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Who Needs Two Kitchens? — and Who Parleyed in the Winter Parlour?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Alison Maguire  and
Andor Gomme
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Extract

‘. . . the large kitchen or keeping-room . . . was a spacious, square, low apartment, in which there was a long grate with various appurtenances for boiling, roasting, and baking . . . But though the apartment was called a kitchen, — and, in truth, the cookery for the family was done here, — there was behind it, opening out to the rear, another kitchen in which there was a great boiler, and a huge oven never now used. The necessary but unsightly doings of kitchen life were carried on, out of view.’

Trollope, The Vicar of Bullhampton, chap. vi.

Writing on Lulworth Castle in Architectural History in 1990 Mark Girouard pondered why the castle was provided with two kitchens. The only explanation he could think of was that one of them was for the preparation of royal food, which always had to be cooked separately. But we have recently found evidence of paired kitchens in several smallish and middle-sized gentry houses of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, none of which would be likely to have had aspirations to receive royal visits. There must be another answer.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 38 , 1995 , pp. 58 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1995

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References

Notes

1 Architectural History, 33 (1990), p. 48.

2 Nevertheless Howard Colvin has pointed out that Elizabeth 1, while on her progresses, stayed quite as often with the gentry as with the aristocracy and sometimes in relatively modest manor houses.

3 Kingsley, Nicholas, The Country Houses of Gloucestershire, vol. 1 (1989), p. 146 Google Scholar.

4 MSS of Earl Cowper (Coke MSS; vol. 1: Historical Manuscripts Commission 12, App. part 1, 1888). Kingsley (loc. cit.) refers to Powell as Greville’s agent, giving as his authorities G. Ruck, Preston: a guide and history (1953) and T. C. Reeves, History of Little March and Preston parish (n.d. [c. 1975]). Powell and Coke have evidently been confused through their subsequent relationship and Powell’s having taken over Greville’s lease.

5 Edge’s initials and the date are on a lintel now above a minor entry in the back range but almost certainly once over the front door.

6 See Smith, Peter, Houses of the Welsh Countryside (1975), pp. 233, 277Google Scholar and Fig. 148.

7 Cf. Marcus Binney in Country Life, 16 February 1984, pp. 399f.

8 When elaborate pastiche decoration was introduced by Benjamin Ferrey (1877-82) — all now removed but illustrated in Binney, art. cit.

9 Oswald, Arthur, Country Houses of Dorset (2nd edn. 1959), p. 102 Google Scholar.

10 Craven, Maxwell & Stanley, Michael, The Derbyshire Country House (1991), p. 110 Google Scholar.

11 The mid-eighteenth-century palace at Rundāle in Latvia, built by the Duke of Courland, has two identical kitchens, one each in the Duke’s and Duchess’s sides, each with four hearths side by side.

12 The bakehouse in Bolsover little castle has a curious arrangement in which the fronts of the three ovens are arranged in a shallow concave curve, within which at ground level is a hearth from which vents passed upwards to discharge into the main flue in front of the ovens. ( P. A. Faulkner, , Bolsover Castle (English Heritage Guide 1985), p. 30 Google Scholar.)

13 Greater houses often had independent pastries, though it was customary to bake pies, cakes and pastry in bakehouse ovens when the bread was partly baked and the fierce heat had cooled somewhat. ( David, Elizabeth, English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977), p. 184 Google Scholar.)

14 Ex. inf. Nicholas Cooper.

15 At Moynes Court the curious curved alcove to one side of the hearth in the original kitchen may be the remains of a baking oven.

16 Conversely, as Maurice Barley observed (‘Rural Housing in England’, Cambridge Agrarian History (ed. Thirsk, J.), IV, 733 Google Scholar), ‘the name kitchen was, in western counties as elsewhere, sometimes given to a brewhouse or bakehouse; the term must have meant merely a room with a particular type of hearth and equipment rather than one specifically for cooking and the preparation of food.’ But, if not for cooking, what was such a hearth there for?

17 The terrace range at Bolsover, built by Sir Charles Cavendish immediately after completion of the little castle, goes to town with as many as three separate kitchens; it also includes a large room at the north end identified now as the servants’ hall. For a remarkable early instance one might turn to the keep of Warkworth Castle, in which the double-height main kitchen has two enormous hearths each fourteen feet wide, while to one side is a lower room, also called ‘kitchen’, with a seven-foot hearth flanked by a large oven and a set-pot. At the time of its building by the Percys in the 1390s Warkworth might indeed have expected to receive royalty; but it is notable that this lavish provision of hearths served a house in which there appear to have been no more than three chambers: the great hall in the outer ward was served by an entirely independent set of offices with a single large kitchen.

18 The Book of Architecture of John Thorpe, ed. Summerson, J. (Walpole Society, XI, 1966)Google Scholar. (‘T’ numbers refer to pages in the original manuscript now in the Soane Museum.) Thorpe was active between the late sixteenth century and 1651.

19 Cf. for example, T27, T99, Tuo, T121, T132.

20 Bacon was keen on making provision for different times of day as well as different seasons: he insisted that the courtyard ranges of his palace should be double-pile: ‘let all three sides be a double house, without thorough lights on the sides, that you may have rooms from the sun, both for forenoon and afternoon.’ (Ibid.)

21 It is possible that the double stack at Preston Court is a survival from earlier building on the site — in which case it is noteworthy that the arrangement was retained in order to provide for two kitchens.

22 Pratt, ‘Certain Heads to be Largely Treated of Concerning the Undertaking of any Building’ (1660): see Gunter, R., ed., The Architecture of Sir Roger Pratt (1928), p. 62 Google Scholar. We have not been able to identify the first use of the term ‘servants’ hall’. It was apparently used at Bolsover when the great cellar was converted and given a fireplace, and it appears in an inventory of Erddig dated 1726, in which both an old and a new servants’ hall are included. See Waterson, M., The Servants’ Hall (1980), p. 29 Google Scholar.

23 North, Roger, ‘On Planning a Country House’, in Colvin, Howard & Newman, John, eds., Of Building: Roger North’s Writings on Architecture (1981), p. 140 Google Scholar.