A Tudor Feast

This is Haddon Hall,

an ancient monument from a vanished age.

Here in Derbyshire's Peak District, this extraordinary manor house is trapped in time,

exactly how it used to be during the reign of Elizabeth I in the year 1590.

Today a remarkable project is about to take place.

Without the use of modern conveniences,

a group of historians and archaeologists

will prepare a Tudor feast as it would have been over 400 years ago.

-Utterly stunning.

-Tudor ironing!

They'll wear clothes from the period, source food from the land.

That's it. Spot-on.

-And use recipes from the era.

-Five udders - that's unusual!

They'll be turning the clock back to rediscover a way of life from an age gone by.

Standing on a 3,000-acre estate in the Peak District and uninhabited for over three centuries,

Haddon Hall has survived wars, changing fashions and family misfortunes.

Now, a group of experts will breathe new life into the house.

They'll step back in time

to recreate a Tudor feast, using only the resources available in 1590, when the house was completed.

This was a time of huge social change

when new worlds were discovered and new tastes were emerging.

This was England working out where it is and what it wants to do.

It's broken away from Rome.

And it goes for it in every sense, the architecture, the art and the food,

exploring the world and bringing all that produce back. It must've been an exciting time to live.

Marc Meltonville runs the historic royal kitchens at Hampton Court

where he cooks using old Tudor recipes.

We've got a tantalising glimpse of what we think we should do.

You've got the most ambiguous of recipes to work from.

You're using fire, so how can they tell you how long to put it in the oven for?

You don't have timings. It just says, "Cook until done."

So with every recipe, there's 20 ways of doing it.

With no labour-saving devices, the team will need all their skills to cook food from the period

using surviving recipes.

"Dress the peacock in such salt that it shall seem to be alive."

Ruth Goodman specialises in domestic practices of the period.

We'll try to do all the visual, pretty-pretty things on the table

and also various dishes and sauces.

We're also going to try and serve it in a Tudor way.

Archaeologists Hugh Beamish, Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn, nicknamed Fonz,

will supply much of the labour.

-Don't all Tudor feasts have a boar's head with an apple stuck in it?

-We could have.

-Have you walked round?

-Yeah. I've seen the boar's head on the family crest.

-Yeah.

-Peacocks and boars.

-They're everywhere.

-So we've got a boar and a peacock.

It's got to be posh ingredients. Things that make the diners realise that this is the place to eat.

Turning theory into practice, over the next three days, our team will cook peacock, wild boar,

venison and an array of salads and elaborate sweet dishes,

as they attempt to recreate an authentic Tudor feast.

The team's first task is to bring the kitchen back into full working order

for the first time in over three centuries.

Three wood fires would have been in regular use. Fonz and Hugh are attempting to relight the copper.

The copper is this. It's a large copper dish that contains water.

It's used for boiling water. You put your water on top and you've got a fire underneath.

You let it boil and hopefully you'll get hot water.

-Going to have a go with the flint and steel.

-Flint. Steel. Strike the two together and you get sparks.

-Bit like a modern lighter.

-Very much.

-Where's the gas?

-No gas.

However, we have a piece of charcloth.

So hopefully it'll take a spark from the flint.

-Happy with the theory?

-I'm happy with the theory.

-It's not as easy as it looks.

-No, unfortunately not.

Like most chores in the kitchen, lighting the fires was a slow and painstaking job.

You have a go.

-Right. You've got it lit.

-Mm-hm. I'm just going to place it inside this bit of tow.

HE BLOWS HARD

Hooray!

-It's going, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-Just keep blowing really, really gently.

Working in the kitchens at Haddon Hall was a privileged position.

Here the cooks were almost all male. Men's wages were higher,

so affluent households employed them as a status symbol.

Women were often given the more menial tasks.

A household this size needs the most ENORMOUS amount of water.

All your cooking and washing and drinking water - it's all got to be collected by bucket and yoke.

I mean, the yoke does help as it spreads the weight on to your spine rather than hanging off your arms.

And it stops the buckets banging against your legs.

Few houses had the luxury of piped water. The Hall relied on both its natural resources

and hard physical labour.

Much of the women's work at this time is really, really physical.

If you were a frail little thing, you wouldn't last five minutes.

You had to be physically strong. If you weren't, you couldn't get work. You know, you would go hungry.

And when people hired servants, they looked at their physique to see that they were tough.

They must have been pretty tough, actually. When you start doing this work, it's absolutely exhausting.

