable appearance and a degree of comfort. And, hopefully, keep the flab at bay.

Though their food would sometimes consist of leftovers or fairly basic, plain food overall, the food the live-in
country-house
servants eat is, in many cases, quite good. In some big houses, the lady of the house gives the cook a written set of rules for amounts of food permitted for servant consumption each day, according to quantity or value. But quantity aside, much depends on the quality of the cooking; sometimes the cook will refuse to cook for the other servants. Then the kitchen maid has to do the best she can. So in some houses, servants’ meals are heavily dependent on pre-cooked food (leftovers).

The uppers, of course, fare better food wise – particularly if they are in a house where they continue to eat separately from the lowers in their own quarters – dining off high-quality china and tableware. But overall, while the lowers’ breakfast and break-time fare is very basic, the servants’ main meal – the ‘dinner’ served around noon – is fairly substantial and very much ‘meat ’n’ two veg’ type English food fare: stews (usually with cheaper cuts of meat) or offal or roast meat, often served cold (the leftover syndrome).

The vegetables, carrots, cabbage and potatoes on the table are plain, without elaborate sauces or garnish – but they’re home-grown and fresh. The bread is not the sliced white or brown packaged variety we know but freshly baked from the kitchen; the butter is freshly churned, country style. Desserts are plain too, like rice pudding. But there’s often cheese and seasonal fruit around: strawberries, raspberries, loganberries, peaches and apricots. And many houses permit a specific allowance of tea and sugar for their servants, so there are plentiful cuppas available, domestic tasks permitting.

At Longleat, Wiltshire, home to the Thynn dynasty, servant diaries during World War I record an abundance of game for their meals: pheasant, goose, venison, partridge, hare and rabbit, followed by cheese and puddings. Given the fact that the greater majority of the population are not, at any time, enjoying such fare, the advantages of working on a large,
well-run
estate, food wise at least, are clear.

But what do servants drink? The uppers drink wine with their meals but beer is the traditional servant drink and in previous centuries many country houses brewed their own. So they devised their own rules around beer consumption. These included small beer made available through the day (small beer is weak, with 2.5 per cent or less alcohol content) but stronger ale is strictly rationed – and sometimes only allowed on special occasions, like birthdays. (Men could drink double the amount that women were permitted to drink.) But after the nineteenth century, country houses start to buy in their alcoholic drinks and eventually abandon their own brewing. Cash is sometimes offered to servants in lieu of beer as part of the deal – ‘beer money’ – but servant alcohol abuse is often a problem – and alcohol abuse itself remains a huge social difficulty in Edwardian times, with thousands regularly prosecuted for drunkenness.

As a consequence, some country houses have very strict rules around alcohol and staff access to their vast wine cellars. Those whose work involves hanging around, waiting for their masters, especially in towns and cities where pubs are plentiful – and warm – are the most prone to alcohol problems: footmen, for example. Cooks and butlers are also prone to over-tippling or taking one-over-the-odds sometimes. Given the amounts of spirits and wine consumed by their masters, it’s difficult to say how rigorous the toffs might be when it comes to monitoring the servants’ intake. After a long day supervising the kitchen, is it so surprising that Cook might reach for the sherry bottle?

Between 1909 and 1913, a survey was conducted in Lambeth, South London, of a large group of working-class families, detailing how they fed, clothed and housed themselves on very low incomes. Conducted by Maud Pember Reeves and other members of the socialist Fabian Women’s Group, the survey was published as a book,
Round About A Pound A Week.
This £1 (twenty shillings) was a standard wage then, a sum these families, often with several children, struggled to live on. The book’s publication created a furore and was an important stepping stone in the ongoing campaign towards a fairer society and the welfare state. Here’s what it says about the diet of these ordinary working Londoners:

Both poverty and excess bring considerable health problems. The rich multi-course diet of wealthy Edwardians, the large amounts of meat, sugary foods washed down with sherry, hock, champagne or liqueurs leads to stomach and digestive illnesses. Diet-related health problems include jaundice, gallstones and gout. And for the poor, their limited diet and lack of knowledge about nutrition means malnutrition is widespread. At the time of the Boer War in 1899–1902, Army recruiters are shocked to discover that many would-be recruits are too undernourished to fight.

Here’s a vivid description of a child’s view of the Edwardian ‘at home’ afternoon tea ritual written by Constance Spry, a
well-known
writer of recipe books at the time.

Often known as the ‘king of chefs and chef of Kings’ Georges Auguste Escoffier is a major figure in the development of modern French cuisine, earning a worldwide reputation as a director of the kitchens of the ultra-fashionable watering holes, the Grand Hotel, Monte Carlo and the Savoy Hotel in London. The gourmandizing Prince of Wales is a huge admirer of Escoffier and when he becomes King Edward in 1901, Escoffier is in charge of the banqueting for his Coronation. One of Escoffier’s most famous dessert recipes, served in a silver bowl, is Pêche Melba (Peach Melba) in honour of Dame Nellie Melba, the Australian singer, a frequent guest at the Savoy. His cookbook,
Le Guide Culinaire,
published in 1903, continues to be a source of inspiration for chefs everywhere to this day.