In many of the British stately homes open to the public, the dank old kitchens in the basement are echoing empty spaces, where visitors file past giant spits and trestle tables. But in recent years food historians have been bringing some of these old kitchens back to life, demonstrating old recipes and cooking techniques to eager visitors.

Hampton Court Palace has led the way in kitchen restoration. Henry VIII’s redbrick pile west of London has Europe’s biggest surviving Renaissance kitchens: more than 50 rooms, ranging from confectionery chambers to impressive, high-ceilinged roasting rooms. They occupy more than a third of the ground floor and were once staffed by 200 servants. There is a monthly programme of Tudor cookery displays that provides an insight into the formidable logistics of feeding the court. Food historian Marc Meltonville, who leads the Historic Kitchens team at Hampton Court, says, “We take printed recipes from the reign of Henry VIII and cook them in the space they were cooked in, using the implements with which they were cooked.”

Courtly dining in Tudor times was about status, with the number of dishes you were served and the ingredients used reflecting your social standing. Rare, exotic spices were a high-status ingredient: “It was food miles, but in reverse,” says Meltonville: “the further the better. When we’re cooking here we do our best to be unseasonal; seasonality was what poor people put up with.”

While visitors can watch food being cooked in the old kitchens, food hygiene regulations mean they are not allowed to taste it. That leaves the staff to eat the dishes they have made. This, says Melville, can involve sampling intriguing creations: a cold, sweet chicken and honey dish was “odd, like a toffee chicken bar, but omelette with minced pork was interesting”.

Historic houses don’t need to be grand to have a working kitchen – at Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumbria, where the poet was born and lived as child, there is a Georgian kitchen as it would have been in the 1770s. Zoe Gilbert, its National Trust custodian, says: “It’s very hands-on: people can rummage through jars in the kitchen. It adds to the homely feel of the property. The Wordsworths were ‘middling sorts’ and had a couple of servants. The working kitchen garden is very important. We cook seasonally here, so during the barren winter months we use a lot of pickles and preserves. In summer, with fresh produce from the garden, we do a lot of Georgian salads. We make a salmagundi – which looks wonderful, like a thali, with little pots of things dressed with edible flowers and leaves.” The kitchen is open every day and, although everything cooked is for display only, the volunteers run regular food tastings through the year, cooking the old recipes in a modern kitchen.

A working kitchen doesn’t just smell good – it boosts visitor numbers too. When the National Trust restored the kitchens at Penrhyn Castle in Wales, with the help of food historian Peter Brears, the visitor count went up by 50 per cent. Brears says kitchen demonstrations also teach the experts more about the past: “Servants have returned to great old houses and told me tales of what went on,” he says. “There’s so much that hasn’t been recorded. I did an exhibition in one noble house on wartime food and a lady came in and asked, ‘Where’s your liquid paraffin cake?’ and I said, ‘Pardon?’ She explained that because of fat shortages during the war, people would buy liquid paraffin from the chemist and use that.”

Heritage recipes are also about to make an appearance in one of the world’s best restaurants. At the Fat Duck in Berkshire, chef Heston Blumenthal has developed such a fascination with the past that, as he explains, “the driving force at the Fat Duck and the Hind’s Head will be historic British recipes”. On the menu from next month at Blumenthal’s triple Michelin-starred the Fat Duck will be mock turtle soup – a fashionable Victorian recipe based on a veal consommé. Blumenthal, inspired by Alice in Wonderland, will present it in concentrate form, moulded into a gilded fob-watch.

“I’m not a food historian,” Blumenthal stresses. “I’m not trying to replicate these dishes, but to use them for inspiration. For me it’s great that people are now championing British produce, but we also have a rich culinary heritage we should be proud of.”

Blumenthal was inspired by a chance meeting at an Oxford food symposium with Hampton Court’s Meltonville and another food historian, Richard Fitch: “I love the showmanship and creativity of many old recipes,” he says. “I wanted to bring a dish back to life; offering a modern interpretation of it but keeping the essence. The quaking pudding we serve at the Hind’s Head is based on an old recipe that’s pretty vague. We ended up making 50-plus versions of it. It was trying to get the wobble without sacrificing the ideal texture.”

Recipes such as chocolate wine and buttered beer were similarly demanding: “I do love a challenge,” he adds, cheerfully.

For those who want to learn to cook like our ancestors, Ivan Day offers courses at his Cumbrian farmhouse. “People think that to roast meat in front of an open fire will result in it being charred on the outside and raw in the middle, but that’s not the case at all. There was an immense range of sophisticated technology used in roasting, from two-spindle jacks to dangle spits. The kitchen equipment used in the past was wonderfully made; I’ve used 18th-century bronze saucepans that are wonderful to cook with. You see beautifully worked knives because people used to carry their own knife to eat with and this was a status symbol, like mobile phones nowadays, and so they’d try and outdo each other.”

Camelyne Sauce

A medieval recipe from Peter Brears’ Cooking & Dining in Medieval England (Prospect Books), this is one of many cold sauces, with vinegar as their base, that can be kept in bottles or jars in the pantry – now you should keep it in the fridge – and which go well with cold meats. Rather than being poured out in quantity, it would have been eaten as a relish, taken in tiny dabs.

Ingredients
225g white bread, toasted golden brown
150 ml white wine vinegar 150 ml white wine
4 tsp sugar
pinch saffron
quarter tsp ground cinnamon
quarter tsp ground ginger
three-quarters tsp ground cloves

● Method
Soak the bread in the vinegar and wine until soft, then rub through a sieve three times.
Stir in the sugar and spices, bottle and seal.

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Details

There are Tudor cookery demonstrations at Hampton Court this weekend, for details and other dates visit www.hrp.org.uk/HamptonCourtPalace
Wordsworth House and Garden www.wordsworthhouse.org.uk
Ivan Day’s cookery courses: www.historicfood.com

Jenny Linford is the author of ‘The London Cookbook’ (Metro)