SHE SIGHS HEAVILY

Water - it's pretty heavy stuff!

In the kitchen, Fonz and Hugh have brought the copper fire up to heat.

-It's a good heat, isn't it?

-Yes.

-This is an exciting moment

because this is the first time in over 300 years that these fires have been lit.

-We're looking forward to seeing how they do. Shall we have to get this under here soon?

-I think so.

-Right. Fantastic. Lovely. A good job there.

-You got the water?

-I have.

-Best stick some in there.

Oh, cheers.

-Well, I suppose, wait for that to boil. Then I can do my gelatine.

-It'll not take too long.

-No.

The kitchen at Haddon Hall was once the engine room of the entire house.

A butchery provided a constant supply of expensive meats and game.

An adjoining bakehouse produced fresh bread and pies for the table.

And confectioners made sweet dishes with exotic ingredients.

This was a food production line designed for the sole purpose of large-scale catering.

Alex has been kneading dough all morning.

-Shall I have a go at kneading that for you?

-Yes, please.

-It's looking good.

-Bread-making is so knackering.

-But the upside is the smell of hot bread.

-You can smell the yeast?

-Yeah.

-And once we've given this a good stretch and got the gluten moving,

-stick it in a bowl, cloth on top, put it somewhere warm.

-Next to the fire?

-That'll do.

If we were playing very ancient, we'd stick it under an apple tree.

-Why would I do that?

-Apples have got natural yeasts on the skin.

-And if you put dough underneath a tree, it rises up quicker.

-This is not just an old wives' tale?

-No.

-It's backed up by science?

-Yes. But it would've been old wives by Tudor times. It's very ancient.

You've got brewer's yeast in here. That'll make it rise up lovely. We can get two dozen buns out of it.

-How's it feeling?

-That's starting to push back now.

It's less like pastry and starting to become more like a dough.

It's springing back. It's rising up itself already.

-Give that another go and you'll feel it's pushing back.

-Oh, right, yeah.

-So it's bowl time and then you just get to make another two.

-Another two of these?

-That should be all right.

The water in the copper is at boiling point. For the first time in over 300 years,

it is ready to be used.

I'm making some jelly. I'm more used to buying jelly in a packet.

But for this I've got to extract my own gelatine.

Gelatine is in the skin and bone of a pig's trotter.

In order to get it out, I've got to boil them for eight hours. So I'm just going to pop these in.

Ruth is busy in the still room, where all the work that involved cooking with sugar took place.

Sugar in the 1590s was 16 to 20 times the price of beef.

So if you go to the butcher's and think how much a pound of good beef is and sort of scale it up,

you think, "A modern bag of sugar - that's 300 quid!"

The kitchen staff were rarely trusted with preparing the sweet dishes.

The work in here was done by ladies of the house.

It might be THE lady of the house or other female relatives.

If you allowed a servant in here, it would be under supervision.

Following a surviving recipe from the period, Ruth is attempting to make a marchpane,

an iced marzipan cake that only the richest households could afford.

"How to make a good marchpane.

"First, take a pound of almonds. Blanch them in cold water and then dry them."

And then it says, "Stamp them small in a mortar."

It then goes on to say that having reduced my almonds to powder,

I've got to add in sugar that I've already ground. I can't tell you how long it's taken me!

I've done one batch here in a bowl. That was about an hour and a half of pounding.

I've got about three times that much to go. My arms are killing me.

So I might call in some labour from the boys. Help!

-Alex?

-Yeah?

-You couldn't give me a hand, could you?

-Yes, just a second.

-What can I help you with?

-You couldn't pound some sugar for me?

-Just pounding this?

Please!

-OK. So just got to grind it right down?

-Yeah. I'll start the almonds.

-To a powder?

-Yes. Like this one. Look.

-That's like flour.

-That's the point.

-It's going to take me ages.

-Yes!

A lot of manpower, these sweets!

-Or should I say woman-power?

-Yeah, they are. We'll be here forever.

Hosting large feasts was a regular occurrence in the great households of Tudor England.

At Haddon Hall, over 70 servants lived and worked on the estate.

Most were employed to provide the kitchen with a constant supply of fresh produce and meat.

Released from the kitchen, Alex has joined Fonz to track down one of the centrepieces for the feast.

They've met up with Anthony Salt, who's re-introduced wild boar to his Derbyshire farm.

-It's taken us a while, but we've tracked them down. Are they feeding?

-Yes, in that glade there.

-We're at a safe enough distance here, are we?

