Virtual Tour: Henry VIII's Royal Kitchens

This gate was the entrance for goods into the kitchen complex. Imagine the doors wide open. From here, porters would take the goods such as meats and fish, firewood and spices to storerooms and kitchens further into the complex behind you.

In this courtyard, clerks checked deliveries and goods were dispersed to kitchens and storerooms. This courtyard was overlooked by the Office of the Greencloth, the palace administration department.

The Greencloth was an actual green cloth covering a table and marked to allow calculations to take place upon it.

Stews and pie fillings were made here, and joints of meat to be roasted in the Great Kitchen were parboiled to reduce the time and fuel needed to roast them.

Pies were made to be shared between groups of four or six people, they would often just remove the lid and eat the simple stewed meat contents.

This paved passage was the core of the kitchen complex. Doors led off to the Great Kitchen at one end, and the Boiling House, Confectionery and Pastry departments at the other.

Along its length, doors to storerooms and subsidiary kitchens called Working Houses where more complex dishes that involved multiple steps, not just roasting, boiling or baking would be made; such as allowes, beef steaks wrapped around minced onions and dried fruit then cooked.

The Great Kitchens had six enormous fireplaces used to roast the joints of meat needed for the two meals each day.  This was a vast space, open to the roof to allow heat to rise and attempt to keep the working spaces cooler.

Here we can see one of the six fireplaces used for roasting. Meat was placed on metal bars called spits and  turned by hand in front of the fire until cooked. Roasting was a costly and fuel intense process which gave it a high status as a cooking method.

A range of charcoal stoves, a fireplace converted to use coal instead of wood, and an oven are all later alterations that kept this space in use through to the nineteenth century. The floor slopes into the central drain for easy cleaning.

The Wine Cellar stored wines imported from across Europe for the court, with beer and ale brought from London and the South of England stored in a separate cellar. Water was also commonly drunk, being piped to the palace from a spring source three miles away.

At the two meal times of the day, around 10.00 and 16.00, the North Cloister would be full of people taking their food  up to the Great Hall or Watching Chamber to eat.

On special occasions, these people would be courtiers and household staff taking on the role of uniformed waiters to serve the diners in the Great Hall as we would expect in a modern banquet.

Most meals were not full of ceremony though and would resemble a modern canteen, with staff collecting food for themselves and the people they worked with to eat.