'A Greedy Queen: Queen Victoria and Her Food’ - Dr Annie Gray

well good evening good evening to all add there's a very great pleasure for me this evening to welcome Annie gray here to talk to this fantastic theme of really Queen Queen Victoria and her food I don't know if any of you were here on Monday to listen to Jeff Sachs talk about climate change but there's a very nice healthy contrast between Monday's lecture and tonight and it's very good to come back to I think to be the basic issues of food for those who don't know annie is a writer a broadcaster and a consultant she specializes in British food and dining from roughly I like this it's about several centuries 1652 1950 small time period and his resident food historian on BBC two radios force pitch to the kitchen cabinet she also advises on BBC and presents of course BBC Two's Victorian Baker's annie is a research associate also at the University of York and her first book a greedy Queen eating and drinking with Queen Victoria was shortlisted for Jane Grigson trust award for new food writing in March 2016 and is this whole book is due for publication by profile books Emily in May and somewhere we got a cover of it which is we've all got cards excellent very good so we are getting the message across I I was really enticed by the blurb for this lecture meet Victoria she's a morbidly obese 78 year old with an unhealthy relationship with food forced by a hated mother onto a diet intended to impose discipline and control as a child and used to taking refuge in food as a means of control as adults she eats what she wants and as much as she wants with the constitution of an ox and an appetite to match I can't wait for more so please join with me in welcoming Annie Liz evening just going to lower this even more thank you and this is quite an exciting lecture for me to be giving because it's the first time that I've been able to talk about the research that I've done for the book it's not a book talk per se it's a talk about Queen Victoria and her food I'm not going to read out chunks of the book to you or to extol the virtues of it and implore you to buy it not least because you'd have to pre-order it and then you'd forgotten about it by the time May rolls around but hopefully I will titillate your appetite a bit and give you a new perspective on a monarch so I think we all know something about even if we don't know a lot about Victoria is very much in the news at the moment I think she's one of those figures that is often somewhat person and in times of political turmoil in this country we like to look back at a time that was settled at a time when we all knew who we were and when the lowest sorts knew their place and women knew their place too and of course as all of you know that's rubbish but it doesn't stop a real outpouring in the popular press of stuff about Victoria how many of you saw the miniseries that was our last year satisfyingly few I've not watched it although I know quite a lot about it strangely enough and there is a new film coming out later on this year Judi Dench will be reprising her role as Victoria looking at her relationship with Abdul Karim then is the Munchie one of her servants in her later years so things about Victoria Victoria is big Victoria than the press and for once Victoria is in the press as the young and beautiful Queen which wasn't that beautiful but she was in eighteen forties rather than as a sort of black blob that she became known as but we do all have our own visions of her here she is 1838 diffident sweet slender blue-eyed always with her mouth slightly open which is always slightly flattering her half-sister said it always looked a little bit as if she was waiting for someone and she should possibly look at shutting her mouth from time to time because it was rather on the flattering and there she is the most there was slightly more I think familiar view to all of us she lived a tremendously long life she was until last year before last the longest-lived monix that we've had the longest reign on the throne she's somebody who defines Britain not just to us but especially abroad and even if you go to France or Germany or any of the X colonies if you see a silhouette of Victoria it's not just us as Brit you might know who she is she is a tremendously iconic figure we quite like Victoria I think she speaks to us a femininity and domesticity she seems a cosy figure and yet I suspect even among the people here you all have very different versions of Victoria um snap poll associations with Queen Victoria if I say Queen Victoria what springs to mind excellent she never said it anything else Empire precisely a huge thing and something we try and ignore I think in this country these days oh let's just brush it under the carpet of British associations with foreign countries we don't like that kind of thing anymore anything else terrible temper yeah that's certainly true especially in her old age she is so many things to so many different people everyone has their own version of Victoria there are over 200 books about her and trying to find a new angle on someone who it appears sometimes everything has been said about can be quite difficult when I set out to have a look at her I wanted to do it through her food and I've said this quite a few times the people who've gone the Victorian life service was that Victorian food she had the 45 inch waist by the end of her life this is not a woman who didn't like food you don't get to be a black ball as some people called her unless you love your food too here's got a 45 inch waist pretty much no one who hears five foot one excellent stand up stands up those are all certified RIT one I'm five four - you are not five foot one marbeth this is Victoria's height five foot one stand up anyone who's five foot ten or five or 11 this is Albert's height so there you go just to put it into perspective Victoria is short but she's not as short as people sometimes say there's a curious set of myths about Victoria myths that very quickly fall down when you start to investigate them so in the loads of the recent miniseries it was said that she was four foot nine well she may have been when she was 82 because people shrink in old age but she certainly wasn't that when the previous picture - this was Tate was painted because the tape measure exists that the painter used to measure her and it's very clear she was five foot one of course you could wear high heels and sweep yourself up but the fashion at the time was much more for slaps so she probably didn't the Victorian age is one of those but again everyone has different viewpoints of it is an amazing period now my heart firmly belongs in the Georgian period rather than the Victorian period but there is no doubting that the age from 1837 to 1901 has a lot in it and even those days by the way are in dispute we now have the long Victorian period which might start in 1832 when the long 18th century ends but it might start in 1821 where the Prince Regent finally becomes king and yes it may not start then it might start in 1830 when Georgia for skies and although it might go on from 1901 when Victoria died might also go until 1914 when a cataclysmic world event swept the entire of the globe and therefore that age comes to an end and certainly the food does so this is debate about the Victorian age how much more debate will there be about what in it it is a tremendous period it encompasses everything from fox hunting to Alecto to clocks it goes from electricity and gas in the kitchens right from coal at the beginning that's lighting is in at the beginning gas cooking comes in at the end you have enormous misery as always you do among the working classes get privation the hungry forty's when people are starving to death food is alteration to the point that malnutrition three-year-olds are dying because the bread that they are eating contains such bad stuff watered-down milk and yes at the other end of the scale you also have food colorings and not now you have petrochemical and flavorings your food you have molds to shape your food into anything you want it to look like you have everything in this period from tables that grown under the weight of meat to people whose diet is so reliant on potatoes and bread that they eat raw onions just to have something in their diet with some flavor it is everything to everyone and it's presided over by a woman who really could eat for England and did to understand the Victorian period it is worth having a brief nod at what came before George the fourth the Prince Regent Prinny the biggest glutton to have ever sat upon the English throne he beat Henry the eighth's into a cocked hat with his appetites and while the revisionist history now places him as a patron of the Arts and a man of exquisite taste there is no doubt that he was loathed in his lifetime I cannot imagine well okay I can imagine a world leader now being lamented and in such words the London Time views when George the fourth died it said there was never an individual let less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased King so yes okay fine we can see the parallels in modern life and he wasn't even better at the luxury that you wouldn't be able to say about Trump who apparently lives on fast food and sleeps for four hours a day George the fourth was hated his brothers were hated creevy who is one of the great political commentators at the time so that they were millstones around Parliament's neck these hated brothers these wasteful sisters all of them children of George the third all of them largely pointless when you look in the 1830s you see a procession of debauched horrible old men who are lecherous who are pretty nasty and who all their original ISM in the world can't really paint in a good light the Georgian period was messy it was brutal it was wonderful the Victorian period in popular mythology is straight-laced hypocritical and put women firmly in the house all of these are broad brushstrokes but there is no doubt there was a huge contrast in the periods and above all of this it's our greedy Queen this is a banquet held Lord mayor's residence mansion house in York to celebrate the Queen's coronation and it's one of the very few depictions of Victorian people eating a lot of the time you have victorian people at dinner but they are not actually galumphing their food and yet here you can see a man digging into the jelly's you can see enjoyment written on their faces and they're far away sits victoria staring at the jellies and as it turns out eating them with gusto she's someone it's very hard to get to know and I would argue impossible to get to know after all she's dead and even during her own lifetime she was something of a legend this is a Duke of Windsor later Edward the eighth who said so deeply had the power of Queen Victoria's personality pervaded the existence of her family but I can no longer differentiate with certainty between what I actually saw of her with my own eyes and what I later learned from my parents or the courtiers who had served her or what I learned from books even in her lifetime people couldn't decide what she was and how can we dare to do that now the truth of course is that she was human she was many things at many times she was a terrible mother but she adored her children she was an