Читать книгу Dinner at Buckingham Palace - Secrets & recipes from the reign of Queen Victoria to Queen Elizabeth II - Charles Oliver - Страница 8

The Tudor and Elizabethan monarchs enjoyed enormous and extravagant feasts, as did the high-living aristocracy of succeeding centuries, who were close enough to the royal court to aspire to its standards even in non-royal entertainment. In 1746 the Earl of Warwick held a banquet for more than 6,000 people, where a great marble basin was filled with a punch made from 25,000 lemons, 80 pints of lemon juice, 4 large barrels of water, 1,003 hundredweight of sugar, 300 biscuits and 5 pounds of nutmeg.

A great change in the nature and quality of English food took place in the early part of the nineteenth century. After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars many French chefs were left without noble houses to employ them and came over to England to put their enduring stamp on English cooking. French, or at least ‘frenchified’, food became the most desirable and dishes were given French or semi-French names regardless of their origins. The introduction of French kitchen techniques also led to a refining of the English appetite. Dumplings became quenelles, fish was transformed into soufflés, meat was enhanced with sauces, socles of rice or pastry held composed salads and other dishes, and desserts became rich and a far cry from the homey English pie. Even typically English foods, notably game, were cooked in a more imaginative manner.

The chef who had the greatest influence on this development was Antonin Carême (1784–1833), one of the master chefs of all time and creator of immensely elaborate confectionery, as depicted in his drawings – they have to be seen to be believed. Widely regarded as the founder of haute cuisine, Carême was chef to Talleyrand, Tsar Alexander I and to England’s George IV, who enjoyed vast quantities of high-quality food. It became obligatory for royal chefs to be French or at least French-trained, and this remained more or less the case for years to come.