THE GREEDY QUEEN

ANNIE GRAY is an historian, cook, broadcaster and writer specialising in the history of food and dining in Britain from around 1600 to the present day, conducting her research both in libraries and in kitchens. She has worked at Audley End amongst other historical kitchens, and gives lectures all over the country. She presents history documentaries including Victorian Bakers, and appears on BBC Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet. She lives in East Anglia.

THE GREEDY QUEEN

Eating with Victoria

ANNIE GRAY

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

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Copyright © Annie Gray, 2017

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 78283 273 7

To Matt, with love
In memory of my grandma, Brenda Gray (née Evans)

Contents

Acknowledgements

1.Introduction

2.Childhood

3.Dining style

4.Kitchens

5.Cooks

6.Private palaces

7.Motherhood

8.Ordinary eating

9.Extraordinary eating

10.The wider world of food

11.The ageing Queen

Epilogue: how to end an age

Appendix: annotated and modernised recipes

Select bibliography

Notes

List of illustrations

Colour Plates

Index

Acknowledgements

This book would not have seen the light of day without my agent, Tim Bates, who has been unwavering in his support and supply of beer, and my editor, Rebecca Gray, whose editorial comments were a delight, and whose patience in the face of endless toilet references has been awe-inspiring. Thanks also go to their excellent colleagues at PFD and Profile Books.

Many people have helped me with ideas or information while I’ve been researching The Greedy Queen, as well as allowing me access to archival material without which I could not have written a thing. Primary among these are the brilliant staff of the Royal Archive: Pam Clark, Allison Derrett and Lynnette Beech, along with Carly Collier in the Print Room. I am grateful to Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II for giving permission for the online publication of Queen Victoria’s Journals, and for the reproduction of some of the pictures included within this book. I would also like to thank the various archivists who took time to reply to emails, especially those at Staffordshire Record Office, Chatsworth, Bangor University, Hastings Museum, and Blair Castle. At (in some cases ex of) Historic Royal Palaces, I was encouraged by Lucy Worsley, and aided and abetted by Jonathan Scott at Kew, as well as Lee Prosser and Nigel Arch. At Kensington Palace, Deirdre Murphy talked to me about Queen Victoria’s dress, figure and height, and Ian Chipperfield, costumier extraordinaire, also helped with matters of clothing. At English Heritage, Michael Hunter and Andrew Hann have been long-standing supporters, and the research I did for them on Osborne House forms the background to several chapters. Meanwhile over at Historic England, Steven Brindle showed me round the restored Windsor kitchens, and, along with Richard Williams of Windsor Castle, provided a very memorable morning. Richard Pollitt at Mansion House in York helped me out with particulars of the Queen’s meals en route to Balmoral, as well as admiring with me the epic 100 Guinea Dish. My fellow historians, Richard Fitch, Marc Hawtree, Ivan Day and Sara Pennell, all pointed me in directions I’d not yet discovered, and I am also grateful to the various food people, historians and generally fascinating community I follow on Twitter. At the University of York, Kate Giles has supported my Research Fellowship, and I am grateful both to her, and the wider Archaeology Department, for enabling me to continue my association with York. The Greedy Queen was short-listed for the Jane Grigson Trust Award for New Food Writers in March 2016, which gave me a tremendous boost, and for which I thank the Trustees.

On a more personal level, I owe a huge debt to the team of The Kitchen Cabinet, both on and off-air, especially Jay Rayner, Tim Hayward, Rachel McCormack, Vicky Shepherd and Darby Dorras, and I’d like to thank them for their undying support and encouragement in the face of terrible pottage. I’d also like to thank the cast and crew of Victorian Bakers, in particular Peter Sweasey, Emily Thompson and John Swift, who have both encouraged me, and also given very specific particulars of gas ovens and anti-fart bread. Del Sneddon sent me a bottle of Lochnagar whisky so that I could carry out very important experiments in royal drinking, and the staff at Toppings bookshop in Ely fed me tea. Special thanks to Rebecca Harris Quigg for all the gin. My friends have been brilliant: Katharine Boardman, Rebecca Lane, Kathy Hipperson and Laura Gale, I salute you. Mike and Chris Grundy put me up (and put up with me) on repeated visits to Windsor, and saved me from certain death when knackered on the M25. The various people who have read drafts and commented, including many of the above, as well as Jess Smith, all deserve thanks, as do my family: Mike and Angela Gray, Kristy Noble and Sean Griffin, Marion Howling, and Richard ‘stop sending me stuff’ Gray (who also looks after my website and makes elegant sense of my doodles). Last, but very much not least, I would probably still be thinking and not writing, were it not for my partner, the inestimable Matt Howling.