-Yes. They do have a very keen sense of smell.

But their eyesight's not great. But we're downwind, so they've not smelt us yet,

otherwise they'd be on the run.

Hunting wild boar was a favourite pastime of the landed gentry.

Their powerful jaws made them a formidable prey.

-Are they dangerous?

-Yes, they can be very ferocious when cornered. They're not like a domestic pig.

-They're a wild animal.

-Right.

By the 16th century, the indigenous species of wild boar in England had all but died out.

Wild boar herds were imported from the continent.

I think basically it was down to the amount of damage that they did on the land to crops and fields.

-Landowners persecuted them and forced them to extinction.

-And the depletion of their habitat as well.

The forests were used for charcoal burning and for shipbuilding as well and the navy of the 16th century.

There'd be less places for them to hide out in.

-So what does boar meat taste like?

-It's got its own distinct gamey flavour.

-It's a lot stronger than commercial pork and it's a very similar texture to beef.

-Right.

It's redder and darker than the supermarket pork.

Today, wild boar meat is back in fashion.

Anthony has agreed to part with one of his stock boars for the feast at Haddon Hall.

Wow! I've ground all the sugar down.

And all the almonds. And I've beaten the two together with a spot of rosewater.

And I now have marchpane! Perhaps you might know it as marzipan.

All that work! Anyway, you can see I've got great big lumps of it

and now I've got to start moulding it into the shape. So, clear myself a space.

What I plan to do is a sort of big circle flat cake,

about that deep, if I have enough. I'll ice it and hopefully gild it.

It'll have a little tree coming out the centre. I've seen this described in period recipes.

Let's see how I get on.

So I think I'm going to start by seeing if I've got the thickness

and how big I'll be able to make it.

OK.

The pig's trotters have been boiling in the copper for the last eight hours.

And Fonz and Marc can now start the arduous process of making their jellies.

At the moment, it's like soup. We want it clear, so we'll have to sieve it over and over again.

And then hopefully we'll be left with a gelatine-rich water,

which when cool, should set hard like a jelly.

I'm going to make an icing out of sugar and egg white, which I've just beaten up a bit together.

I'll mix it up to something fairly wet. Then I'll paint it on with a feather.

While Ruth continues the delicate task of icing the marchpane,

in the game larder, Alex is skinning a deer in preparation for the feast.

He's being helped by local butcher, Michael Shirt.

-So, we're doing the legging here?

-Yes. And then you hang it up by its haunches,

so you can remove the skin in one piece, because apart from the meat, a valuable part of the carcass,

-they also used to cure the skin to make a rug.

-So no part is wasted apart from the hooves?

-No, they'd boil them and make glue out of them.

-Right.

In the 16th century, few meats were as prized as venison.

If you were invited to the lord's manor and the lord was serving up venison at the table,

he's trying to tell you that he's high up the social order.

And he can hunt, which is only a privilege of the upper classes.

-Right.

-And you're going to twist it round, yeah?

-Yeah.

-Lovely.

-Like so.

-Up it goes. Just a minute.

-We've already taken out the insides, haven't we?

-That's right.

What they called gralloching. You take the intestines out

and the pluck, we've got the windpipe here and then the lungs,

-the heart and the liver.

-So these are the "humbles"?

Yes. Which they used to give to the peasants, the people lower down the scale.

-So they would get to eat the humbles? And that's where the phrase "to eat humble pie" comes from?

-Yes.

So now we'll just pull the skin straight down here, quite swiftly, and leave the carcass behind,

and hopefully have a nice, clean skin. If you'd like to get hold of that there? And pull it down.

-That's lovely.

-Smashing.

-Lovely. There we are - a carcass of venison there.

-And that's basically it.

-Just need to de-bone it now and it's ready for the spit.

-That's right.

Fonz and Marc are still straining the gelatine.

-Even making jelly's hard work.

-Yes, that's the whole point. The food's expensive because of the labour.

So it might only be pig's trotters, but two people have got to do this for hours just to get some jelly.

-Hence why we're doing it for a feast and not a kids' party.

-Yeah.

In its day, Haddon Hall was one of the grandest houses in the country,

reflecting both the wealth and extravagance of the Tudor upper classes.

To understand more about its culinary past, Ruth has met up with local historian, Mary Lloyd,

in the Hall's magnificent long gallery.

Oh, that's the boar's head, isn't it? Isn't that the Manners family?

-It is the boar. But the Vernon family built the house. There's our peacock up there.

-Isn't that lovely!