awful life but the love story between her and Albert is well-known she was a queen who had enormous power real political power and yet she was a constitutional monarch who could do nothing without her Parliament she's an enormous Lea contrasting figure but to me obviously she's a very greedy Queen so to bare-bones born in 1819 and if you look at her family at that point you would not believe not only other debauched old men who are her uncle's but her own immediate family are pretty hideous to her father managed to get kicked out the Army for imposing discipline his troops revolted against him and tried to cut his head off believe it or not before they were caught and therefore he was demoted he had to go away to Germany to marry his a broodmare mother in order to have Victoria and then decided she needed to be born on English soil so he rushed back to England having pawned everything he owned and also his friends for loans to get back here so that Victoria could be born on English soil the only reason he's gone across and married a German broodmare Victoria's mother is because Georgia force daughter Charlotte had died in childbirth in 1817 she was seen as a beautiful sweet Virginia creature who would save us from the debauched Georgians and be a new Elizabeth and when she died all of the hideous brothers dumped their mistresses found themselves wise and tried to spawn because they all wanted to be the father of the heir to the throne and the Duke of Kent won he won the battle and then he died four months after Victoria was born leaving her mother and Victoria stranded in the country with no money because George the fourth wasn't going to give them any money because he couldn't stand her mother but because the family is also hideously incestuous Victoria's other uncle on her mother's side who was married to Charlotte the one who died is still in England and manages to bankroll the whole family and that's just a snippet of how weird their family is they end up living at Kensington Palace which is a sort of spare hotel I suppose for Royals who are kind of not attached but vaguely attached to the family infested with black beetles hideous kitchens drafty as hell wet rot dry rot damp it's absolutely appalling Victoria later remembered Kensington Palace is just being hide both infested with beetles but also hearing clock's ticking all the time because one of the other mad uncle's kept so many in his apartment but that's all you could hear at Kensington she looked back on her childhood and she hated it it was tinted by what it became as a child she was breastfed which was quite unusual at the time and weaned as was usual on sort of milk and bits of bread she remembered not being allowed to drink tea acceptable luxury and she seems to have been kept on nursery food far longer than was necessarily the norm they'll carefully stage-managed appearances like this one which was published in the book in the eighteen forties of the young Victoria with her lovely mother she hated her out in the garden with tea little glimpses of this princess who was almost certainly going to become Queen there was a chance that one of the brothers probably William who became William the fourth or two it could yet have had a child to succeed instead of her but the hopes of the nation were pinned on this little girl and this little girl knew how to behave she knew what queenship was from a very young age and bossed everyone about she had a very odd upbringing she had a beloved half-sister who was married off when she was only nine Victoria rather than the sister and after that a thing called the Kensington system was put in place which is fairly well known it was a system designed to isolate Victoria and make her totally dependent on her mother and her mother's evil advisor John Conroy now there are lots of figures in history who are called evil John Conroy seems to have actually been quite evil there's no revisionist history that can make him out to be anything other than a fraudster and as Victoria once said a demon incarnate which is kind of strong really when you think about it she was paraded through the dining room not every night but certainly what she was sort of eleven twelve her mother would hold big dinners and the young Victoria would be paraded past all the jellies and ice creams and aerials and cakes all of which we know about from the equipment list would exist for the kitchen and then paraded back out again to go to the nursery and drink her milk and eat her bread it was quite a schizophrenic existence from that point and you find it gets worse because from the eighteen thirties onwards her mother decided she was definitely definitely going to become Queen and needed to be shown off to the nation they went on royal progress across the country which involved Victoria being shown the Great and the good while her mother on Conroy moved to try and get their way into the political circles at the time huge innards were held in celebration of their arrival not even with them present things like this they held public dinners themselves as well she went to so many cold collation but the journals that she's keeping at the time seemed to be full of cold food with various males all of the mayor's lots of pompous men surrounding her she handled it with aplomb but the diet did not agree with her there are some fascinating doctors notes from her time staying over in Wales which show that she suffered from constipation and diarrhea presumably not at the same time she was fed rhubarb pills which she hated in order to try and flush a system through and it's quite clear that the fifteen-year-old princess was suffering quite a lot from this strange food culture where on the one extreme she was eating very plain Nursery food and on the other hand she was present at dinners which were catered for by the leading chefs of their day if you were an aristocrat hosting the princess who would be queen you would bring in the best the chances are you already had your own French male chef cooking rich beautiful food for our grand truffles by the gallon not least and then then you've got swans and not so much peacocks but you've got Woodcock some black and everything you can imagine very neat heavy diet very very rich when Victoria could she would escape go to the kitchen gardens of wherever she was staying and gorge on fruit which probably to be fair didn't help with diarrhea and then she would run off to a dairy engorge herself on butter and milk it was quite clear she was developing a rather dysfunctional relationship with food even by her mid-teens she was described as gobbling she was described as always eating too fast her half-sister recalled occasions where she would put salt into her gravy and mix it around with her knife unthinking me before then eating it she was told by Gould uncle Leopold this one who'd supported them all the way through her childhood but she should stop eating so much but she should try and restrain herself but she should take exercise as well these are all admissions which seem very very modern but it's quite quite clear that Victoria was in love with food and yet at the same time couldn't admit it all the way through this period she kept a journal which she sort of used as a passive-aggressive form of communication with her mother the mother read it so Victoria would write brilliant things in it such as went on board a ship ate some mutton chops I really enjoyed them but Muammar was terribly sick it's brilliant reading it and when you realise that these are all coded messages intended to her mother it gives you a real insight it feels like a modern teenager the pace however was terrible every year they were off on tour and Victoria complained and complained and complained like any adolescent she wanted to flex her muscles she said she wasn't going on the final one up to York and got dragged there anyway writing in her journal that she felt and I quote well tired they got down to King's Lynn and the coach was unattached from the harlot if Cole thing was dragged through the city she hated every single second and it forget stole in 1835 she was extremely ill possibly nervous exhaustion possibly typhoid possibly tonsillitis no one really knows it was thought for some time that she was possibly even dying and just to show you how awful John Conroy was that was the very moment he decided to try and get her to sign documents making her making him into her person enters into her private secretary she refused and after she recovered it was war between them she came out of her illness very very determined to withstand everything one of the other things about her illness is that when she recovered for the very first time in her journals she listed the food she ate now given she was clearly something of a foodie and clearly eating too much when she could it's very curious but in her journal she doesn't really mention much food I read that this as being that classic thing if I don't think about it and I don't write about it I won't get told off for something I know I'm doing wrong but in the wake of her recovery when she haven't eaten much for about two weeks suddenly the journals come alive with lists of everything she ate 31st of October took a luncheon at 12 which consisted of some potato soup took my dinner at five which consisted of soup chimera and some little bits of excellent mutton with boiled rice which I relished very much at seven I had a glass of orange jelly with a Brussels biscuit which I liked very much the Brussels with biscuits which are a type of Rusk she loved for the rest of her life and her chef briefly Charles Franco telle published two recipes for them in his various cookbooks she also when she recovered took great pride in the fact she lost weight by this point she was quite obsessed with what other people looked like constantly writing in her journal about pretty people she'd seen about the fact that so-and-so looked very thin and when she did finally recover she went on a diet which involved skipping lunch every single day that she could do it was very very obvious that now she decided to assert control and she would assert it through the one thing that she could control her food she sketched herself Besh's and looking up at the camera like the average selfie today on Instagram and she even said in her diary I am grain very thin and a little taller and dr. Clarkson I shall grow quite tall after this I think that was wishful thinking but most she and her uncle were abdomen that if she tried she'd be able to grow a bit yeah right anyway massive pains were head in 1836 when there was a birthday dinner held by her other uncle William the fourth who by now was on the throne and who absolutely hated her mother at his birthday dinner in August 36 there was a terrible terrible scene which quite frankly you wouldn't believe if you saw it in some form of drama or soap on TV William who was quite drunk at the time stood up and shouted at Victoria's mother that she was incompetent unfit to be a regent and she was over held by evil advisers it wasn't what I would call a sort of easy tactful birthday dinner Victoria didn't mention it in her journal but all the courtiers as you can imagine it were a GOG William decided he needed to live long enough that Victoria would turn 18 and accede to the throne in her