1

Introduction

In July 2015 a pair of extraordinarily large bloomers were auctioned in Wiltshire. They sold for £12,900, breaking the record for the previous pair of similarly generously proportioned underwear, which fetched £6,200 a year earlier, and the news of their sale was widely reported across the media. Embroidered with the letters VR, and verified as genuine by the auction house, they showed our continuing fascination with a woman who died over a hundred years ago. Bloomers of similar dimensions and provenance appeared as part of an online history course run by Historic Royal Palaces in 2016. Reactions were immediate and polarised, from those who peered at them in avid curiosity, seeing them as offering a rare personal insight into a distant figure, to those who found the whole thing sordid, and cried out for people to leave the poor woman alone. Her weight was her own issue, and we shouldn’t be pawing over personal items in such an undignified way, even if she had given the items away as tokens of esteem, knowing that they would be treasured and kept for posterity – and, despite an initial interdiction to do so, eventually sold on.

Queen Victoria, who was, of course, the original wearer of the bloomers, was a complex, fascinating person, whose reign was, until 2015, the longest of any British monarch, and who was head of state during some of the most formative years of British history. A long and influential life has made her one of the best known figures from the past, and over 500 books have been written about her, with countless more about her children, her palaces, her influence and her legacy. This book is about her food.

When Victoria came to the throne, in 1837, she was a petite, elegant young woman, with what commentators called a fine complexion, though a lamentable tendency to pose, when resting, with her mouth slightly open. Very few people knew anything about her personality, which was barely formed at eighteen years old, and she was thrown into the maelstrom of court life with little experience of the world of politics, people outside her immediate circle, or fine dining. She was a party animal, eager for what she called dissipation, but equally ready to work hard. In recent years her damaging childhood and delight in becoming Queen has become better known in popular culture, mainly through films such as Young Victoria and the 2016 mini-series, Victoria. There has, however, been a tendency to dwell on her personal life and her marriage to Prince Albert while neglecting her very real political significance; although she was a constitutional monarch, she (and Albert, while alive) had a great deal of influence, both officially and unofficially, through the reams of letters they sent and their personal connections with heads of state abroad. The death of Albert, in 1861, plunged the Queen, in her mid-forties, into a black depression, and she mourned him for the rest of her life. Biographers have been inclined to refer to her as old from the 1860s onwards, which she certainly was not, and it’s deceptively easy to divide her life too absolutely into pre- and post-Albert, whereas, as with anyone else, things were just not that simple. It is as a widow that she is best known, however, black-clad and growing ever larger as she turned to food for comfort. She was, too, increasingly sedentary, due to a knee injury that left her lame, and the most abiding image of her for many people, for a very long time, was a distant and forbidding figure in a donkey-cart.