I'd never have been allowed in here 400 years ago.

Sir John Manners and his family were living at Haddon Hall in 1590.

The family still own it today.

Oh, we have some of the original orders for food.

-So these are food lists from here of about the date we're doing?

-Yes.

-"Sir John Manners" - that pretty much dates it, doesn't it?

-Yes.

"Three dozen chicken. Eleven dozen pigeons.

"Three barrels of oysters"!

I suppose they were cheap in those days. "Five udders" - that's more unusual!

Just by the quantities, they've got to be some special event?

-John Manners' father-in-law, Sir George Vernon, he was known as the King of the Peak.

-Oh, was he?

He was probably known for giving banquets left, right and centre.

The feasts at the Hall were famous.

A portrait from the period depicts the Christmas revelries in the Great Hall.

It was during a feast that Dorothy Vernon, Sir George's daughter, eloped to marry John Manners.

Their children became the Dukes of Rutland.

There's this sort of tradition in this house of large-scale entertaining. Oh, fantastic!

It's the end of the working day for the team. Time to take some well-earned rest.

And for the workers, it's a chance to eat a dinner of umble pie.

-This is the umble pie.

-Umble pie.

-Who's going to be brave and cut it open? Go on, Alex. Go on.

-Was!

Take the top off and we get a stunningly good pie.

-Good rosemary flavour.

-It's nice, that. I like that.

-It's very nice.

The team are settling in to their new roles. But they still have a lot of work ahead of them.

-Well, we got to the end of today and everything we planned to do is done.

-How's your jelly?

-Good.

He didn't seem so confident. I'm eternally confident. >

A new day at Haddon Hall

and the team must start by gathering together more ingredients for the feast.

Kitchen staff relied on the estate itself for all the fresh produce they needed.

Ruth is raiding the Hall's herb garden.

A herb garden would have been absolutely central to a great estate. It's not only for food.

You also need your herb garden for things like the insecticides that keep your house clean of pests,

for cleaning agents. It's a pretty huge list.

Without it, it's hard to see how a Tudor household can function.

A huge variety of herbs and plants were used in a Tudor kitchen.

Much of their food was preserved with salt. So powerful flavourings were needed to disguise the taste.

But herbs also had other valuable properties.

These plants were eaten also for their medicinal properties.

The theory of how the body worked then said that everything had to be in balance.

There were four humours - blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.

And you had to have this balance, but men are different from women and young are different from old

and people with different colouring are different from each other.

I'm ginger, so I'm choleric and therefore, hot-tempered.

I would need to make sure that I didn't eat too many hot, dry foods. So not much mustard or pepper.

But lots and lots of cool foods. So I should be eating the angelica and lettuce and celery,

which were calming and would make me a nicer person.

To cook the large number of dishes they're planning for the feast, the team will use a huge amount of fuel.

They need to re-stock their wood stores.

If you think of all the many fires they've got over at Haddon Hall, well, back in the 16th century,

they would've used an enormous amount of wood. You've got fires for cooking, heating and boiling water.

You've basically got fires running pretty much every day of the year.

On the other side of the estate, Fonz has come down to the river with local angler, Richard Ward,

to try his luck at a spot of fishing.

You really must stay hidden.

They're using a rod similar to that used by anglers in Tudor times.

This is typical of an upmarket rod that the Tudors would've used. They'd been around for 100 years.

And the butt section that I'm using here is made of hazel.

And it has a slice taken out of it up here at the top.

Then I've got a section here of blackthorn,

which is very resilient wood,

which are fastened together, and I've got linen thread waxed with beeswax. There's no glue in there.

It can expand or whatever.

First, there's a heavy horsehair fishing line here.

This is 21 hairs, three bunches of 7 twisted to make a little rope.

And then there's another piece and it's knotted together with a knot

that's still used today by anglers. It's called a water knot.

They knew what they were doing. It was important that they succeeded

because it was part of going shopping. It was going to get some grub. They didn't go to the shops...

They had to get their own.

The River Wye running through Haddon Hall's estate

not only supplied the kitchen with fresh water, but also a constant supply of fresh brown trout.

-The brown trout's natural environment has been slowly eroded by man's use of the waterways.

-Yes.

So we're very lucky here at Haddon Hall to have a river that runs past that has got brown trout in it.

-But I'm not so sure if we'll be so lucky to catch ourselves one.

-We will. But probably not here.

I think we've scared away the fish that were here. They'll not have gone far. But they just won't eat.