own right something which seemed a little bit dubious at the time as William was showing signs of a each one of the most touching part for me in researching this book was the bit where I was looking at the dining Ledger's at Windsor Castle for 1837 because William did manage to outlive Victoria's 18th birthday he managed to manage to live just a month after she turned 18 and when you're reading the dining Ledger's for that period trying to work out what the meals were like Windsor Castle in the last few months of William the fourth reign you suddenly realize that you're watching a man die through his menus it's really odd you've got full menus should have a there were two courses but there is sort of 3040 dishes listed and this goes on for day after day after day it's quite monotonous there's an awful lot of hair soup going on and you're reading it and then all of a sudden the Kings menu appears in a separate column barley soup chicken rice classic invalid food okay the King's ill can you keep breathing because you haven't really clocked what's going on at this point and you go through and the king is on this sort of unrelenting diet a chicken souffle and barley soup and beef tea and then all of a sudden he disappears completely disappears two days after the Archbishop of Canterbury appears at dinner clearly to administer that all the last rites and the day after the King dies it's no longer listed as their Majesty's dinners but just dinners at Windsor and they have a severely cut down menu for Victoria it meant freedom and as the last rites were administered to William before she couldn't wait to get her hands on queenship she mourned her uncle but she'd barely known him and now now she got to be in charge of bucket of ice it was amazing did Windsor - but you know that was kind of donkey's years old and also Queen Adelaide was living there so she said well you know hang onto it for a month I want locking in Palace and Buckingham Palace at the time with a building site having been finished it was pretty awful it's melted glue it was garish because it was William it was a daughter thought a stiff face a bright pink with gold all over it it was pretty nasty but it was ideal for an 18 year old who had a love of gold and wanted bling in everything plus it was enormous so she could stable her mother at one end of the palace and herself at the other a mother refused to move out absolutely refused steadfastly to go anywhere until Victoria got married which Wiktoria had absolutely no intention of doing whatsoever because she was Queen now and that meant she could go partying and party she did she threw herself into it all of this gold and bling that was her that was she wanted and Palace was very hastily refitted they managed to find a throne for her that's all she wanted they said there's no carpets or beds you know why I don't need carpets and beds but I do want a throne so they supplied to throw and she got her throne and that was fine and it largely worked and things well I say it largely worked but problem with the royal palaces was that they looked good I mean you know you've got the Waterloo gallery that's absolutely gorgeous they renamed it incidentally over time the French King visited and you've got Windsor it looks very nice although clearly this building works still going on Buckingham Palace is hideous but it all looks loyal doesn't it I mean you'd be forgiven for walking past today Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace and just assuming that if it's royal it works but then you might make the same assumption about Victoria's family and they certainly didn't work Buckingham Palace was a nightmare and it was one of the most shocking things actually in the research was reading the accounts of exactly what was going on there London itself was a growing issue you've all heard I'm assuming about cholera outbreaks and the Great Smog and all that kind of thing coal fires open running water with sewage running into it all of this stuff affected the poor though surely it wasn't a problem if you were royal kind of I'm Buckingham Palace had security issues so there are tramps regularly found in the grounds sometimes people broke in and tried to propose marriage one boy broke in three times eventually got transported to Australia for his pains but the worst thing or two of the work is what was the administration nothing got done so if you wanted a window fixing then you had to call up the window fixing department and that was fine they would sign a Chitty but then the window fixing departments going to find another department to come and actually fix the windows that never got done windows were cleaned on the inside but never on the outside because two different departments were liable for it in the kitchens even if you wanted a new pop three different people had to sign off on it and if you wanted a fire lit forget it one department laid the fire another department with responsible for lighting the fires so the place was freezing Windsor was especially known for its poor administration and seemed to swallow dusters at a rate of knots as well which is one of the strangest things that you find and Palace have a bigger problem though and the problem related to the kitchens the kitchens have never been properly finished so a lot of the rooms that you would expect to find with kitchens didn't exist you had the main kitchen things like Zardoz and scullery x' and roasting kitchens and vegetable kitchens they were a bit lacking instead there was a room full of urinals and open dust bins next to the main kitchen that's fine it just smells a bit I mean you know everyone can cope with a bit of man where you smell when they're cooking their swagger I can't Lee not a problem but it got worse because the kitchen when built had been built in a hurry by John Nash and he discovered as he built the Foundation's but it was a really handy brick floor underneath and he thought wait I just dug down I found a brick floor marvelous I will build the kitchen on top of this handy foundation it was a sewer the main sewer for the entire area the great conduit in fact and the bricks were porous so every time it rained who came up through the brickwork and the walls of the kitchen were about a foot deep in human effluvia it got worse as well because Buckingham Palace itself didn't have any decent sewage so why you got plebeian turds coming up through the kitchen floor you had royal poo going up through everybody else's floorboards and believe it or not people didn't really like that they said that Buckingham Palace was bringing the area down the ladies-in-waiting contained as well because every time you opened a window everything would go black inside the palace so you've got the smells of cooking the smell of urine the smell of glue all working its way through the palace and then you opened a window and opposite with a street called princes Court where upon one commentator said the emanations drawn into the palace of so powerful is to produce nor their and feelings of sickness when we went close to the sinks that's downstairs upstairs when you open the window the area offers it was used as a urinal for everybody in the area so all of those fumes would waft into the palace and turn all of the brass black overnight and the walls which were once white went black as well the ladies-in-waiting blame the local gas works but no it was just man we just imagined great place to work no ventilation charcoal chasing stoves in the kitchen cooks dying of respiratory failure and they're working with to up the walls I cannot really overemphasize how cozy it was Victoria didn't care she just ate the food the main kitchen in any case was at Windsor and Windsor Castle kitchens are still justifiably famous they acted as a kind of culinary hub for the whole reign so a lot of the food that was produced in these kitchens was sent off to Victoria wherever she was and parcels of mainly cakes and breads and baked goods were often sent off when she was at different palaces they were and are really quite stunning has anyone visited the Windsor Castle kitchens they're amazing aren't there you walk in and your jaw drops Gabrielle Schumi who was an apprentice in the 1890s said that the main kitchen looked like a chapel with its high domed ceiling it's feeling of airiness and light and the gleam of copper well-worn and burnished at each end of the room their origins are medievals if you go into the kitchens here in Durham and you see those wonderful fireplaces kind of a bit like that but five times bigger they have been redone by George the fourth the famous gourmand in 1828 so they didn't really need updating from most of Victoria's reign this is them in 1840 1860 1870 in 1880 1890 because the Illustrated London News just use the same picture every single year and you can see in them you've got gas lighting you've got these that used to be the roasting ranges similar to the ones that you've seen here but by this point of filled with charcoal chaffing stoves you've got an enormous roasting range at the back behind this screen which by the way has its own battlements because why wouldn't you have a roasting screen with battlements the roasting screen was a big wooden thing with doors in as you can see with this man here moving them and behind it is the roasting fire up here above it was the roasting spit and that was turned automatically to the the fire would draw so much air out the room that that draw would turn a fan which in turn would turn the spits so everything was fully automated there were brakes on it to stop it there was also a smaller fire just for the Queen's own roast meats the chasing is torturous those which are coal-fired so these ones were fairly well ventilated they didn't kill off too many cooks but they did need constant care and attention and this table in the middle was a steam heated table so elsewhere in the kitchen complex this huge boiler room and that pumped hot water all the way around the kitchen so this table was steam heated all the time these smaller tables were where the master chefs worked there was a head cook in charge of the whole thing for master cooks under him and then a staff of around 35 people under him and as you can see in this picture most of them were men but the staff of a round of a say 35 to 45 cooks about 70 people in total if you include the various silver pantry staff and the butler's and always kind of Butler eariler and about 15 of them at any one time were women eight after the thirty five cooks were women in 1900 if you were a woman you have it wasn't in the glass ceiling it was concrete they was absent you can't even see through it you were just there you join as a kitchen maid you might have two steps on the ladder if you were a man you'd go ever you wanted to a lot of people joined the kitchen with apprentices and stayed there making eventually yeoman of the kitchen or master cooks the titles are pleasingly weird there even is at one point of boy is the kitchen although by this point it's gone over here you've got William Collins who was the master Clarke and this is a man called George de Saul George like so many people in the kitchens was the son of somebody else working in the establishment it's totally nepotistic and he joins the son of a pager presence he joined and worked