How The Victorians Made Their Exquisite Ice Cream | Royal Upstairs Downstairs | Absolute History

just what do you have to do when a queen decides she's going to pop in to see you and not just any old queen victoria like a pair of obsessed victoria groupers we're pursuing her around the country through the posh pads she visited we'll be delving into her personal diaries to reveal what happened behind closed doors we start off here at the magnificent chatsworth house deep in the derbyshire countryside and as someone who spent a lifetime getting excited by antiques are the upstairs exploring just what would have excited victoria on her visit here this was the setting for princess victoria's first grown-up dinner party and as a chef who loves great food i'll be rediscovering an amazing 19th century approach to ice cream making perfect for serving the young princess victoria look at that and tantalizing tim's taste buds that is just an explosion in your mouth [Music] cool look at this rosemary chatsworth house now this is what i call a packer country house and it is of course what princess victoria would have seen in october 1832 on her arrival princess victoria seen here as a child next to her ma the duchess of kent was only 13 years old when she came to chatsworth just a year after finding out that she was to inherit the crown this four-day visit hosted by the sixth duke of devonshire was part of a pr exercise by victoria's mum who was keen to introduce her to her future subjects the royal party traveled to chatsworth from eaton near bakewell by horse and carriage they must have hit traffic because they turned up a bit later than planned at 6 30 in the evening no sat nav i guess we've come here right at the beginning of our journey tracing victoria's progress across britain but what i'm really interested in is discovering exactly how she got on in this early royal visit in the upstairs domain well i'm going to the engine room of the house downstairs to the servant's domain to find out about the cooks the maize the footman and the stews just to see how they kept the show on the road the sixth duke of devonshire was loaded and was known as a bit of a charmer this was his big chance to show the princess just what a hot shot he was victoria kept a journal so you have an idea of her daily life she started her writing at the time that she started these journeys around the country but at this stage there's simply the jottings of a 13 year old when she arrived at chatsworth she described it as beautiful and in this extract from her diary she wrote it's built in the shape of a square joined by an arch under which one must drive and that is the arch that we've just walked through she would have swept up the drive with her mother and admired probably the north wing now the sixth duke was remodeling the house and he was very keen that everything should be ready for the princess's visit the duke managed to get the builders out and the new north wing was knocked up just in time for princess victoria's arrival doubling the size of the house [Music] but believe it or not this wasn't the duke's main house that was done in london and was run by about 30 staff this massive chatsworth estate was run by half that number well it was only his second home to make sure he wasn't caught short during victoria's visit he brought up additional troops from his london pad to help out i'm heading downstairs to explore their world here we are in the engine rooms of the modern chatsworth now these corridors are still used by the staff today to get from one end to the other when this face is full of people this would have been a hive of activity when the princess and her mother came here for their visit this maze of corridors in the basement houses essential heating pipes today but in 1832 it would have been crammed with servants getting ready for victoria's visit there is 61 rooms down here most are empty now but back then they would have been ladas pantries and pastry rooms this is the old kitchen it's a dusty woodworking room now but this is how victoria would have found it on a guided tour during her stay and she was quite impressed in her journal she writes it was superb for its size and cleanliness and it was the perfect place to cook for the visiting princess now it's my guess that when victoria arrived here she was absolutely shattered and needed to rest after the long journey she was only 13 after all but the duke was having none of it he wasn't going to let the princess to her room before showing off the cavendish family album and appropriately at this half landing surrounded by a clutch of other portraits of the cavendish family is the first duke and you see him astride his charger but our hero is the sixth duke that you see up there top left in a portrait painted by sir george hater in 1816 so that's a cool 16 years before victoria's visit but i reckon that that's probably more or less what he looked like when he ushered her up this very staircase while victoria was checking out the family album upstairs the servants were preparing dinner food was very important in all of victoria's visits and throughout this series i'll be joined by food historian and chef ivan day we'll be working in some of the finest victorian kitchens across the country recreating some amazing dishes that were served to victoria the juices of the meat delicious that is beautiful the chatsworth kitchens no longer exist so i've been to ivan's own kitchen to create a dish that's perfect for victoria a few years ago i was working at chatsworth and i discovered in the cellars this incredible horde of pewter ice cream molds we have to make ice cream because it was almost certainly served to the young princess at chatsworth the gardener there grew fabulous pineapples so we have