Viva Brighton Issue #56 October 2017

LOWDOWN ON...
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The Great Kitchen
Royal Pavilion curator, Alexandra Loske
What really makes this
kitchen stand out is
its relative size to the
Pavilion. The Pavilion
is reasonably small for a
royal residence; it’s not a
large palace, and to have
a kitchen that’s so grand
and modern and large is
quite something, which
really tells you what
this building is about:
entertainment. Balls, concerts, banquets. And it’s
on the ground floor - it’s not in a basement and
it’s not far away from the state rooms; it’s part
of the main building. If you think of places like
Windsor, like Hampton Court, or even Petworth
House, the kitchens are far away from the dining
rooms. And yet here we are on the ground floor
with only one little room between, and that’s the
Table Deckers’ Room.
Table deckers’ rooms, these link-rooms
between the kitchen and banqueting room,
are quite rare. They were used to put the last
finishing touches on all those little dishes, and to set
everything. We need to learn a lot more about what
actually happened in the Table Deckers’ Room,
but it is significant that we have it. It’s also the only
barrier between the kitchen and the grand room, in
terms of smoke and noise – and fire, in case it broke
out – so the architecture is partly informed by that.
But because it was so close, food could be brought
in quickly and at the right temperature, without
falling apart.
George’s dinner parties were relatively small, by
court standards; if you look at the table as it’s laid
out in the Nash views, I believe it’s set for 36. He
liked dining ‘à la française’, this sort of buffet-style
menu [displayed in the
kitchen] with dozens and
dozens of options. I think
‘options’ is an important
word here, because
we can’t think of these
dishes as the courses we
have today – that would
have been ‘à la russe’.
It’s a great conversation
piece, this menu,
because it looks
extraordinary; it’s what you’d expect from the
Regency. You would have been served every one of
these dishes, but fear not, where it says ‘eight soups’
it doesn’t mean you had to eat eight soups - you
had the choice of eight soups. Eight types of fish, 40
entrées – you have to imagine it a bit like a buffet.
But whether people ate ten or twelve of these didn’t
really matter; the kitchen still had to produce it all,
at the right temperature, at the right time.
The menu is a translation; the original was
written and printed in French. It’s a Carême
menu. Marie Antonin Carême was a celebrity chef,
who was brought in by George after the Napoleonic
wars. He wanted the best French chef, and
Carême was known to have cooked for the Tsar of
Russia, for Napoleon himself, and after Napoleon
was defeated George got his best chef over. He
wasn’t too keen on England, really. Carême did
comment on the blandness of English food and
the way things were done here, so he wasn’t happy
here, clearly: he stayed for just under a year. But he
stayed at that crucial time when the kitchen was just
about to be finished, so he must have been the first
one who used that fabulous space. It’s a shame we
don’t have any comments from him on what it was
like to work in it. As told to Rebecca Cunningham
Photo taken at The Royal Pavilion, Brighton, by Rebecca Cunningham. Thanks to the Royal Pavilion & Museums Brighton & Hove
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