his way up from a princess very few people left sometimes I did sometimes they died quite a lot of them died in fact normally of respiratory failure one man died of fits he'd been having fits for at least two years while working in the Royal kitchens before he then retired and then died and one woman had appalling appalling living liver failure which would have been incredibly painful before she too died in service but by and large people stayed some people did get a sacked Charles Franco telly who was quite a well-known chef of his day cooked crock woods and eventually the Reform club joined the kitchens in the 1840s and got sacked after a frack are in the kitchen during which a policeman was called and he had to escape out of a window some left and started up their own businesses as well especially the confectioner's who were very very skilled individuals one called Giuseppe Calvo ran an ice cream parlor in Eaton many years afterwards to which the boys would apparently go and then not talk to him because he was scary and they will thought he'd been sacked or chastened down the street with a knife he didn't get sacked he left all the records are still there the wages were all right they weren't as good as you would earn if you were cooking for a hotel or a club a Heuer in a hotel or a club you might earn a thousand pounds a year or visiting your man if you were cooking in a private establishment you might earn 150 to 200 pounds a year this is as chief cook if you cooked at Windsor then you would earn about 250 to 300 pounds a year and that didn't really change there wasn't much inflation during this period you'd also get apartments at st. James's Palace and you had the right to come to work in a top hat and you've got perks as well you've got apprenticeship fees and various other things as well if you're a woman you might aspire to earn 40 pounds a year that's as much as you could manage it but there were benefits working in the Royal kitchens enabled you to at gain access after ten years of service to a pension something that was exceedingly rare at that point you also got sick pay the Queen's bounty which continued well into the 90s if not at early 2000s and was a selective bounty that you could have if you were sick one of my favourite characters that I found when researching the book was a woman called Jane Elgar who was a confectioner's maid she joined the kitchens when she was 17 in 1828 so only about 10 years after the first women even started in the world kitchens and she was there for her entire life she retired at 67 with a pension to Kent she had outlasted her five heads of department above her and she'd earned the same wage for about 60 years 40 pounds a year for the entire I'm good on Jane Elgar I say she could have left but as a woman in Victorian Britain I say she was better off staying where she was supplying the palace as you can imagine was in Lewis the number of people fed we tend to think of Palace food we think of the Queen but these kitchens were feeding anything between 3,000 and 15,000 people on the average month sometimes even several thousand people a day and the meal of on the top table could consist of anything between twelve thirty dishes and balls could consist of anything up to two or three hundred dishes sometimes repeated along the table when you look at the statistics of what went into the kitchens you realize this is not finesse this is not a nice restaurant environment this is mass catering jay-ar Muirfield was one of the main suppliers of meat and in the first two weeks of Victoria's reign he supplied four thousand pounds of beef two and a half thousand pounds of mutton two thousand pounds of veal four hundred pounds of lamb 200 pounds of suet 36 carvers livers three carved heads 204 carve speed 28 sweetbreads twelve Lambs beat seven quarters of lamb ten lamb necks 3 oxtail the four calves brains the brains clearly was a top table the beef went below the meals were staggering and their dining Ledger's on the period which show very much that there's not just three or four meals being because it's not just servants of the servants Queen there is a huge human infinite number of different tables and rank within this household status was incredibly important Victoria put on quite a lot of weight in their first year she managed to get herself up to nine and a half stone which she decided was incredibly fat for someone a size foot one so she went on a diet and got down to seven spoon two that gives her a BMI of 18.8 for anyone who's interested in such things she is right at the bottom of where you should be if you're healthy and clearly version on what today we would regard as exceedingly thin she was incredibly worried she was going to be a fat Hanoverian and she was encouraged in that thought by Lord Melbourne her first prime minister but what it didn't mean was that when she got married she was tiny this is her wedding dress that you can see over here the marriage was dawning Victoria in 1837 to 1830 9:00 was a party animal she loved going to balls getting drunk saying up to 5:00 in the morning getting up early they're not really getting up early but staying in bed till late then feeling guilty about what so she hadn't done then going to another ball getting drunk we've all been there I feel that sort of cycle of hangovers and stuff anyway she got bored very very bored and the nation was starting to get a bit sick of her she looked like she's gonna be fun and sweet but she was 18 really naive and frankly didn't know her job and she was so bored but when Albert turned up she fell completely in love I mean I'm not suggesting that she didn't genuinely love him later on but the marriage was very much engineered by her mother and uncle Leopold and on paper they were not suited at all when she'd first met Albert at her 17th birthday party he'd been too weak and feeble to make the dinner fainted halfway through the first dinner couldn't come to the party afterwards and generally from the entire trip being a complete nutter worse he probably had cranes disease which doesn't exactly make him a foodie so you've got on the one hand someone who wants to get drunk party and half as she put it a great deal of dissipation and on the other hand a man who doesn't like eating and regards food as simply sustenance but they got married and it was lovely and everybody hated him because he was a German and we don't like people who are not British do we apparently and you all know what follows nine children she did not put on significant amounts of weight during the marriage and it does genuinely appear that Albert quote/unquote tamed her now I have grave reservations about this whole idea of him teaming her she herself said later in life that meeting and marrying Albert meant that she calmed down that she became the woman she was supposed to be the goodness sake she was 19 and having a good time did she need taming she thought in later life she did she grew increasingly closer to Albert and Albert he did not like Buckingham Palace he did not like London living he didn't even particularly like Windsor and even she complained that Windsor was beautiful and comfortable but her palace and God knows how willingly I would always live with my beloved Albert and our children in the quieten retirement of private life and not always be the constant object of observations and newspaper articles celebrity status alive and well and living in the eighteen fifties anyway moving on from the picture of miserable Victorians she did get her way she went over to France in the eighteen forties early 1840 and fell in love with the idea of a private palace like Louis Philippe Chateau du and so she bought and she and Albert did up well mainly Albert I was born house on the Isle of Wight this view is of the kitchens so here they are they are now garages and all of this is garage doors but the kitchens are in this block here and wrapped around there they took a skeleton staff seven or eight cooks with them and they lived in the way a private middle-class family would except obviously for the massive amounts of servants and the two massive apartment blocks all of this is servants and courtiers and obviously the politicians but you know if you go over that their meals certainly warmer were more subdued they ate often only three or four courses well six and they ate as a private family sometimes the children came and ate with them and it was very obvious that this was a house about children one of the nicest things about it is the way in which Victoria sought to sort of get over and to make up for her own hideous childhood by having for her children a completely different set up this is Swiss Cottage which some of you might be familiar with and that's the kitchen on the inside it apparently is 3/4 sized it's the perfect height for me and this was set up so the children could learn to cook this was royal crane it's not completely unusual for royal princes and princesses at this point in time to have a play kitchen and a play house but the Royal kids would go down there cook their own afternoon tea or lunch growing their own vegetables and they would cook in the kitchen and the scenes have been no form of gendering either it wasn't girls in the kitchen boys in the garden girl and boys all had their own plot and they all seemed to cook Toria would go down there with Albert and they'd have a Children's Tea Party and then they'd dig the governess out from the fort where the children had locked her and generally have an absolutely splendid time and Swiss Cottage remained in use by Victoria's children and her grandchildren until well into the 1870s at which point it started to become more of a private t-taking house for the Queen herself it was quite convenient because it had a loo so she could stop when she was in the grounds and find tea she did a lot of finding tea ignores the fact someone had to make it clearly they also decided to build Balmoral which was more about hunting anything that moved really Albert at one point wanted to dig trenches so that he could he could shoot the deer and they couldn't see him but that was regarded as very unbrushed and vetoed Bart's nevertheless dead things especially venison was a huge path what barrel morel was about and again the children were involved so they were encouraged to go out and learn to spear salmon in the river to go out and to butcher deer to kill the birds it was all brilliant this was an orgy of death massive great game Lada and Victoria also along with Albert adapted at this point the habit of tramping out incognito around the countryside I don't know how incognito you can be when you turn up in a carriage with a royal crest on it but apparently everybody helped she was delighted she always thought she was unrecognized and in she went too and it often led to her having some terrible dinners on one occasion she noted the wine was awful so it's good they'd brought their own and there was no pudding and no fun she clearly hadn't given up on her love of food but she didn't as I say for some weight she did develop a taste of whisky from living in the highlands as well Beggs distillery which was on the Balmoral estate very cleverly invited her and Albert out to come and see the distillery and Albert as a scientific man was really interested in the process of