You wouldn't eat if you were frightened, would you? If a Spaniard with a sword was at your throat,

-you'd not be ready to eat a pork pie, would you?

-I'm always ready to eat a pork pie.

They're all over there by that bank.

Anglers through the ages have learnt to their cost they must not let the fish see them!

-Well, shall we go and try another bit of river?

-Yes.

-Where we've not frightened off the fish!

We'll try not to frighten them at the next spot.

These are wild strawberries. They're the only sort of strawberries the Tudors had.

Modern ones are a hybrid of these and something from America.

But these tiny little things are really lovely, though, so sweet.

I've seen household accounts of gentlemen in London.

And it says for their dinner they had a pint of strawberries and a chicken, which would be gorgeous.

You'd need hundreds of them!

-You must have a go with this. Just hold it there.

-Just hold there.

And the trick is not to put lots of power on the forward cast. If anything, you don't put any on it.

It's a little bit on the back cast and ease it forward. OK? Back and forth. That's it. And there you are.

That's it! Spot-on.

-Just need a fish now.

-Yes.

-Just need a bite now.

-Ready? Aye.

Charles Cotton, an ancient Derbyshire angler,

used to say that any man who couldn't land a 16-inch trout on two hairs

was not fit to call himself an angler!

So I'm unfit, I'm afraid. I just find this stuff so amazingly frail.

And for a feast like ours, they would've used a brown trout.

They'd all have been brown trout and you'd have used all methods to catch them.

You'd have had traps in the river. There'd have been people up at dawn with bread and worms.

If it was an important feast, nobility or royalty visiting, they would go and get it.

There wouldn't be... There's no sporting aspect to it at all. It would've been, "Get them caught."

-We're not doing very well.

-Let's hope that all the rest of the estate workers have caught plenty of trout

-as we're not doing very well at all.

-We'll have to get the traps out.

As Alex returns with a new supply of faggots and kindling,

in the kitchen, the others get ready for an afternoon of baking.

Ruth is attempting to fire the kitchen's 400-year-old bread ovens.

The oven itself is just a sort of stone cave or maybe a brick cave.

But it has to be a specific shape to make this fire move in the right way so that it heats evenly.

And then it's the hot stones of the cave that do the cooking for you.

So now we've just got a little fire happening in the middle. That's a baby fire just started.

As the fire develops, we're looking to move the flame around the shape.

And we'll end up with it starting to get a plume. So it'll go up straight and it'll hit the roof,

spread and come down the side, heating it like a mushroom cloud.

And then later it's going to come in sort of at the base and curl away round and back up.

So what I'm aiming at is a very particular shape and colour and form of flame

to tell me that the oven is heating properly.

It's pretty accurate. But like so many things, it requires skill,

a bit more skill than just turning a knob. Anyway - more wood.

For an oven that hasn't been in regular use, this is working superbly well.

I wonder who the last person who used this was?

Somebody who was glad to see the back of it, I imagine.

A huge amount of work.

The ovens are proving to be more successful than Richard and Fonz

who have yet to catch a single trout.

-..and to all fish.

-Call it a day?

-If you like, yeah.

-Yeah.

-We won't get into serious trouble.

-It's wet!

-We're the lord's favourite, aren't we?

-Now look, we mustn't waste that.

-What is that?

-This is sheep. And it's where they've rubbed it off.

In fact, it looks like a bit of lamb's wool. It makes good dubbing. That's for the bodies of the fly.

-I'll keep that in our dubbing bag, ready for when we want to tie some more flies.

-Ready for next time.

Pick anything up like that, anything that's fur, even a mouse.

It can be used for making flies' bodies with.

-I'll keep my eyes peeled.

-Yes.

-I wish they had invented tea in Tudor times!

That fish is still rising here.

With the ovens warming, Ruth is ready to start preparing the centrepiece for the lord's table.

The Tudor upper classes loved to dazzle their guests with great visual displays.

And few dishes were more spectacular than the peacock pie.

-It's lovely. Absolutely beautiful.

-He hasn't even started dragging his tail feathers.

-Look, they're perfect right up to the end.

-Not even a scuff on them.

He looks extremely fresh.

-So is it me skinning this?

-Yes.

In Tudor England, people's poultry yards contained a huge variety of poultry, not just chickens,

but also ducks and geese and peacocks and swans

were all sort of farmed, in essence, for the table.

We don't really seem to do that any more. I'm not quite sure why. I can't think of why we don't.

I mean, a peacock's a nice bird to eat. But people think they should only be looked at these days.