to make pineapple ice cream right here on the ice and salt to keep it really cold i've actually got a pewter ice cream mold of a pineapple that is beautiful look at the detail to make the ice cream a wonderful container called a sapetier is in a pail of ice into that we've put some pineapple flesh that's been boiled in water and pureed then sweetened with sugar and a half pint of cream added then the sorbettier has been spun to make the mixture freeze this is called an ice spaddle we want to make this really light remember this is for a princess so it's got to be absolutely like baby's breath yes that means we've got to get air into it okay and the way you aerate it is by spinning it so what i'm going to do is i'm going to spin it round like this have a go yourself just spin it round oh that's perfect keep it going lift it up and down as you do it and that will bring the air into the mixture that's going to make it much much lighter you can already see actually now we have to add the color to the basic ice cream to match the real pineapple what you have to do is to make an orange for the pineapple body and for that we have to use this material here which don't eat it whatever you do these are little cautioneel beetles that grow on prickly pear cactus and that makes a very interesting red and if we mix that with a little bit of yellow made with some saffron we'll get a kind of pineappley color green for the leaves is extracted from spinach these are natural dyes and they were the colors that we used at the period right fantastic once the colors have been added to the ice cream we have to freeze it before we can fill the mold it's amazing to think that at the time victoria visited chatsworth the gardeners were able to produce exotic fruit like pineapples joseph paxton was the man who was responsible for everything hood cultural here back at victoria's time his crowning achievement was the great conservatory this was no off-the-shelf greenhouse at the time it was the biggest glass building in the world in her journal the thirteen-year-old victoria described it as out and out the finest thing imaginable of its kind sadly it's no longer here and there are no pineapples today but there are plenty of other victorian glass houses and one other special fruit that was here when victoria visited the cavendish family in 1832. the current head gardener is steve porter i'm in a real jungle here now i've been told you grow a very special fruit here we do indeed and we're standing underneath it this is musa cavendish dwarf the cavendish dwarf banana it came here in 1829 joseph paxton our head gardener at the time for the sixth duke obtained the plant and grew it in the glass house here at chatsworth where it flourished it fruited and produced these wonderful bananas and from here they were taken out to samoa and other places around the world and became a commercial crop that's still grown there today it wasn't only exotic fruit there's another amazing plant imported from the amazon that paxton's green fingers managed to get to flower and it has a close connection with victoria later in her life this is the victoria lily this was grown here also by paxton and the sixth duke but it was later that it flourished and flowered here in 1849 and joseph paxton actually took a leaf from chats with anna flower down to winter castle and presented it to queen victoria who then named it the victoria lily she must have been absolutely thrilled with that the time victoria got to her room she must have been ready to just chill out but no such luck the duke had laid on a dinner party starting at seven o'clock he even had a dress rehearsal the night before because this particular dinner was so important this wonderful dining room was the setting for princess victoria's first grown-up dinner party but after all the build up it didn't go quite to plan she didn't turn up victoria in her journal writes i dine by myself in my room with lazen that's baroness lazen her governess and you can hardly blame her she'd only arrived at chatsworth half an hour before dinner was to be served but the duke must have been a bit cheesed off after all the effort he'd put in downstairs the staff were busy preparing the evening meal and we're making ice cream just as it would have been served to victoria the green and orange pineapple flavoured ice creams are now frozen and ready to put into the pineapple mold the one we need first is the green if you take the napkins off and just put them aside right i'll show you how to do it and then you can try it out yourself okay so this is actually a nice consistency you want about half spoonful each time right and you're going to put it on to the leaf i'll do this one actually okay now put it on very gently and then with one spoon paddle it in pushing it in quite hard like that yes so that you get the impression you've got to work very quickly that's perfect leaves done now for the body [Music] the secret this is being very slow and gentle and everything is so intricate and time-consuming and time-consuming the thing you have to remember is cooks didn't do this at all at chatsworth this was done by the duke's confectioner now we have to leave it like that standing up and if you can just steady it with just one finger sorry the mold is now filled with the rest of the orange colored ice cream this was not done in the kitchen at all it was done in a completely separate room really cold area which was the confectionery yeah it was a long way from the kitchen it couldn't have files or anything like that in there he must have had quite a bit of help lately oh yes it would have been a kitchen maid who was probably called in and possibly even a male person because confectionary was tended to be done by men at this period really yeah then