distilling and Victoria was really interested in the results and after that Beggs best was always on the menu wherever they went on one occasion she notoriously added whiskey to her claret which if it I suppose you don't be appalled try it don't try it before you have to do anything but do try it because it is surprisingly good and I think gives you quite an interesting perspective on the Queen it is lethal but it tastes fabulous she was blissfully happy at least in retrospect in reality she and Albert were having enormous raus he still couldn't digest anything and he took advantage of every trip he took to Germany alone to go on a fasting diet where he just used to drink chamomile tea and take lemon in water but it's very very clear that most of the time their marriage was about as harmonious as the average marriage often is and as you can see from this picture taken in 1861 she really is fairly trim still as well as besotted Albert on the other hand looks increasingly florid and unpleasant and the British nation had vainly taken him to heart mainly because of the Great Exhibition in the fact that he was doing an awful lot to promote the cause of British farming at the time heavily involved in both agricultural improvement but also in improving the loss of especially the rural poor this is from Punch there's Albert and his Victoria milking a cow never happened but it is rather cool I think doom-doom this is a scene that never happened as well which is great this is one of the sort of Florida magazines unfortunately none of the children without a part and bare-chested and there are stripey people there's a very beautiful looking queen there are small children there's no Kaiser cradling the Queen at cradling sorry these dollar at point there's a negative there were lot bishops presence for Albert's death mustering prayers it was all very long drawn-out and nasty and Queen Victoria blamed her eldest son Bertie for his death because Bertie had got himself mixed up in a sexual scandal and Albert being rather printed rushed over to go and try sorting out it was all rather torrid and rather unnecessary and current theory is that Albert actually died from complications of Crohn's disease probably pneumonia and that he probably had a stomach ulcer dartz Victoria decided he had typhoid just as she has had in 1835 that they were warming the same and she threw herself into depression she was properly depressed in a clinical and very hardcore way she had some form of nervous breakdown couldn't move couldn't she lost the use of her legs for several months and the same when John Brown died as well she couldn't walk off and it is no doubt this slaughter brought her completely but she also threw herself back into her first love and she threw herself into eating I do not believe that she had a torrid affair with John Brown or the Munchie or any of the other men in her life but she had two big loves Albert and food and with one gone she went for the other she said later of Albert that she did nothing moved not a finger arranged not a print or a photograph and didn't put on a gown or a banach if he didn't approve it that is how she felt that she had been with him if any of you are familiar with the 2016 definition of abuse domestic abuse it's very very close it's not true it's very very clear from reading her journals and the words of the people around her that she was still having enormous rounds with him but he was still dedicated to work he was far too busy doing his own stuff to tell her whether or not he'd liked her hat the nose face she had terrible clothing firms so to be honest he probably would have been better than her and she wouldn't have worn such terrible clothing if he had actually bothered to admit an opinion but she was prepared to abrogate herself to his memory in such a way that she really did become subject to what he had been never mind or in her memory what he had been nevermind what he actually was the breakdown led to her putting on weight and already by the 18th by 1863 who is described as growing enormously fat she really did replace sex which she adored with food which she adored even more and this picture she loved because she said it had a total honesty about it a knack of flattery she said it's not good at there I mean she's not a pretty woman it must be said one of the things that did change as she moved out of the deepest phase of mourning was that she did discover other things to do and those things were holidays one of the biggest associations with Victoria is the Riviera and the holidays that she took towards the end of her life and you can easily divide her life into phases childhood the years before she got married when she was partying the years when she was married and fairly stable the deepest ways of mourning and that bit where she came out of it and where she did things which by her own admission she felt guilty about doing because Albert was not there to share with them with her on her deathbed she said that she did feel a little bit nervous about meeting Albert because she done a great number of things that she felt he wouldn't approve of and that's included partying like a beast on the French Riviera the first holiday she went on was to listen in Switzerland and she went there specifically because Albert had been there before he'd met her so she felt that she was following in his footsteps and her journals at the time are full of the fact that she tramped up Mount which was constantly hot always traveled every road ice so she was tramping up and up and up further up mountains as far up as possible to find somewhere that was icy and then she'd had tea and pick wild berries and eat them and then have tarts made out of them she brought her own chef with her to Lucerne and they also employed local chefs who were taught to make English sandwiches one Swiss newspaper said they were actually very good if you got used to them she was in the FATA gobble she tramped out in all weathers this is Ann I am in a serrated London News picture which is not particularly brilliant reproduction but you can see the tea set up here and there she is in her carriage being given her tea she attended the fete to gosh it's perfect a cold autumn as it was called in Nice where they were painting gourds and bright colors often with her face on them she sat down to enormous lunches while she was in Nice and he went off in all weathers coming back covered in dust she kind of like gone shot hers when she was an ex at one point and when they offered her some refreshments and brought her tea she refused it saying she'd only really come for the shorter of spirit that she knew they made she commented it was quite strong it was a very unbalanced lifestyle anybody in the public eye has an unbalanced lifestyle the victorious was worse than most at this point if she was taking meals in private or with her ladies as she often did she would have a fairly cut down version of the enormous menu that she would have had when she was younger something perhaps fairly light like just six courses and loads of mutton but she would also host state visits this is the Tsar of Russia his wife and the Grand Duchess Olga who was shot in 1917 in a basement I know it brings it alive doesn't it when you see them in tinted color and you suddenly realize what happened to them here again at Windsor with the great buffet on display a massive state ball and this you can see this various foreign dignitaries meeting Victoria at state banquets the food was incredible bustards which had been hunted to extinction in Britain role before she was eating them guarded hares kidneys I mean yarded hares kidneys nodding means sewing strips of bacon through the flesh of a beast hares kidneys not very big how do you learn it the delicacy of that process must be absolutely incredible turtle super coming out of their ears champagne jelly pineapple jelly poached apricots lamb sweet valla Vaughn's grouse if it moved they ate it if it grew they ate it but never in plain ways always in elaborate ways it could be very fraught when the Shah of Persia visited rumor went around the whole of Europe as he moved around that he was lecherous that he would put an arm on the back of the Queen's chair that he would eat his dinner and throw the bones underneath the chair and worse still that he needed an eye exam to sacrifice to the Rising Sun with very disappointing when he visited he ate lots of fruit and didn't drink any wine it was rather shocked at the fact that the Victoria's sons were wearing kilts and he didn't throw chicken bones under the chair at all although in the menu books it's clear he was having live lambs brought in did he sacrifice them probably not they were probably just butchered in a halal manner for his followers but there we go on day to day basis while Victoria's meals were large it's a more physical age and she's a very physical person her breakfast was usually mutton chops sausages in a beefsteak 1875 you've got four people for breakfast they have sausages with potatoes grilled whiting poached eggs in stock hot and cold roast fowl and bread and porridge so you know reasonable you're not going to eat it all but you are going to eat a fair amount of it you are not encouraging waste in this scenario your luncheon was relatively small often made of leftover dishes usually served a la francaise everything on the table at once in your dinner well Anna Frances was a service style early in the rain so to courses lots of non-traditional on the table at once moving to a LaRussa sequential linear service and around 1874 there were muted dinners so June 1857 there were just three of them they only had soups with poached secret poached eggs a clear chicken soup a soul grass and fried Whiting's roast beef and caper with asparagus follow Avanza bechamel sauce grilled eggs apricot flan and waffles virtually nothing isn't it this is a page from a ledger you can see from 1897 and here you can see this is the royal dinner the household dinner for the upper servants the number of people and who they are you've got a royal luncheon and then you've got spread out across the pages as I mentioned all those various groups which could be as few as one person mr. Fraser who is one of the Highland servants just had his own dinner because he was a status all of his own and the food could be spectacular didn't have to be but could be and often also spectacular in a way that we would not imagine this for example is a lamb's head curry where you take the ears and poach them and then stop them and sum them and you take the brains and make them into croquette you take the meat you know what I'm not selling it man's cutting off I had turtle's head perhaps a bit better if you wanted turtle soup which was often eaten at big state occasions you'd import a live turtle from the West Indies chop its head off honey's up overnight use the green fat and use the flesh to make two different dishes and often serve it in the turtle shell as well there's your plain jellies birds always served as you can see head legs on pancakes jellies they're the blancmange this one is a particularly good Victorian dish that one is Jerusalem artichokes and Brussels sprouts with a while with a rice border so excellent with corsets it's going to hurt that isn't it the food looked great it tasted