Queen Victoria's Favourite Meat Pie | Royal Upstairs Downstairs | Real Royalty

[Music] just what 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 groupies we're pursuing her around the country to the posh pads she visited we'll be delving into her personal diaries to reveal what happened behind closed doors today the former home of elizabeth the first hatfield has where our odyssey in the footsteps of victoria brings us to the outskirts of greater london and there's someone who spent a lifetime getting excited by antiques i'll be looking for things that would have impressed her majesty on her visit here and here it would have sat groaning with food for victoria's luncheon and as a chef who loves food i'll be getting a flavor of work below stairs and creating a super 19th century recipe that was served to victoria i'm so excited about this pie and tantalizing tim's taste buds with this magnificent victorian treat oh my lord [Music] in 1846 victoria and albert came to hatfield house victoria was 27 years old and had been on the throne for nine years renowned as a great political and social center hatfield also had a very special connection to royalty you know when it comes to hatfield queen victoria isn't the first queen that springs to mind because nearly 300 years earlier this was the home to another celebrated queen elizabeth the first she spent chunks of her childhood here but at the end of elizabeth the first's reign it became home to the earls and marcuses of salisbury and it's still their family home and it was the second marcus who was in residence when queen victoria and albert came to stay but by jingo he did not have the easiest of times getting ready for their visit oh no victoria's advisers told the marcus two years before that she planned to come and stay for two nights but nothing was formally agreed and in the end confirmation of her visit only reached the marquis just 10 days before she actually arrived after all that waiting for sudden panic i can just imagine which is my cue to find out how those hasty preparations went on as i head downstairs and that's my cue to stay upstairs make sure that the arrangements for victoria's arrival were set fair [Applause] as victoria and albert travelled to hatfield they were greeted by well-wishers [Applause] [Music] the illustrated london news reports the scene as truly exhilarating bands played and the streets were filled with groups of delighted and loyal people but not everything went according to plan as the royal carriage thundered towards the entrance it was found that the gates were locked and no one could find the keys the times newspaper reported that a last minute panic ensued and just before they rounded the corner the gates had to be taken off their hinges oh dear now as victoria entered through this door all was calm and serene and regal the royal standard was flapping on the roof and the queen was greeted here in what is called the armory she was met by her host's two daughters lady mildred hope the eldest and lady blanche balfour who by all accounts was a bit of a stunner even victoria said she was so pretty so far so good but the last minute hullabaloo to get things ready had prompted the marquis to write to the queen in advance to ask that she and the prince will have the goodness to excuse any imperfections they may find in their reception little wonder in the 10 days that the house had to prepare before queen victoria actually got to stand here it was absolute chaos iron gates had to be welded gate piers repaired furniture ordered so much so that the marquis himself took direct control urging everything on on and he says with the greatest vigor we know this detail thanks to the reverend arthur starkey the tutor to the salisbury children the marquis himself asked the good reverend to record victoria's visit and in his journal he tells us the time was so short it was almost thought incredible that everything should be ready all however completed in time though with so little to spare that the coverlet for the royal bed was only put in place as the royal carriages drove into the park and the family motto cerro said serio late but earnest must have felt rather appropriate no doubt the queen was blissfully unaware of the chaos as she moved through the house with her host not only do we have reverend stark his journal of what was going on upstairs during the visit we also have the impressive accounts book that tells us what was going on downstairs and boy what a book vicki perry the archivist is going to tell me more this is the biggest account book i have ever seen well this is the account book dating from 1846 which shows the household expenses and we've got it open on the week of the royal visit so you can see along here are all the provisions that were purchased and details of game that were caught that week as well oh fantastic so let's look at some of this up here they had a ball and dinner on the friday night the 23rd of october and you can see that they fed 550 guests that was a lot of people it was take us through what they were having so well they they show the provisions that were purchased for the visit so there were 709 bottles of wine that week they did enjoy their drink didn't they it's more than one that's more than one each and this shows the ox that they purchased and they roasted it outside for all the estate workers amazing they roasted a 96 stone ox in the grounds for the estate workers that's quite a