KITCHENS OF OTHER DAYS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 10753, 26 April 1913, Page 4

KITCHENS OF OTHER DAYS.

The kitchens of olden times seem to have been of extraordinary size, judging from the investigations recently made, bv an English historical society. At Hurstmonceux, for example, there was a kitchen twenty-eight feet high, with three huge fireplaces, and a bakehouse with an oven over fourteen feet in diameter. There is an old Welsh kitchen near Llandudno, dating from the fifteenth century, which has many primitive culinary contrivances, now obsolete or superseded by modem devices. Among these curious old devices may be mentioned a meat-jack with a fly-wheel, a steel toasting-stand ond a fan bellows. At Battle Abbey there is a curious old kitchen containing much of interest to the antiquarv, and a kitchen at St Mary's Hall, Coventry, is remarkable for the famous " knaves' post," _to which, it appears, refractory scullions were temporarily attached by way of punishment. _ . There is a medieval kitchen at \\ estminster Abbey, although little remains by which to identify it aside from the rubble flooring, the buttery hatch, and an adjoining cellar. Hampton Court Palace shows its great kitchen." with vaulted roof and sets of antlers on its walls.

Englishmen of other days fully recognised the advantages of a large kitchen- There is extant an order, dated April 19, 12C6, wherein Hugh de Nevill is commanded to have the king's kitchen at Clarendon roofed with shingles and to cause two new kitchens to be erected, one at Marlborough and the other at Lud'gershall, in which ''to dress " the royal dinners. In this order it is stated that "it is particularly directed that each kitchen shall be provided with a furnace sufficiently large to roast- two or three oxen."