The shocking secrets of the Tudor Christmas dinner

[PranKk.]

Anyone want a nice bit of swan? No? Peacock? No? Ok then, here are some delicious marinated pigs’ ears instead.
When this year’s Christmas TV schedules were announced, the BBC Two documentary A Merry Tudor Christmas with Lucy Worsley stood out.

In the hour-long programme, the historian examines the festive customs and traditions of Henry VIII and co.

As you can imagine, many of the celebrations involved food, but probably not quite the Christmas dishes you’re used to seeing on TV.

So intricate and long-forgotten were the recipes, the show enlisted the help of food historian Dr Annie Gray. Alongside Hampton Court Palace chefs, she conjured up dishes from the period.
Not only do the calories and costs stack up, but so do the hours, days and weeks it takes to make the dishes. As for the food itself? Well, it won’t be to everyone’s taste. Here’s what we learn from the documentary…

You’d be hungry for most of December (unless you were rich)

 

Oh, how times have changed. While we now treat ourselves to a chocolate advent calendar, during December 500 years ago things were a little different.

Most of the English po[CENSORED]tion were Catholic when Henry VIII took to the throne in 1509. And what rule did the Catholic church impose? That the period of advent was a time for abstinence, when you were not allowed meat or dairy.

Fasting lasted four weeks, so by Christmas Eve people were more than a little peckish. The fast would officially break on Christmas Day, then for 12 days there would be feasting. But for some the wait was too long.

“Some people would break their advent’s fast with Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve at midnight”, explains Dr Annie. However, the fasting period wasn’t as difficult for people with titles and money, who added fish and other aquatic delights to their diet during advent. “To be fair, the fish dishes at the time were quite something. So if you were wealthy, it wasn’t a time of hardship, you just ate porpoise and beavers’ tail rather than beef and venison,” she says.

Most people were vegetarians – except at Christmas

In the documentary we learn that meat was seen as prestigious – because most people didn’t get to eat a lot of it.

“Around 80–90 percent of the po[CENSORED]tion were probably involuntary vegetarians because they couldn’t afford meat,” says Dr Annie. “Because it was Christmas and a great big feast you’d want to have meat and – in the majority of cases if you were not a landowner or freeholder you would be an agricultural worker, so you’d have a lord and master and they would gift you some meat for Christmas.” This wasn’t a purely altruistic move though; tenants were expected to give their lord and master a gift too, and they would probably be told exactly what it should be.

The dishes the average person made at Christmas weren’t that strange
After being gifted something like beef, they would “have probably put it into a stew-like dish or they might have a piece of pie,” says Dr Annie. She adds “the Christmas feast would also have bread – everyone ate a phenomenal amount of bread at this time, and if you could you’d perhaps buy some gingerbread because ginger was relatively cheap as a spice.”

The same could not be said for the royals…
Early on in the documentary we see exactly what Henry VIII spent on the 12 days of Christmas in his first year on the throne: an eye-watering £7,000. To put that into context, his father Henry VII spent £12,000 on the royal household for an entire year.

So, to say Christmas feasting was excessive would be an understatement – and meat was a main component. The festive table would include swan, stuffed peacock, beef and turkey. But one showstopper highlighted the king’s power and prowess…

Wild boar’s head was the ultimate indulgence

Having hunted down a wild boar with his own spear, the head would then be served up on Henry VIII’s Christmas dinner table. It was a trend for landowners that became problematic. “They (wild boars) kept going extinct in Britain because people were hunting them all the time and eating them. So you had this constant conversation along the lines of ‘oh dear we’ve killed all the boars, let’s reintroduce them so we have something a bit dangerous on our Christmas table.’”

In the programme, Dr Annie and the chefs reproduce this dish. It takes quite a lot of effort, and it isn’t for the squeamish.

 

“You’d have your boar’s head prepared – cut back from the second vertebrae – and you’d need a big flap of skin behind the ears,” explains Dr Annie matter-of-factly. But that’s just the start.

“You’d need to bone out the head completely before rubbing it with salt and various spices. Then you'd marinate it in red wine and salt and leave it to set for 2 weeks, at which point it would become a sort of purple mess and very leathery”.

Seriously, look away
“At that point, you'd have to trim all the flesh from inside it. When we did this, it took most of the day. Then we sewed the eyelids and openings shut, which took an hour or two, and then it became this big pinkish cushion cover.

“Then you'd chop up all the meat that’s been in the head in brine, add more boar's flesh, fat, spices and nuts – really expensive ingredients that show prestige at the Court – and then you'd stuff the head.

"When we prepared this, the boar’s head was so huge that there’s a picture of me with my arm right down the snout, and the ears are tickling my neck. I had pig’s fat all up my arm.”

The work didn't end there, though: “Once you’d stuffed it with itself, you flipped the skin round, sewed it up and swaddled it in muslin, then boiled it for 7 or 8 hours in red wine until it was done completely. Then you'd lift it out – which is virtually impossible because it weighs the same as a five-year-old child and it’s huge.

"After removing the muslin you'd decorate it. That’s normally quite simple: you'd brush it with a bit of the reduced wine, which by this time was sticky and gorgeous, then brush it on the head so it glistened and had a beautiful winey colour.”

As it was brought to the table, a song would be sung about how special it was.

So, an awful lot of work for one Christmas dish. And what did Lucy Worsley make of it? “I don't like it,” she confesses.
 

One thing that might have made the boar’s head more palatable than the 16th-century version was that health and safety rules meant it didn’t contain the brain. Would Henry VIII’s dish have included it? “They probably wouldn’t have removed it, no”, admits Dr Annie.

While it’s hard to come up with a relative cost for the dish, Dr Annie estimates that in today’s money the head would have “been in the tens of thousands, really”.

Meat was in pretty much everything festive
On the show we see a precursor to the plum pudding and mince pies served up today. Both would have included a lot of meat and of course fat – the suet in the mince pie came from sheep’s kidneys, and as one of the chefs tells us, they had to “strip out the veins and membranes”. Delightful.