barbecue but what was on the menu for the royal guests upstairs no menus have survived so we don't know exactly what they ate during the royal visit but we do have a few clues right over the page here the week before the visit they spent 13 pounds on turtle which would almost certainly have been made into turtle soup that was very popular very popular and it was a bit of a status symbol to serve turtle suit because it was so expensive expensive and of course nowadays illegal i love this turtles came to 13 pounds five shillings and eight pence that would be an incredible 800 pounds today well they certainly pulled all the stops out for queen victoria's visit they did they spent over 1200 pounds during the week on feed that's some food bill in fact today's money that's over 70 000 pounds ivan day our food historian is in the kitchen and has more clues about just what the royals would have eaten and it's not just the accounts book that reveals what was on the royal table we have an amazing watercolor of the dinner served on the second night of the visit which shows a very special game pie if you look at it very carefully you will see that it's actually emblazoned with the initials v and a victorian albert and it was made certainly especially for the occasion and that's the dish we're going to make today ivan's brought some amazing victorian pie moulds to do the job originally they used cardboard to do this and the fashion was to have a pie that looked a bit like a corset and you see it's wasted like a vic just like a victorian corset yes and amazingly originally this this cardboard corset you made to put around your pie even had laces on the back to pull tight so you got that shape but by the 1820s they were making these things and they're beautiful aren't they yes some of them are extraordinary we get started using a special pastry which contains egg yolk to make it firm our game pie is known as a raised by because the pastry holds it together rather than a pie dish to start the lining ivan's cutting the pastry okay and we open it up like that and what i'm going to do is i'm going to put some flour inside that okay and then i'm going to put it down on here and with the rolling pin i'm going to knock it out and roll it so that i can make a pocket by doing this we can make a kind of wallet-shaped structure which we can then you see it's got a nice hollow we just put that inside it drop in then it's a case of drawing up the pastry i think it's time for me to have a go [Music] i'm just going to get another little tool that we need now this is really being used just to flatten the base as we toil away downstairs tim is still on the trail of her majesty as she was shown around the house upstairs victoria's tour continued she records in her journal that having been in the armory she actually walked up this staircase and it's this staircase which so amply illustrates what a wonderful early jacobian house hatfield is this staircase was put in some 250 years before victoria's visit but this rib vaulted ceiling above me is much more modern and this was created in 1846 specifically for victoria's visit by the second marquis who wanted a decorative scheme that looked like the early jacobean the marcus was keen to restore the jacobian style throughout the house and had refurbished the east wing to the tune of a million pounds spurred on to complete it just before victoria's visit in 1846 the west wing had already been refurbished in the 1830s after a huge fire the story goes that the marquis's eccentric 80 year old mother known as dowager sal caused the blaze when her hair caught fire while writing by candlelight needless to say like the west wing she didn't survive back downstairs in the kitchen our pie is really coming together what we've got in here is a mixture of veal it's rose veal so it's not that veal that's been locked away in cages it's perfectly humane a little bit of suet some herbs which gives it the moisture got to have fat in there fat is flavor isn't it and what we're going to do with that is we're going to put about half an inch of it in the base of the pie this is going to be a game pie with many layers i'll be brushing each layer with egg yolk and seasoning with salt pepper and nutmeg this egg yolk will stick everything together right so the next thing is to put in a couple of these chicken breasts this is followed by another layer of the strongly seasoned ground feel or forced meat the next layer is is the venison we know from the huge accounts book that haunches of venison were indeed purchased for the visit and were likely used in the pie it's not just meat that goes into the pie [Music] cooked egg yolks are brushed with raw egg rolled in parsley and buried in the middle of the many [Music] they remind me layers furry critters they do they're lovely green aliens these sort of pies you know everyone thinks they were sliced down the middle but they weren't they used to take the lids off them and then cut the meat out i think i'll stick to slicing seems a shame not to try the pastry too [Music] we top this with a layer of pigeon breast and another layer of veal [Music] to cook this you would have to cook it on quite a low heat to keep it nice and moist yes that's right it would have been put in when the oven was quite low right in modern terms you're probably talking about 150 yes we are finishing our pie with a layer of pheasant breast brushed with egg and seasoned they did love their meat