great Victorian foods had a really bad reputation for staad suet pudding I don't understand what pudding is see nurse dodge suet pudding is one of the best things this country's ever invented I mean quite frankly a good suet pudding is unbeatable and good for you because we all know now that's good for you don't we sugars bad that's good fine it'll be different next year anyway but just imagine sitting down to a meal this is a fraction quarter of the dish year on offer the point wouldn't be that you would eat all of the dishes incidentally whether it was served all on the table at once or whether it's sequential you could pick and choose to some extent but the meals were large and Victoria could put away nine courses in half an hour so her gobbling habit that she had when she was younger was certainly still a feature of her older age she could if she wanted to slow down a later statelessness said the meal took two and a half hours and the Queen ate of everything that was on offer including the hot and cold puddings and all of the meats and all of the vegetable van everything but half an hour's what she could do and she would use that as a way of disciplining her courtiers let's face it if you're eating with the Queen when she finishes a dish it's off so if you don't eat the same pace she does you don't eat and courtiers contained time and time again that eating with the Queen was a horrible experience because if they wanted to have conversation than they couldn't eat and if they wanted to eat they didn't have time for conversation as she grew older one of the really obvious features of her life is the fact that she remains excited by food she was not as many people say an invalid from early on I think we have a vision of Victoria which goes young young young young young Albert died old old old old not true at all she had problems with her need she'd fallen over and smash tourney at one point and therefore she walked with a stick and by the late 1890s she did have cataracts which meant that she struggled to see but she was not an invalid she was quite sprightly well in the 1890s she was still able to dance a Highland jig much to her courtiers annoyance she remained excited by food one of her ladies-in-waiting her parents owned a farm in Ledbury and Victoria was constantly asking her to supply new things she hadn't eaten cider Perry enormous apples that she was sick and eat on her own new varieties of things beautiful grapes on one occasion in 1885 the International Health exhibition was on in London and there were Chinese cooks preparing meals as part of it when Victoria got wind of it she had them brought to Windsor to cook her a Chinese meal this in an era when Chinese food was really only seen in Limehouse and other areas by ports she said that she found the bird's nest soup to be particularly good this was what this is so right up to the end of her life even in the 1890 even in 18 in 1899 and in 1900 when she was clearly dying what she laments is the fact that she's lost her appetite and that is the point when you know she's dying as well as with William the fourth you can read the Queen's life to some extent in her Ledger's although by this point they are few and far between you can also read them in her own words she complains about her lack of appetite and it's very clear that when her appetite goes she knows what's coming she's well aware that she's going to die she's well aware that her life is ending and she doesn't want it to she says at one point that although when the prince died she wanted to die desperately now she feels there's more to do and she doesn't want to go yet and she fights all the way to the end even right up to her dying breath she is constantly making a recovery the very last day the day she dies her family are summoned in the morning to stand around her deathbed and then they have to go away because she needs a week and she had a glass of milk and signed some letters and then they come back again because she's going to die and she doesn't so they ask the Archbishop of Canterbury to stop saying prayers because it's getting a bit boring and then finally she does die it's almost a complete anticlimax when you're reading her doctor's letters and she's finally gone and the nation well the nation doesn't know what to do this by the way is the size of her when she was older she dies there's morning she gets a white funeral she says that black is depressing so everything should be white and it snows on the day of the funeral so it really is white and at the end of an age and no one really knows what's coming next and really what comes next and the shape of Bertie is viktoria to the power of 10 Bertie has a very love-hate relationship with his mother his mother doesn't really like Bertie but they have a great deal common Bertie is a glutton and a gourmand like his mother but it's acceptable to eat like a king but if I tell you that someone ate like a queen you think very differently about what that means Bertie ate himself into an early grave throwing himself into work and food with equal gusto fat disgusting lecherous known as Tumtum and Edward the Caressa he turned out to be a brilliant monarch but I think he has a lot more in common with Victoria than he would have wanted to actually admit to she would be a hero to me ignore her politics ignore all the conflicting messages about motherhood ignol the fact that she declared him a bit of an old bat's in her household and old age and celebrate the fact that she ate for her country she ate curry cooked by her Indian cooks or the cook to her Indian servants I should say she ate Chinese food before almost anyone else had tasted it she constantly explored new flavors and tastes throughout her reign and she ate a lot of them in an age where food was constantly changing or where our diets changed almost out of all belief from the beginning to the end she ate all of that and then she ate some more now we don't like greedy people these days the Daily Mail and other horrendous newspapers of that Hill like to fat shame people I've been told that this will go down very well with some readers of some newspapers because historic fat shaming is in yeah she was huge so what her husband died when she was in her forties if she wanted to eat my god she was queen who are we to sit in judge her for the fact that her knickers were enormous by the end of her life it didn't seem to affect her health she did have a prolapsed hernia and various other problems by the time she died but she was in two areas I think we should salute her not necessarily follow completely in her footsteps I wouldn't advise that you each endangered birds or quite as much as she ate but I think we should celebrate the spirit of the Victorian period and there's so many different spirits to choose from in this case we can celebrate the spirit of the Victorian period as exemplified by Victoria by drinking a glass of claret mixed with whiskey and pushing ourselves to try new flavors and embrace the fact that British food is every food and loving everything we eat thank you very much [Applause] no chiefly if I sit now no one will see me thanks very much and Matthew David from here in Durham given that England has had eight monarchs named after potatoes Edward the eighth King Edward the second King able do etc anyway and given the catalogue that you've provided over gout bloated sort of leaders and the preceded Victoria and followed from her Victoria special or suggest another sponge I suggest another sponge she she is special in that she during her reign the power of the monarchy did change partly because of this long period where she just refused to see anyone so public popular perceptions of the monarchy changed in terms of the fact that should we have a molecule not have a monarchy those are wider issues between her and Edwards I would say they changed perceptions of the monarchy and change what it meant so up to Victoria the Manik was very involved was very much a political figure by the end of it toria's ray and even more moving into Bertie's reign it was more about ceremony her funeral was huge people turning out on the streets her jubilee to Jubilees within the space of 10 years big ones to 87 and 97 you know thousands of people feeding on beef and plum pudding celebrating the Queen's reign so I think the big thing that Victoria is that she changed perceptions of the monarchy from hideous foul people who did lots of political things and lost America to quite benign thing that we all turn out on the street some wave flags around and that is let's face it largely what Monica means today we have forgotten the monarch is the third house and that should she wish to behave like Trump she could sign executive orders to in theory hello I'm William old from Durham the Victorians were quite well known for their interest in sparse health sparse roar lemming Tain's ba Harrigan and so on did you come across any evidence so that was mirrored in Queen Victoria's diet ie healthy eating in inverted commas no and Bertie was very inspired so even during Victoria's life birth he often went off to spars although part of that was because it was very easy for him to meet women of slightly loose morals or I mean he didn't tend to sleep with prostitutes Bertie tended to sleep with the wives of other aristocrats who wouldn't have venereal diseases so he likes spars from that point of view although it wasn't really so much about the health aspect from Victoria's point of view health didn't really play a role towards the end of her life she was constantly being asked to slow down and to reduce what she ate she was offered vengers vengeance I think same pronunciation goes which is an indigestion remedy and she was advised to take that instead of one of her meals possibly luncheon and she just tried it and liked it and added it to the meals she was a hypochondriac she was constantly worried that you by the end of her life about her health and used to write some anguish letters to her doctors saying that she was definitely having a heart attack completely having a heart attack and the doctors would confer with each other and say it's probably just trapped wind and it usually did turn out to be trapped wind so she worried about her own health but she never seemed to do anything with her diet to do and it's not ways exercised when she was younger she loved riding and used to across the countryside for miles and miles and miles but she did that because she enjoyed it she didn't really do it because she felt the health benefits are there there's been a lot of stuff talked about the fact that anorexia and various other eating disorders have their roots in the Victorian era something I don't believe it's very clear that Victoria was verging on that when she was a teenager so I would say that you know someone so clearly verging on that when they're a teenager before the rain starts how can it be a product the Victorian age when it's not Victorian yet so she had an old relationship with food but it wasn't health driven and she did not rest feed them she refused to do despite the fact she'd been breastfed and she said the first child was very worried over Vicky their Princess Royal she was the woman in charge of the nurseries that she clocks and she was just like any new mother she and Elbert had their first