A Year in the Life of Downton Abbey: Seasonal Celebrations, Traditions, and Recipes (9 page)

Six times a day in Downton Abbey, a full meal is served: two breakfasts, two lunches, two dinners. Three for the servants and three for the family. Not to mention two afternoon teas, with all the homemade bread, cakes and biscuits they would involve. Backbreaking work for Mrs Patmore and her kitchen assistants … and just as hard work for Lisa Heathcote,
Downton Abbey’
s food stylist.

In 1924 the fashion was for highly decorated food – even the edges of the serving platters would be garnished with thinly cut slices of radish or strewn with the verdant colours of watercress – and aspic, a clear liquid that could be set in pretty moulds with, say, a tiny strand of dill perfectly suspended within. A gelatin made from meat stock, aspic is, for most modern tastes, absolutely revolting to eat – like a solid consommé – but it created a beautiful effect in the 1920s dining room. For Lisa’s purposes, aspic is wonderful to work with, as it stays set and glossy even after hours under hot studio lights.

A pie is prepared in Mrs Patmore’s kitchen.

Lisa’s biggest challenge with the food is continuity. Not just the long hours that it takes to film the dining scenes, but the fact that the kitchen and dining room are separated by sixty miles. Filming is done in blocks in each location, which means the footmen will leave Mrs Patmore’s kitchen in Ealing with a platter to emerge in the dining room at Highclere some three weeks later.

When planning the food for a scene, Lisa has to take on board several factors. First and foremost, she has to think seasonally. Not everything out of season is completely off limits; by 1924, a house such as Downton would be ordering things such as oranges and lemons from the bigger stores in York, as well as occasional luxuries from Harrods and Fortnum’s in London. The grander houses of that time would also often have hothouses in which exotic fruits such as pineapple would be cultivated – these were notoriously difficult to grow and so were a real triumph for a house to present during a dinner party. But on the whole, if a scene is set in February, then Lisa can’t include ingredients that are too obviously seasonal, such as salmon and strawberries.

Secondly, Lisa establishes from the script which course the characters are eating when the action takes place. For a grand dinner, there might be as many as nine courses – soup, hors d’oeuvres, roast, entrée, pudding, savoury – although each portion would be quite modest.

For recipe ideas, Lisa went to the National Archives to look at private house menus. These are full of inspiration, but are largely written in French, as was the fashion, so Lisa found herself turning to Nancy Lake’s
Menus Made Easy: How to Order Dinner and Give the Dishes Their French Names,
which was published in 1891 and ran to several editions. Doubtless, the likes of Mrs Patmore and Daisy would have found it invaluable in boosting their schoolgirl French. Lisa also uses cookbooks common to the period, such as those by Larousse, Mrs Beeton, Mrs Marshall and Elizabeth Rafferty. ‘Downton’s not changing too much and I like to use books they would have had in the kitchen, even if they were a little old-fashioned by then,’ says Lisa. ‘It’s still very much a country house. But the new kitchen equipment has started to make a difference – a toaster for breakfast and a beater for soufflés and mousse.’

Using these recipes, Lisa is able to plan the food as carefully as the best country house cook – nothing that appears on a plate is there by accident. Even the platter decorations are put to good use, providing something light and easy for the actors to nibble on. When dining-room scenes take between ten and twelve hours to film, the actors soon learn not to be chewing any chicken in their shot, or they’ll be chewing it for a long time and it won’t taste so nice by the end of the day. Sometimes, though, hunger overcomes them. ‘The worst is when we’re filming a breakfast scene,’ says Chris Croucher, producer. ‘The actors arrive on set hungry, having been picked up from their houses at 7 a.m. or earlier. They can’t help but start tucking into the sausages that have been put on their plates. The problem comes when they have to return to the scene after lunch. They’re not so hungry anymore, but they still have to keep eating …’

Food is also an important element in the kitchen, where Mrs Patmore and Daisy are kept constantly busy. A house that size would have had a still room, with its own still-room maid, leading off the kitchen, in which the jams, jellies and cakes were made and tea-trays would be laid out. But for dramatic purposes it was decided to keep all the cooking action in the main room itself. Lisa and the set-dresser decide what Daisy and the other maids can be doing in each scene, taking the need for colour on the table – a bowl of lemons or leeks, for example – and the time of day into consideration. ‘We keep them away from knives,’ laughs Lisa. Baskets of vegetables are often seen sitting on the worktops – these are freshly bought before being dusted with handfuls of earth, kept in a bag by the art department, to give them that ‘just out of the kitchen garden’ look appropriate for 1924.