those victorians there we go okay perfect the last thing is to just get this little thin layer of forced meat on top and then we're ready to put the lid on [Music] back upstairs the efforts of the marquis to impress his royal guests were clear lord salisbury definitely wanted this place to look at its best for victoria's visit though and shortly before she came here he went out and he acquired a magnificent series of four tapestries which were woven by rafe sheldon in the sheldon tapestry works around 1611 more or less exactly the right period for the building of this house imagine trying to find something this special at such short notice but one piece that wasn't brought in is this magnificent table it is the origin of the side board literally one enormous board of oak laid on some trestle type bases and made around about the time of the house about sixteen hundred and here it would have sat groaning with food for victoria's luncheon and when it came to dining the marquis had a trick or two up his sleeve for impressing the queen because victoria in her journal notes lady mildred brought in the coffee after dinner and lord salisbury did the same for albert so no servants served the coffee the marquis did it himself i bet he didn't brew it though meanwhile back downstairs it's time to put the lid on our pie [Music] at the time of the visit the man responsible for making the spy would have been a french chef casimir tessier who began working for the second markers of salisbury a couple of years earlier very gently he was paid almost 40 000 pounds a year in today's money and would have been expected to produce interesting delicacies with many seasonings and flavors cooking for victoria was the highlight of his career now this is the dodgiest bit of all because we have got to get those two sheets to join together perfectly right and in order to do that we use one of these things which is called a pastry jacker and these little marks we make are known as crinkling cranks actually they were called crinkling pranks so there's a word for you [Music] so we crinkle crank around the pie to really seal the pastry it's important that our filling doesn't leak if we don't get this right the pie will be ruined and a vent hole allows the steam to escape we don't want our pie to explode [Music] what do we do we're going to ornament it which is very important and what i've got here is what's called a pie board now you won't have seen one of these i haven't they're amazingly rare so i'm going to show you um how to make the leaves i'm going to cut out two leaf shapes if you'd like to take that one this time-consuming victorian ornamentation could only be achieved because of the huge numbers of staff in the kitchen now the thing is in order to ornament this very large pie we're gonna need about 60 of those right fortunately ivan's already been busy what we've got to do is to wet the whole pilot a pie like this would have been a real collaborative effort on the part of the servants the gamekeeper would have caught the game the housemates would have plucked it the housekeeper would have been in charge of the pastry and the chef would have been responsible for the filling now ivan i'm so excited about this pie i cannot tell you this is incredible [Music] after lunch on the second day of the visit albert couldn't wait to get out onto the estate to do some shooting victoria herself paid little attention to this event she simply says in her diary albert went out shooting but you wait till you hear what our reverend starkey has to say about it well for a kickoff is the party itself we've got the prince we got the marcus of salisbury we got the marquis of exeter we got the duke of wellington he of waterloo fame we've got earl spencer so it's a pretty top-notch party and it would appear that they were pretty serious about their business too reverend starkey states that albert had four guns more guns on this occasion than he had ever had before quite barking [Music] the whole head of game killed was as follows the reverend continues lord spencer 80 lord exeter 50. lord john russell 30 the duke of wellington 16. prince albert 150 head being at a rate of a head of game per minute for the whole time he was out double the bag of anybody else he was machine gunning them down while the privileges of the royals and their pals were unending below stairs the harsh realities of life could also be unending one servant's tale at hatfield reached like a storyline from a costume drama vicki perry is going to tell me more one of the most interesting things that we have in the archives is a series of letters from john mart who was the porter at the time of the royal visit he'd worked here for about 18 years at that time but in 1848 he was sacked as after he was accused of stealing beer from the marquis no what does he say in this letter he says i have nothing but poverty and distress before my eyes i have now my wife on the bed of sickness and son out of employee and nothing to help myself with i do hope my lord that you will take it into your consideration and not send me away so disgraced ah that is really that's pretty quite sad he did write a few letters to the second marquess and claiming that he didn't steal the beer and he says here i have served your lordship upwards of 21 years and to be disgraced to leave your lordship for a full time not guilty of it is too much for me to bear so when the second marquess replied to his letter he