-It's just a pretty chicken, really.

-Yes.

-People think, "Poor thing." Well, chickens are pretty too.

I'm trying to take the skin off in one complete piece, so that we can re-use the skin.

It's going to the table too. It'll be part of the big visual display.

We'll eat the bird himself, which hopefully will be nice.

In books I've read they claim that peacock is disgusting.

Yet the two times I've done it before, it was lovely.

The diet of the landed gentry differed greatly from that of the lower classes.

Poultry was considered a luxury. Even chicken was seldom eaten.

The lower classes very rarely had poultry.

A chicken was an expensive meat simply because it's much more valuable alive as an egg-layer.

Chicken only became a cheap meat from the...last quarter of the 20th century

when we introduced battery farming.

Before that all poultry was expensive meat.

While Ruth continues the delicate art of skinning the peacock, Marc's making a spice mix for the pie,

ingredients that were only available in wealthy households.

The whole point of spices in this pie are money.

Everything about this meal is to show off. You're in a big house.

You've got fantastic food, things that other people can't have that have come from all over the world.

It's hard to tell how much it's worth because we don't use the same money as them.

Cinnamon's a good indication.

We buy it at Christmas, put it on custard, then leave it in the cupboard.

Nearly 500 years ago, if I could afford to buy three ships,

put a crew on board, send it down to the Spice Islands, fill them up with cinnamon,

if one of those ships makes it back three years later, we've made enough profit to pay for everything.

To keep ourselves in good living for many years. So it's worth a fortune!

We're nearly, nearly done here and it's gone quite well, actually.

He was warm and that makes a lot of difference. Trying to skin something with so much plumage

and in such condition is a bit of a challenge.

But you can't spoil something as gorgeous as this, can you? Right. Last little bit here.

Meat.

And peacock.

Cor! Look at that. That's going to look amazing on the table, isn't it?

Absolutely fantastic. I'm really pleased.

With the skinning of the peacock complete,

the rest of the team can now prepare the filling for the pie.

I'm just chopping up the beef suet for our peacock pie. Ruth said I've got to dice this up really small.

I'm going to mix it in with all the meat and the dried fruits as well,

just to keep our pie nice and moist, nice and succulent.

We'll have something that now none of us think about - nutmeg. It was the new spice for the late Tudors.

We're told entire estates were lost when the bottom fell out of the nutmeg market not much later.

Someone who has the purse strings to this house will give me meagre amounts of each one

and say, "That's enough for your pie." Or I'll pick it up and I'll be off and live like a king forever.

So you need to take these away now.

-Let's have a look. That looks nice. We have got enough, have we?

-Yeah.

-I want it really, really full and solid!

-Yeah. There won't be any gaps in this. Let's put that there.

A momentary respite for the team while the bread ovens are still heating

allows Ruth to begin applying the finishing touches to her marchpane.

She's gilding its edges with gold leaf.

This is real gold and so costs a blinking fortune and always did.

And that's the point. It's real conspicuous consumption. And fake gold makes you ill if you eat it.

But real gold is inert. It goes in one end, straight through the other end and does no harm on the way.

But gold has always been the price of gold.

Whoever was doing it at any date in history must've felt the pressure,

but perhaps they had more practice.

In the period, they actually just took a small lump of gold

and some poor bloke just hit it with hammers on a cushion

until they got it down to this really fine sheet.

I mean, the skill involved in beating something so you don't break it, that just beggars belief.

I'm having trouble picking it up without breaking it, you know.

But I think my real worry is that we won't get the finish,

you know, the final quality of presentation that they would've had in the period.

I feel we might end up with something rustic.

And now a critical moment has arrived in the bakehouse.

Raking out the hot coals as the oven is now at the temperature

when the stone is hot enough to cook the bread.

With the ovens up to temperature, the team have just seconds

to get the bread and pies in before the stones begin to cool.

-Door. And the dough.

-That moment when you take the fire out and you get the bread in has to happen fast

because once you've taken the fire out, the oven begins to cool down.

The bread and pies will bake overnight. A dough mixture is used to seal the doors

and prevent the heat from escaping.

Now we can take our time, get rid of the ashes and then seal up the doors.

And then we can all do something calmer!

The day of the feast has arrived

and our team are up at dawn preparing for a long day of cooking ahead.

The first job in the morning is to get this fire lit.

At five o'clock, the servants, people like Fonz and myself,

are up getting together our tinder and kindling to get this thing lit,

so we can get it up to heat as soon as possible, because we've got so much to cook today.