finally more green ice cream to form the base [Music] imagine doing this for a princess it must have been i would take advantage of their lives almost now if this pineapple is actually going to sit on the table and stay firm we've got to freeze it much harder than that okay and bizarrely for that we need some lard we're going to rub it into the seams because we're going to put this into a mixture of ice and salt and the salt could work its way into the ice cream and spoil the flavor so we have to seal it how very clever [Music] with the seams sealed with lard the molds wrapped in paper so that when it's plunged into the bucket of ice the ice doesn't stick to the pewter the final thing we need to do if you put salt onto ice it acts as a refrigerant and you get a temperature of about minus 13 which will rapidly freeze anything that you put in one of these pots it'll take another three hours for it to freeze solid upstairs on the first morning of her stay princess victoria awoke to enjoy her first glimpse of paxton's gardens in her journal she writes i breakfasted soon after nine in a room overlooking the cascade she may have been keen to see more of the gardens but the duke of course had the day all set out and it began inside with a guided tour starting in the library the sixth duke was a bit of a globetrotter and it was on his travels that he built up his massive collection fifty thousand books victoria well red herself was clearly impressed describing the library as beautiful the next event on the duke's itinerary was something completely different anyone for cricket on the afternoon of her first day the chatsworth doors were thrown open to the public and over 300 people flooded in to watch a special match that was laid on in victoria's honor there was even a band who played god save the queen to rapturous applause as the current chatsworth cricket team put their best bats forward qriket historian keith hayhurst tells me more the teams were made up of gentlemen and workers is that right that's correct uh most of them would have been the workers uh there would have been two or three gentlemen who wouldn't work so hard they would direct the feeders to catch the ball and and find the ball well the gentleman wouldn't really do the fielding then not not a lot of it and they wouldn't do much of the bowling either you get the strong workers for the estate to do the bowling and maybe some of them were employed just as good cricketers cricket during victoria's time was hugely popular both with the gentry and their staff but you might be surprised to know that just like today the fans like to have a flutter there was a lot of gambling especially in the cricket of the 1750s to 1850 and huge amounts uh something like a thousand guineas a match where it were put on these games you would get people coming from manchester from chesterfield from all around the district uh to watch that game and that would bring the money that would bring the money in yes [Music] with the royal visitors wandering around the gardeners would have had the grounds looking immaculate and there was one particular treat that 13 year old princess victoria took a real shine to so this is the most unusual feature in chatsworth garden it was built for the first duke the design was based on a willow tree and it's been restored a couple of times during its life the princess victoria called it the squirting tree she must have had such a lot of fun here i think it's rather quirky when later asked what she liked best about her stay at chatsworth victoria answered the squirting tree the goddess must have been thrilled i'm keen to find out more about the men and women who labored so hard in the gardens and downstairs at chatsworth luckily the house has some amazing documents from the period that house collector matthew hurst tells me offer an intriguing insight into that world well matthew i believe you've got some information for me we're looking at 1832 when victoria came here and i'm really interested to find out more about it so can you show me absolutely what we've got here are the household accounts covering 1829 to 1833 so it fits absolutely in the period that you're interested in fantastic and if we open it up here yes we can see look at this the wages absolutely let's have a look now we have got a thomas howard and charles good they both were on a 150 pounds that's a lot of money it is it is and they would have been the senior male servant so they would have been the butler or sometimes called the steward of the household who was essentially the man in charge of the whole household interestingly when you look at the women of the household um the highest paid woman has a salary of 40 pounds a year she would have been the housekeeper so she was the most senior female servant and you can see that their salaries drop as you go down the list well the i think the least we've got is for a harriet sheffield sheriff sheriff yeah six pounds two shillings and six pence so that wasn't she must be in this gallery mate absolutely she would have been what is so fascinating with this there's a huge hierarchy situation and it must have been almost like an upstairs downstairs within this little domain yeah completely the scullery maid would probably have been a girl between 14 and 16 years old when when they started so very young as well um in contrast to to somebody like the housekeepers what's so interesting that this gallery made you know she would be near enough the same age as victoria when she came pretty much yes i mean we don't know exactly how old she was but she would have been around the same age and it's extraordinary to think the contrast the lives the contrast unbelievable victoria may have escaped dinner once but on the following night she wasn't so lucky there