massive Wow over feeding Vicky the youngest child Victoria shouted she was she never married Albert and stormed out of the room and he wrote her letters recriminate and then she burst into tears and I mean it was all just revolting but certainly they tried feeding Vicky acid milk and all sorts of bits and pieces and she had two richer diet but they largely left it really to their nurses murmurs maids and the governesses so they had a fairly sort of typical upbringing that they were weaned at six months onto again it was bread and milk but also things like chicken and rice and girls especially with February plain food because it was felt but otherwise it would excite their appetites and they become too masculine too interested in sex as they grew older and even with boys Berkey at one point was put on a really stringent diet because it was quite clear he was a tearaway they were terrible to burst he actually in retrospect they treated him very badly and you know just like his mother they used to put him on diets and used to find ways around it because he loved his food so it was a fairly typical Victorian child's upbringing for most of the children Beatrice the youngest one was slightly different she's to get to come and sit downstairs and have pudding off people's plates and behave very badly hi Alexis Cleveland from Durham City you've done all this research on all the recipes in there how many if any recipes have you taken into your dinner party repertoire and quite a few the Brussels biscuits are amazing well no you know what I do like Brussels sprouts and artichokes but there's a limit not on a school night is all I'd say and the Brussels biscuits which she talks about I love there are recipes in the book just for the chapter headings really to give people a flavor of how they and how they're written as well and I've cooked all of the ones in the book of which the Brussels biscuits I would say are the real winner but in the wider kind of in a wider way I lost the round album familiar with Victorian resident anyway and one of my absolute favorites is a Victorian recipe which would not have anything by the Queen it's a very middle-class recipe for sausages and chestnuts an issue which if you wanted to do is just leave the butter fried chopped sausages any sausage will do from beef sausage to breakfast whatever fry off throw in a load of chestnuts get the good ones don't get the ones in the box get the ones in the tin just sort of hit them a bit so there's loads of them give them a bit more of a fry for I'm gonna load a good Twitter chicken stock throw in a load of Madeira or possibly another fortified liquor ginger wine works put a lid on it simmer it down for 20 minutes 45 minutes whatever you want scrape the bottom off because there's a really good gooey goodness in there throwing low decay and Pat our chopped parsley and cream serve it that is one of my go-to dishes it's so easy and it's just it's one of the things you return to again and again and again I think a lot of the flavors at this point are very well balanced and very interesting and middle-class food actually is very very good where it gets bad is towards the end of the period where you start to get a sort of culinary kich among the aspirational middle part of the upper middle classes and that's when you start to get things like you can't serve a tongue anymore you have to chop up rabbit and veal and chicken and pork and mince them put it through a sieve and then mix them with a speck and then put them into a tongue mould and serve that and you think that why don't you just have tongue and so and Woodcock I would avoid sorry just say strong especially the guts on toast and but a lot of the dishes are very very nice indeed and at the level of cooking for the Queen Vesta pendous or they do take a lot of the time a very long time to cook so I'm waiting to the man with the microphone to run round hi I'm Sophie Ridley I'm at Durham University and you're talking about the children cooking in Swiss Cottage and I feels a bit like playing house but for the Royal children that seems quite unusually they're kind of playing at what the rest of the country would be doing for house or they must've had some understanding of cooking and food at that level 18 I mean in some ways very unusual it's not hyper unusual in that fedora Victoria's half-sister also have a Swiss Cottage for her children to cook in but she's obviously not at the level of queen of Great Britain she's a minor German and Duchess and the the setup of it is I think designed to teach them about the real world not because they will ever be cooking but because they will be in charge of households of their own to some extent countries of their own and therefore it is deemed useful for them to know about the domestic economy so Albert is behind the gardens that they set up and have those set up before the cottages sound 53 those go in and he gives the market price for their vegetables so they have to grow the best version a helped by the gardener they grow the best vegetables they sell them on to Albert they have a miniature grocer's shop which has everything marked up with price beautiful sprat grocers to the voucher royalty and everything's in there perfectly macaroni and Tapio come in lots of Victorian greens all of them marks up there's even a little toy range for the children that are too young and too small to be able to reach the ranges and Victoria seems to have kept a cookery book of her own from 1832 not necessary recipe she'd cooked more recipes she got from other places so you know she's got on in there that's a hair soup that she was given to her by William before who certainly had a lot of hair soup so it seems it's probably true and the was a manuscript book in the kitchen that Swiss cottages may have been her so there is some extent a certain level of transmission of recipes but it seems to be more about the fact that these children will go on to be movers and shakers they need to know the nitty-gritty and the need to be grounded and of course most of them do go on to marry into royalty or even if it's a fairly minor royalty there's only a couple that marry mere aristocrats but even then you're still in charge of a household and a lot of the prevailing dialogue at the time is about how even if you are a woman and you are in the house and that is your economy that is not someone who doesn't get their hands dirty the whole concept of the domestic angel doesn't exist you might be domestic but your hiring and firing servants you are in charge of the body of the house you're in charge of bringing up children to go out and die for the Empire so the woman you've got enormous responsibility so whether you're a woman or whether you're one of the boys we have a choice force as well so there's lots of martial activities - it's really important that you know what other people are doing what your subjects are doing so that you've got an understanding and it's one of the curiosities of them they love doing it Princess Royal when she goes across marasmus Germany at Marist Russia she sets up her own dairy and she writes back to her mother and says how to make milk here and what eating the right cream settling comes and they send each other vegetables from their own kitchen gardens and comment on the growing techniques so they're clearly both of them very involved and Victoria hauls the kitchen gardens at Windsor not just to have a look but she writes in her journals before state visits that she went out to inspect the apricots and decided with the guard that they weren't ready yet so there is a level of involvement there which in some ways is quite surprising but in other ways actually is quite sort of normal if you look at country houses and the way in which shuttle ins work there you Harriett whining university over um why do you feel that Queen Victoria has such a sober reputation despite her at the time level partying and eating and so forth but we also remember and we are not amused very what Victorian is I think it's partly because a lot of the sources about her the primary sources were written in the last years of her reign where she'd already become with deified you couldn't write this in Bound about her I mean even within just the culinary spear the number of times you hear the Victoria only ate a boiled egg for breakfast well clearly not I mean I menus are there she's not eating up all the day feeding sausages and beef steaks and mutton and all you'll hear that she pictured her food like a bird again absolute rubbish but the source is published in her lifetime of abandoned book in 1897 called the private life of the Queen that's been used a lot as a source book and that's very flattering it's very simple a magazine the memoirs of her ladies-in-waiting came out much later in the sixties so a lot of what we think of as Victoria is because of the writings and the twenties and thirties and you've got people on it and stretching like that is revision is written is history where you want to reject the Victorians because you're the new age and therefore you have to paint the Victorians in a bad light and Victoria in the worst light possible because she defines Victorian because you can't possibly admit I mean that we are not a news story has its roots in an anecdote where she did apparently tell someone to shut up because he was telling stories that were not entirely suitable but he read her ladies-in-waiting Diaries is quite clear she's shaking with laughter we had a very amusing lady's dinner she's got a really wicked sense of humor and you know they're all sort of mean things that we wouldn't find particularly funny today because we're used to slightly more ribald sense of humor I think and stuff about turning up those and I mean look at Sunday at dinner who turns up and he's talking about his sister and somebody else is talking about a boat and at some point somebody says what Weekender able to scrape to her bottom and of course everyone gets a wrong end of the stick and it's absolutely hilarious and the Queen is shaking with laughter there's a comedian that turns up at one point and does an impression of her what she asks him to because she's heard that he doesn't impression and he says absolutely not and she's made go on going you need tuning is master chief now you do so he does it and afterward she stares at him and parrot and Horowitz of God and then she slowly starts to shake and shake and shake to the tears running down her face and after she said that was very very clever and very very funny and you must promise me never to do it again say I always think of as Queenie and of course it's probably the wrong way to think about Brittany's a lot of it is about people to find themselves in opposition to what came before so if you're in the 20s you define yourself in opposition to Victoria and of course it's very very hard when she takes hold especially as the widow of Windsor - then combat this view and even today the knickers the notorious knickers that come up to sail from time to time for 35,000 pounds or whether they are even today I've taken part in historic online courses where people have been outraged outraged that someone wanted a picture of Queen Victoria's knickers we're fat shaming this is disgusting I can't believe we're doing this so it's still hard