All the food is prepped by Lisa at her home, where she has an industrial kitchen, which means she also has to think about what food can travel, as well as the fact that its hard to keep anything hot. ‘Its creating an art form,’ says Lisa. ‘It’s not about the eating, its the look of it, and I really enjoy that.’

Elaborate food presentation was the order of the day.

Farming

Tom Branson

But as a countryman, he’ll see something different: he knows the promise of a bountiful year begins with the spread of slurry on the fields. The calving and lambing has begun. The farm is cleaned up, fences are fixed, holes are plugged, ready for spring to be sprung.

An estate such as Downton Abbey with thousands of acres would have both tenant farmers and farmland of its own, being, in effect, self-sustaining. From the home farm, Mrs Patmore receives all the beef, chicken, pork and vegetables she needs, as well as having free rein over a number of herbs from the kitchen garden.

In many estates there would be a hothouse, producing tomatoes, lemons and peaches, as well as unusual and exotic fruits. There’s certainly a Downton dairy too, providing the house’s milk, butter and cheese. This wasn’t unusual – the Astors of Cliveden even took their own milking cow with them when they went up to Scotland.

The rented-out arable land would customarily be divided into fields of around a hundred acres each, with crop rotation the common method of growing: wheat or winter oats, followed by half clover for hay and half feed for sheep – rye, winter barley, swedes and kale; followed by turnips. ‘This rotation was as unalterable as the law of Medes and Persians,’ wrote A. G. Street in his moving memoir,
Farmer’s Glory,
about life on the farm at the start of the twentieth century. ‘Any slight variation was considered a sin … One didn’t farm for cash profits but did one’s duty by the land.’

As well as farmland, an estate would have woods and gardens for pleasure, whether for raising game for shoots or growing flowers for the dining table.

Pleasure gardens could be extraordinarily elaborate, making them a draw for any summer party, with rockeries, lakes, tennis courts and croquet lawns. While beautiful gardens were the pride of any estate, it was only the employed workers that actually held a trowel or planted a bulb. Gardening might be something we like to do today, but it was classed as servants’ work in 1924 (the fashion for getting one’s hands dirty did not begin until after about 1930), as one can read between the lines when Lord Merton replies to Lady Shackleton, after she asks him how his lovely garden is: ‘Still lovely. Largely because I have the same lovely gardener.’ The hierarchy of responsibility for the garden was so strict that many châtelaines feared being told off by their head gardeners – who were highly skilled workers – for so much as picking their own peaches off a tree. There’s a wonderful story from Loelia Ponsonby, of her orchid expert, when she was married to the Duke of Westminster: ‘[He] lived in hopes of producing a marvellous new cross that would be worth hundreds of pounds and we sympathised with him when he came and complained that his most precious bloom, a pure white virgin veiled in white cellophane to keep away pollen-carrying insects, had been picked by Lord Carnarvon and presented to a girlfriend.’ The descendant of that Lord Carnarvon, of course, owns Highclere Castle.

It’s not so hard to understand why, until the twentieth century, a man’s influence and power were not measured by his job, his wife, his friends, his money or even his title – although all of these things helped – but mainly by his land. The landowners were the country’s principal players for hundreds of years, the long period when a vast acreage indicated both riches and influence. To be ‘landed gentry’ indicated that you came from an old landowning family and could live off the money earned from your tenant farmers. This income could be considerable: at the end of the nineteenth century, the Duke of Buccleuch earned £217,000 a year from 460,000 acres. But even the smaller estates were nothing to sneeze at: the Duke of Marlborough got by on £37,000 a year from 24,000 acres. This at a time when the average working-class family income was less than a £100 a year.