said i'm exceedingly sorry that it is impossible for me to requite you of any guilt in the pilfering of which i complained and we do know from the letters that he never managed to find another job and died in poverty in london so just two years after victoria's visit the porter was sacked what a hard life if you fell out of favor below stairs [Music] back out in the grounds prince albert put down his gun and joined his wife for a romantic tour of the grounds in a phaeton a small carriage built for two victoria and albert's destination on their carriage drive was this spot you have to imagine that victoria would have had a free saw of excitement a little tingling of the spine when she arrived here because it's extremely special in 1558 nearly 300 years to the day before victoria's visit the then princess elizabeth the 25 year old daughter of henry viii and ann berlin discovered that she was to become queen elizabeth the great oak under which elizabeth sat when she received this momentous news was still alive during victoria's visit but only just this picture in the illustrated london news shows it on its last legs victoria was given the only acorn that could be found on the tree before it died but her gardeners were unable to propagate it the oak that's here today is thanks to another monarch and there's one final chapter that relates to this replacement tree planted 25 years ago in 1985 by queen elizabeth ii three incredible monarchs reigning for more than 150 years between them linked by their femininity hatfield house and a tree back downstairs the moment of truth has arrived either the moment has come yeah it's a bit like unveiling a statue cheers i cut the string and it's been cooling down for about two hours so if i get this pin out we can then gently reveal our pie fantastic that is fabulous absolutely fantastic well ivan i can't wait to take this to tim the pie was served at what was to be the climax of the queen's day at hatfield as these pictures show [Music] on the second and final night of victoria's visit dinner was served at 8 p.m meanwhile up here in the gallery the preparations were being made for a ball that was to follow a great number of additional guests gathered so much so that when victoria ascended to the gallery there was a crowd of some 300 people to greet her to the strains of god saved the queen the dancing commenced at 9 pm and as reverend starkey's account records it did not abate until 1am in short they had a rave up queen victoria did the diplomatic thing and had the first dance with her host lord salisbury whilst prince albert as starkey rather amusingly recorded had his first dance with salisbury's daughter lady blanche after all victoria had recorded that blanche was a bit of eye candy i'm not surprised the guests were able to stay up late and dance the night away they had the most amazing food and plenty of it and there's plenty for tim and me too here's rosemary gosh that looks heavy now this is quite weighty that's a pie well it is a pie tell me about it this is a raised pie that queen victoria would have eaten incredibly ornate absolutely beautiful and there is so much in it now what i'm going to do before i tell you what is in it i'm going to open it up are any blackbirds going to get out well that remains to be seen tim i'm going to remove that little decorative rose there and what i'm going to do i'm literally going to saw through it oh this is a moment it certainly is it's like a chainsaw massacre isn't it now can i hold the board a bit because you've like the last bit of a log you're doing yeah okay now now that is beautiful it's got real false meat it's got chicken it's got pheasant it's got pigeon it's got venison all lead up with a lovely egg yolk covered in parsley so what i'm going to do now i'm just going to slice look at that jelly can it be quite a big piece please it's the only way to do this yeah i'm going to take it like this yeah pop it on your plate there that's lovely oh yes look at that would you like to have a little bit of condiment this is horseradish oh yes this is a little sweet plum they would have had this as well horseradish so i'm going to actually just take it natural to begin with does it get the seed of approval that is delicious there we go i just have that little more so oh my lord but there is one last story that our reverend starkey observed and that was it was a great furore because somebody after she got up from the table nicked one of the glasses that she had drunk from so keen with a to have a royal memento at the end of this supper party of course her majesty didn't make any mementos from the house to remind her of her visit but we do know that she left something behind gifts of gold bracelets for her host two daughters wishing them well according to reverend starkey the trip had been a great success commenting as victoria left that she was in the highest health and spirits during the whole time [Music] join us tomorrow on royal upstairs downstairs at castle howard where the royal couple's high spirits were tempered by their eldest son and heir naughty bertie but also lifted by their fabulous surroundings and you can imagine that titchy queen victoria coming into this entrance hall and literally standing [Music] gaping [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Real Royalty

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Length: 28min 55sec (1735 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020