And we'll cook in so many different ways. So someone has to tend this fire and make sure it's up to heat.

Ruth's first task of the morning is to apply the finishing touches to her peacock pie.

That's the peacock pie out of the oven. It's baked quite nicely.

What I've got to do now is get the skin on top of it. Right.

Ruth's recipe describes how the pie should be covered with the skin of the peacock using a wire frame

as if the bird was still alive on the table.

It looks utterly stunning.

The team are also cooking a huge array of different meats, salads and sweets.

In a wealthy household, both quality and quantity lay at the heart of a successful feast.

We've got gammons to go in. We've even got some chickens.

We've got venison and wild boar to spit-roast. We've got the peacock pie to sort out.

We've got more bread rolls and the sweets to do.

We've even got toast to do for 40 people. It's the last thing I need.

When you look at all this, you think, "You can't eat all that."

But you're not meant to eat it all. You're giving your guests a choice.

Even today many people don't choose what they eat. They don't get much.

In Tudor England most people didn't get any choice.

So when you sit down at this meal, tantalise your taste buds.

Do you fancy the chicken, the venison, the salads? Or do you just want gammon?

Nobody minds what you eat, but you've been given choice.

As most of the dishes have to be cooked from fresh, the scale of the task is beginning to dawn on Fonz.

I've never cooked so many different dishes at one time for so many people,

so there's a bit of trepidation wondering whether it'll all come together for the feast.

This, what started off as a really simple salad, became one of those ideas.

This came out of, "What was their crest like? Let's put a boar and a peacock on the table."

Then, "Let's make a salad like the crest." That's easily said!

It'll taste like an egg salad and that's what it is.

We're spit-roasting our venison and our boar. So we'll bank up the fire behind and that'll grill the meat.

But also we've got to fry and boil on it, so we can alter the shape of our fire to our cooking needs.

To spit-roast all the meats in time, they must get the main fire up to temperature.

-That's looking good, isn't it?

-Well, it's there.

-We've got to load it up with wood.

-Fill it with fire.

-Loads of vegetables to blanch.

-And we've got to get the meat on the spit, yeah?

That's got to be done within the hour.

One thing I've learnt so far from this is the amount of preparation work that goes into every dish.

Like today, ingredients are being thrown together and because we've got food blenders,

you take it for granted, because in the Tudor period,

having everything processed by so many people, that's where the status is.

That's what's really dawned on me.

This was a dynamic time for England. The merchant classes in the towns were flourishing.

The old aristocracy were under increasing pressure from families with new-found wealth.

The detail that went into every aspect of a feast

was an attempt to send specific messages to its guests.

The two side tables are laid quite simply. But this one we'll invest some time on.

Everyone dining here literally knows their place.

The ones sat at the far end will realise how far, not just in space,

but in money, they are from the man sat behind this fantastic tapestry,

on the table that's not on the same level as everyone else. It's up on a dais.

He's elevated already, looking down on everyone. He's got the best light. He's got an oriel window,

so the light cascades down on his table.

And this table's going to get three tablecloths.

Tudor version of ironing! Straight down the middle with the seam.

The lord's table would be adorned with fine linen.

This one's the easy one.

Quality napery was highly desired by the Tudor gentry.

Lovely. Nice seam down the front.

There's a crease in the middle.

'And the nicer cloth you have, the more money you must have.

'And the amount of cloth you have shows how much money you have. So it might just look like a tablecloth.'

But to a Tudor, you've got a really flash car here.

With the presentation of food so important,

the staff face a daunting challenge if they're to reach the standards of upmarket Elizabethan cuisine.

-Not long now. What are we looking at? A couple of hours, is it?

-A couple of hours, yeah.

I'm just trying to knock up a... It's a tricolour salad with salmon, mushy peas and onions.

But even that's requiring so much work. I had to dice the carrots. Alex is doing me some onions.

I'm currently up to my elbows in peas. Oh, dear.

-Every time I see you, you have your hands in sort of all...

-Something gooey.

Before anything can be sent to table, each individual dish has to be carefully arranged.

I'm just starting to dress the boar's head for the table.

We lost a bit of the skin off his nose when he came out of the cauldron.

So I'll paint it over with gelatine and then stick something there to hide it.

Over at the main fire, the venison and boar meat has been roasting for the last two hours.

Slightly burnt, one side of it. Well, it's a little bit charred. I think it was Fonz's fault.