there's enough distance to say no it's okay to study someone fairly dispassionately to be interested in her personal life to try and find the new perspective to try and combat those myths because in doing so we gain a new perspective on ourselves which is of course that's ultimately what the historians are all little one of them I'm chip Tucker on five-foot-ten and I'm visiting from Virginia Queen Victoria quickly became a fixture in celebrity culture of a kind of new kind in her century which impinged on commodity culture another development of the century and I've seen ads of the Queen's face on ad for pairs so that that date from the latter part of the 19th century did she get associated with any foods in the market in that way was she used to brand bacon or something I was being associated with her indirectly I mean the latter part of the 19th century as you rightly say is very much about when you get commodity the way through but food processed food products really boom in the 1870s and 1880s and in lots of people are very canny about how they market their products the first shipment of frozen beef which comes across from Argentina they send her one of the joints to me is a really risky thing to be because it wasn't very well frozen it was a zero for the voyage if it's food hygiene skiing but they sent her the beef and she pronounced it very nice so they were able to say well this has been sent to the Queen of England they also sent one to Bertie as well the same with canned me things things I've been sent to her to try and there are certain sources especially the source could all born source which come about which is by the chemist to her majesty's establishment so there's lots of things like that which are bits and genital and you get dishes named after her so the most obvious on this Victoria sponge the sponge cake exists well before Victoria's reign but that particular form the Victoria sandwich Victoria sponge is obviously named after her and you get a lot of cookbook writers call their recipes after various children motion haven't survives so there's a voice called agonist Marshall in the 1880s he was quite a notorious puffer of her own Goods she holds up the patents she's actually brilliant and she has things like little cakes ala Beatrice and various things ala Louise and Frankie Kelly does the same thing so despite getting fact all of his books a cooperative Queen Victoria and he has lots of recipes in there for soup ala hen or dishonour Windsor that kind of thing this sort of so there are soups that do get associated with her but they're not they shouldn't be if that makes sense you know she doesn't endorse them as such obviously if you've got a royal warrant it's slightly different so there are lots of companies that possess world warrants which is the right to supply the court and they are renewed a pay for them but they renew the still warrants they're renewed every year so those suppliers that genuinely do supply the court have the right to say supplier to Her Majesty and that does get used and used a lot and they will really go to town on that royal crest on everything so that is certainly something that gets used but as you say you know her face does appear an awful lot and she can't really sue them all at that point but she is a phenomenon from that point of view I'm Michael sing a student here at the University I'd like to ask given her diet and the standard of Health and food health and safety standards at the time how important were doctors for I guess the survival of Queen Victoria to old age and she was blessed with the constitution of an ox there are certainly things that should have killed that like that shipment of frozen beef to be honest well dodgy she always had doctors on call she always had doctors in her household and they were very important but something sent their importance was because she suffers from such bad hypochondria her last doctor dr. Reid was very important in her life he sort of replaced John Brown and Prince Albert as the main man and she came to rely on and worked as an intermediate really between the household and herself so they were important but in it medicine at the time was not he couldn't administer antibiotics and penicillin and various other drugs so either the limit to what they can do they were important in other way as them and she the nine children she had clears there had been major complications that would have been problems but the last two if not three she had horror form for Victoria wasn't exactly a massive proponent of women's rights but by having chloroform for the last three children she did make an enormous change to how women gave birth because at that point it was seen that if you had chloroform as a woman it was a terrible thing to do it was unbiblical you were denying yourself the pain of childbirth you wouldn't be able to bond with your child it was Eve's punishment for having Adams thrown out of the Garden of Eden that woman should have to go through pain of childbirth all this absolute baloney and the Queen just basically said well go do one I'm having chlorophyll and and in doing so she really that was like a huge move forward for women quite frankly but otherwise I'm not sure the doctor could have done much the saver I mean they pretty much administered beef tea and that was about the limit of their usefulness a lot of the time she did have gout inevitably and she also had an abscess at one point I needed Lansing and which was a lot of pain from that and again at that point suddenly in her journals food bubbles up was a real preoccupation because she can't even light from Fork she can't neither arm and she has to be fed by her daughter and the level of revulsion that she feels not being able to eat with her own knife and fork is quite obvious they were around to do things like Lance boils and look after her gout and bandage hair but mainly they were there I think to her mental health as much as anything and that was a much much bigger concern when it came to Victoria sort of Amit shall I give in order okay right number one and two are sort of links in the the prevailing cuisine of Europe his french still is au cuisine french so her head chefs will often french and there are a lot of french working in her kitchens and that was similar across europe there were differences in germany for example they had breakfast at sort of nine o'clock and then they had their dinner at about four or five whereas in england we had breakfast lunch and then dinners about eight o'clock so they were different in the meal patterns but the dinners were roughly speaking the same and when she going on state visits you know she knows how to behave and likewise people coming across know how to behave because those norms at dinner are roughly the same most of her cooks were english and most of them were recruited through the royal household links already so some of them had French or Swiss or German parents that the parents worked in the royal household and the children were usually born in Britain her confectionery chefs were usually Italian because the Italians had a reputation has been the best confectioner's but they were usually recruited through one of the big confectionary firms they're gone to the wards Bridgman so a big confectionary professional confectionary houses caterers some are Swiss again that would be because she's got Swiss people working in the household Gabrielle Schumi who I mentioned was going Wow where the kitchens were Swiss and her bakers were often German which again was fairly normal in Britain there were lots of German bakers who had fled Russian oppression during the 60s and 70s and come across to Britain so there was quite a mixture but most of them were British then at the end of her life for her do believe she had Indian servants brought across in 1887 they came with their own cook to cook for them exclusively but that could also cooked fish curry and chicken curry for her every week for about a few months in the 1880s and then occasionally thereafter so there was a fair range of nationality I hated the Indians partly get racism partly through linguistic barriers and partly because the Munchie who was in charge of the household was quite a nasty piece of work and had gonorrhea and that was felt not to be the right thing to do in the royal household and so for the second question which is sort of answered anyway it was it was roughly Silla in terms of population in terms of movement she's quite an interesting figure at various point she suddenly becomes very aware of the plight of the poor and at one point she writes to her eldest daughter and says that the working class is but essentially said she she can't believe the working classes are still not rising up against them because really they're all oppressed but when she when she's younger when she's a teenager she forces family of gypsies and becomes very entranced with this traveling family and goes out and gives them blankets and food and for a while it almost looks like she's going to develop a social conscience and then she doesn't but his Lord Melbourne tells her not to worry about the poor because they're always going to be poor she didn't worry too much about it but she tells at various points do things within her own remit to try and help them so there are various balls that held notoriously there's a ball held in aid of a Spitalfields silk workers who are struggling with mechanization coming in where she where the stomacher worth 60 thousand pounds if she just sort of sold that it would have raised quite a lot more than the ball and eventually she gets involved in the plight of the Irish during the Irish potato famine as well and gives money to various causes but in the main she doesn't bother herself about it and when she's in seclusion in the 1860s there is a genuine movement to overthrow the monarchy there is a huge Republican underground recovery but people somebody puts a sign on the bucking Palace gate saying for sale unwanted owner gone away you know she's at Balmoral all the time and and she is told come out of retirement you will not survive the monarchy won't survive this so there is a movement and she does not help it and eventually she has to come out of retirement because government won't grant her any money to get her children married off unless she turns up at Parliament in Athens Parliament and they make such a condition that if she doesn't come and live in Parliament and be seen in public so that the people can see they have a monarch and she's categorically told the only thing that makes a monarch is how is the fact that people allow you to be demonic if you do not come out and show yourself and give people the monarchy it doesn't matter if your Maalik or not because you won't be for very long so there is a movement and she survives on the skin of a teeth to be honest in some way that she died in the seventies and Bertie had become cling at that point we could have a very very different political landscape because he was much more engaged but it is quite interesting as she sat there as a solidly munched her way through everything that moved and the country should have burned beneath her thank you [Applause] you

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Length: 93min 29sec (5609 seconds)

Published: Thu May 25 2017