Myths about Queen Victoria are plentiful, and largely unproven or taken out of context, from the ‘not amused’ comment, to the accusations that she slept with or even married John Brown, and image-searching Prince Albert at work is strictly for those who want to get sacked. Food myths, while not as well known, are equally entrenched: she liked a boiled egg for breakfast, she ate like a bird, she had Brown Windsor Soup for every meal, and she preferred plain food. Most of these crumble in the face of fact, and a far more nuanced story can be told: the only one which even vaguely stands up in examination is her liking for plain foods, but even that has to be seen in the context of someone whose habitual fare involved truffles and cream. In researching this book I did not set out to tackle every aspect of her life. I had no desire to explore the Queen’s sense of humour, or her relationships with her family or her ministers, or her religion or politics or sense of social justice, or any of the other aspects which would form the basis of a conventional biography, and you will find barely a mention of a prime minister or a European crisis (unless there’s food involved). Nor did I want to write a book about a woman and her weight, or make any kind of judgement about nutrition and health, which would project modern ideas and cod psychology back into an age with different ideas, and onto a person whom none of us can ever really know. Victoria undeniably had a complicated relationship with food: she used it to assert control as a seventeen-year-old fighting for her individuality, and she sought solace in it when she was abruptly widowed and thrown into mental turmoil after Prince Albert’s death, but exactly what she felt and how that was expressed in her eating can only ever be based on guesswork.

The Victorian age was one of enormous culinary change. Many of the elements that were introduced or popularised had roots in the Georgian period, and still others took until the mid-twentieth century to really catch on. Things we associate with the Victorians, such as gas cookery, tinned food, raising agents, food moulds and the use of coal in cooking ranges, all pre-dated Victoria’s accession in 1837, while others, such as chemical colourings, mechanisation, gas cookery (again), frozen foods, refrigeration and aspic in everything were as much features of the Edwardian period (and beyond) as they were of the decades before Victoria’s death in 1901. Yet it is fair to say that the way food was produced, cooked and consumed altered significantly across the course of the 64 years she was on the throne, and that the eating habits of those living in 1901 were very different to those who were setting up home in 1837. In many ways the Victorian period saw the birth of modern food culture, complete with fad diets, worries about industrially produced foods, restaurant critics and heavily styled final dishes. Every time we worry about serried ranks of cutlery marching away at the side of our plate, we are being led by the late Victorians, and when we desperately search for novelty in food, while secretly craving a decent pork pie, we are echoing our nineteenth-century ancestors.

Victoria ate – obviously – according to the norms of the times. Her food, and the way she consumed it, showed more continuity than change, which is hardly surprising given that she had the power to eat the meals that she wanted, and her desires were hardly likely to go hand in hand with the latest gastronomic developments. But any meal is more than just its final form, and this book deals with where food came from, who prepared it, the kitchens it was cooked in, and the way meals worked in practice – elements which were often beyond the control of one individual. In doing so, it sheds light on Victorian food in general, for while the food of royalty only represents a tiny proportion of Victorian meals, the factors which went into preparing it are indicative of a much wider context. Victoria was influenced by this wider context, adopting – eventually – the new dining styles of the era, and eating new ingredients and types of cuisine. She in turn had an effect upon the world outside the palaces. Most of her subjects lived on or below the poverty line, so her direct impact was by necessity limited, but she provided a culinary figurehead. Her meals had to be lavish and luxurious, and eaten off gold – she was Queen, and one of her primary duties was to provide a focus for Britons to look up to. Reports on her travels, on her dinner parties, and on her receptions, filled the newspapers, and when she disappeared from public view in the 1860s, criticism was swift and severe, and included calls for her abdication. She was only a Queen because her people wanted her to be Queen, and acted towards her in the way that defined her as Queen. In return, she was expected to behave like one.

This book is, therefore, a book about food, and the Victorians, but seen through the life of a woman who ate a lot of one and defined the other. It is a sort of culinary biography, of a person who symbolised an age. Victoria was – and is – a polarising figure; many things to many people, often deeply contradictory. To some, she was a monster, but those who knew her usually adored her; to others she was emotionally unstable and uncertain, but she could also be stubborn, wilful and decisive; she was unable to cope without a strong man to support her, but unwilling to relinquish any power and always aware of her status as Queen; she was a terrible mother, but she doted on her children and did her utmost to give them the childhood she’d never had; she was clingy, she was independent; she did a lot for women, she hated feminism; she was sweet and feminine, and laughed at everything, she was humourless and horrible and bullied her son. People change over the course of a lifetime, and she was all of these and more. However, as this book will show, whatever she was, and whenever she was being it, she remained above all else, a greedy Queen.