Nowadays we'd stick this napkin on our lap to catch any food we drop.

But that won't happen tonight because my diners know how to eat Tudor style, so they'll put it here.

It looks odd until you think about eating with your hands. It's for wiping and keeping your mouth clean.

The term "etiquette" had yet to be invented. The Tudor equivalent was courtesy,

a belief that a well-mannered person should behave in a way that showed their superior upbringing.

Anyone able to eat in a great hall like this would've grown up with good manners.

And the manners book still survives to teach us what those were. At the high table, before the meal starts,

I'll have my hands washed. Servants will bring me water

and I'll put my hands out and have them washed for me, part of status.

Anything that can't be eaten with a spoon, you're going to need your knife,

as you're supposed to cut it up into "fair gobbets", mouth-sized pieces.

So a piece of lovely roasted meat is picked up with fingers,

put on to this plate and cut up into pieces, so you can put your knife down.

If we get our meal right, it should be the height of good manners.

Not all Tudor dishes took hours to produce.

With the feast fast approaching, the team are creating syllabub,

a simple dessert containing spiced wine and cream.

To mix the two ingredients together, Alex has found the highest point in the kitchen

to pour the cream into bowls of wine below.

Missed a bit!

Wine curdles cream a bit, so you get sort of like flavoured, creamy wine

with a bubbly texture. Dead nice.

Two! Three! Go!

Oh!

There's still loads of cream in here.

It's four o'clock in the afternoon and guests are arriving for the feast.

The Tudors ate early by modern standards, making best use of the daylight.

The team need to serve in only an hour's time. They're taking the finished dishes to the pantry

to be organised and arranged.

We've got a few things not finished to the degree we would've liked, but not bad.

-Perhaps if we got together more often and practised, maybe we'd get slicker.

-A long reach for a leech.

And back and through and pie.

So far so good. I think pretty much everything has gone to plan. We had a problem with the spit-roast.

It could've done with a couple more hours, maybe another hour.

And we've just run out of time now.

But to be honest, we've just got so many chickens and gammons - we won't miss it.

But the venison worked fine, so that was good news.

We've got your roast pork, venison, salads of artichokes. We've got lots of gammon, marchpane.

I've got some cheese made into small balls and fried black pudding with chicken.

-Is there another fat gammon out there?

-We've got this one here.

-No, there should be a chopped gammon.

After three days of hard graft, the team are finally ready to start serving the food.

Your livery coats.

But before any dishes are sent to the great hall, the men must change into their livery uniforms.

Throw that over your right shoulder and like that.

Hand on belly, something like that.

MARC: Might have to stand around doing nothing!

Shall we get dishing out then?

Female servants weren't permitted to serve food to guests.

Male staff, on the other hand, were expected to be well-presented.

ELIZABETHAN MUSIC PLAYS

I'm just trying to get everything together here, so that it goes out in order and goes boom-boom-boom.

On the table, evenly, correctly spaced. So I need to get my numbers right.

So I'm trying to do things in threes or sixes. And the singles are centrepieces.

MUSIC STOPS

(And move forward.)

ELIZABETHAN MUSIC STARTS AGAIN

As the centrepiece for the lord's table, Ruth's peacock pie is the first dish served.

To add to the spectacle, the recipe suggests the bird should be spitting fire from its beak.

The host's table is the first to be filled with the expensive, labour-intensive dishes.

'Courses as such didn't really exist at this point. So you fill the table with food.'

When everyone's finished eating it, you remove it. That's one remove. And then you fill the tables again.

And usually it's two removes.

The side tables are the next to be served. They're given a cheaper, more basic selection.

Once the tables are filled with as much food as they can hold, the feast can finally begin.

It has taken our team three long days to prepare all the food and dishes in the style of the period.

Now, all their hard work in the kitchen is disappearing in front of them.

For Ruth, it is a brief, yet satisfying glimpse into a distant past.

I don't think we've done too bad, really. It's like I imagined a Tudor feast to be.

It's pretty gutsy stuff

with this real powerful understanding and use of good meat and good vegetables.

There wasn't a lot of prudery in the 1590s.

People were living life to the full. It might go like that. Life is short. You make the most of it.

As the final dish, Ruth's iced and gilded marchpane is presented at the lord's table,

for our team, employment at Haddon Hall has come to an end.

As the revelries continue long into the evening, for the first time in over four centuries,

this Great Hall is once again alive to the sights and sounds of a Tudor feast.

Subtitles by Subtext for Red Bee Media Ltd 2006