FOOD & DRINK
M
rs Beeton eat your heart out! In this, the year of Downton Abbey-inspired nostalgia, we decided that it would be
fitting to prepare a Christmas banquet in true Victorian style. So we headed off to Colstoun House near Haddington in East Lothian, one of the country’s grandest houses and also, happily for us, home to a renowned cook school. Head chef Cameron Sinclair-Parry rose to the
challenge admirably. Did we want food from the early Victorian era, he asked, or were we looking for the end of her reign, at the start of the 1900s? Having decided that the mid-1800s was our chosen period – Downton Abbey is set in the Edwardian era, of course, but we wanted food from an altogether more distant time – we sat back and dreamed of lark’s tongues in aspic and potted boar. In truth, we had little idea of what to expect, although that soon changed. ‘Our starting point was to do some research
and ask ourselves what the Victorians of the time, and especially those who would have lived at somewhere like Colstoun House, would have eaten,’ says Sinclair-Parry. ‘Given that we have a cook school on site, all it took was a little research through our library – our main refer- ence books were Mrs Beeton’s and a fantastic American recipe book from the 1860s called Godey’s Lady’s Book – and we were able to find out exactly what the Victorians would have expected to eat on 25 December each year. ‘Once we’d determined that, then we set
about providing it, trying to stay as true as possible to the sort of food that would have been eaten by wealthy Scots at the time of
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the Crimean War and The Great Exhibition.’ The result was a gloriously decadent
ten-
course banquet for ten Scottish Field staff at Colstoun House, with Sinclair-Parry insisting that the whole place be decked out in authen- tic Christmas decorations. Even the
who run Colstoun House’s floristry course were roped in to produce seasonal wreaths. There were challenges, of course. Godey’s,
which was the stylebook for American hostesses in the mid-1800s, recommended sweetbread pâté and whitebait, which was changed to boar pâté and langoustines to replicate what a Scot- tish gentlewoman would have served. Other than that, the main issue was the
liberal use of vast quantities of lard by cooks in the 1880s. ‘The original recipe for rice croquettes, for example, called for them to be deep-fried in lard,’ laughs Sinclair-Parry, ‘but we thought that our refined modern stomachs wouldn’t be able to cope with all of that fat so we used sunflower oil instead. ‘Other than that it was fairly straighforward.
It took a while to find the quality of candied fruit we needed for the Fancy Fruit Cake, but we eventually got there and that was well worth it – the cake was absolutely fantastic.’ As, indeed, was the whole banquet. Ten
courses, starting with a traditional Wassail Punch which could stop an elephant in its tracks, had us almost wishing we were back in Blighty in the time of Queen Victoria.
Above: ‘Cheers!’ from the Scottish Field team. Top right: Oh no, I couldn’t possibly... Bottom right: Raw oysters.
two girls
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