Belated Food Friday II: Easter Feasting, Upstairs and Down

This is the recreated Victorian Kitchen at Beaulieu, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Montagu. Being an English stately home, Beaulieu is pronounced Bew-lee, but of course you knew that. (Perhaps the thrashing French words get in the mouths of the Brits is a rebuke to the Norman Conquest.) It's one of the great houses saved from extinction by the entrepreneurial spirit of recent heirs, who have turned these fascinating piles into everything from rock concert venus to full-fledged golfing resorts — and of course, locations for film shoots.

The Beaulieu website indicates a heavy emphasis on the life of the house in the Victorian era, presumably because detailed archives of the period are particularly well-preserved. Thus the kitchen, and thus a sampling of typical menus served both upstairs and down. Here is what the family would have had on Easter Sunday:

Breakfast
Sausages
Bacon and Eggs

Luncheon
Shoulder of Lamb
Beef Fillets French-style
Roast Chicken
Rhubarb Tart
Jelly
Pudding

Dinner
Royal Consommé
Grilled Sole with Tartare Sauce
Lamb Cutlets with Peas
Roast Beef
Bordeaux Pigeons
Plum Pudding

And here is what would have been on offer in Servants' Hall:

Roast Mutton
Pork
Boiled Beef
Plum Pudding

The thing that strikes me most about both menus is that nearly everything would have been more or less the same color, including the rhubarb and, most likely, the peas.

But that was then. Today's guardians of the patrimony are a savvy bunch, and present-day onsite hospitality — rent-a-castle specializes in weddings, birthdays, conferences, and in all likelihood bar mitvahs too (Woburn Abbey notes that kosher meals can be ordered) — tends to the same kind of first-class food you'd find in any cosmopolitan setting.

Why this sudden interest in Beaulieu and the rest? My own household has been escaping from a world that is too much with us by gorging on Masterpiece Theatre DVDs. We're now about halfway through Brideshead Revisited, which sparked an interest in Castle Howard...and well, I just let the links take me from there.