was another attempt to hold her first grown-up dinner as she walked through the house to the dining room she couldn't have failed to notice the semi-naked figures of the duke's statues that is he was a great collector and luckily for him the young victoria clearly enjoyed the exposure to the sculptures that is writing in her diary that there are some beautiful statues oi fish face what are you stirring at eventually in the dining room the big moment arrived she sat down to dinner with 35 fellow guests at this stunning dining table however daunting it must have been we know that she had mad the gilded circular that is still here today describing it as magnificent quite something for a 13 year old to notice don't you think absolutely while the guests tucked into dinner upstairs downstairs the cooks would have been preparing the dessert in our preparations the pineapple flavored and shaped ice cream has been in ice for three hours now the moment of truth will it come out in one piece look at that how's that oh that is beautiful i'm going to try and just leave that out with the knife like so and then put it onto there right into the middle yep and how you press though oh that how about that darling i love it amazing as this pineapple-flavored colored and shaped ice cream is it would not have been enough to serve to the 13 year old princess victoria there are more water ices and ice creams starting with a delicate asparagus spear beautiful got to get the knife in between and still they keep coming sometimes this fails but there we are look at that a fig of pomegranate and a melon and some grapes [Music] fingers crossed wow it's like magic this is what we call a pillar mold right see the the fluted columns yes and this is made of strawberry ice cream these molds are incredible aren't they it's quite tricky it's going now i think yeah here we go come on just drop out nicely how about that okay fantastic beautiful oh look at that that's it put it with his dad that's my boy this is a basket mold lovely gently lever it out is it coming whoopsie all right okay oh that's beautiful ah but we've got more that's just part of it some strawberries yeah okay we should just drop down okay now that isn't all because i've got some strawberry oh how wonderful which have been sitting in cold water so they should freeze on you may have to hold them on a little while they'll freeze to the strawberries so hold it for about four seconds look at that isn't that absolutely super that is the most that is just beautiful i absolutely love it these victorian isis of all flavors and shapes are so elaborate now we just need to serve them to my own gentleman of the house tim that's nice rosemary thanks but i can't compete with our host the duke by all accounts he was renowned as a great entertainer and showed exactly why with the after-dinner entertainment he laid on in the ballroom young girls would need to be at least 15 before they're allowed to attend a formal ball and as victoria was far too young the duke provided alternative entertainment in the form of charades which were popular at the time and we think that that is what took place here in her diary victoria tells us that the title guests including lady blanche the duke's niece perform scenes from bluebeard tom thumb and king nile parlour games such as charades were extremely popular in victorian times especially for the wealthy upper classes even victoria joined in and during the charades there was another treat in store for her head gardener joseph paxton had arranged a spectacular show of illuminations in the gardens using coloured flares lady kavadesh the duke's niece wrote in a letter after the visit the little princess seemed to enjoy herself beyond anything and was extremely excited about the cascade it was like an enchanted castle the water seemed turned into fire rockets going up in every direction gosh even the duke himself had to admit he had never seen anything like it before so with the upstairs entertainment drawing to a close it's time for me to serve up the ice cream and water ices it's a feast fit for a princess and just think all these exquisite dishes are just the dessert victoria would have had at least 10 courses beforehand tim may not be a queen but he can be a bit fussy i wonder what he'll make of these rosemary what have you been up to well i thought while the table was laid up for a dessert i would give you a dessert well this is quite extraordinary isn't it these shapes the design how long did it take you about five hours and i must say it was fascinating i have to say this is the first time that i've ever addressed an ice in the form of a piece of asparagus and it does look extraordinary it is extraordinary to actually see the process i'm going to taste the first bit yes that is just an explosion in your mouth isn't that just delicious it's extraordinary and it's so smooth it's so delicious unbelievable we're going to have a lot more victorian food as we follow victoria's journey i can't wait for the 13 year old princess victoria life would never be the same after chatsworth she was firmly on the road to becoming queen [Music] next time on roll upstairs downstairs we're with the teenage victoria at shagbra in staffordshire we're upstairs i'll be discovering how her mother's national pr offensive continued and downstairs i'll be experiencing what life was like for the servants during a royal visit i think you'll make an excellent maze

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 215,978

Keywords: history documentaries, absolute history, world history, ridiculous history, quirky history, ice cream, victorian, victorian recipes, victorian era, queen victoria

Id: D1_FeHa2UUE

Length: 28min 17sec (1697 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021