Viva Brighton Issue #68 October 2018

FEATURE
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Historical Dining
Below stairs at The Regency Town House
The idea of Dine
Like A Servant
is that you’re a
servant for the
night, eating down
in the kitchen
with the other
staff. It’s good food
though. We know
that if there was a
feast upstairs, all
the leftovers would
have come back
downstairs and been eaten by the servants. That’s
the kind of menu we serve.
I usually do a pickle and a pie of some kind. I
haven’t attempted the giblet pie recipe though. I
want people to have something extraordinary but
I still want them to have a nice evening.
I’ll often do a flummery or a syllabub for
dessert and I’ve been trying out Hypocras
jelly, a delicious concoction of spices, red fruits
and wine that was popular in medieval times.
We’ve been given all kinds of wonderful jelly
moulds. The biggest challenge is getting the
jellies out of the tins.
I’m obsessed by old cookbooks and am
always adding to my collection. Recently we
were given a wonderful handwritten one that
dates from around the same period as the house.
It’s got everything from a beer recipe from
1881 to a concoction for treating typhus. It had
belonged to the woman’s late father who had
picked it up in a charity shop, apparently. I’m
going to use it in the menu for the next Dine
Like A Servant.
The Spice Shop in Gardner Street stocks a
lot of the more unusual ingredients – long
peppers, which look like catkins and are a form
of chilli; a spice
called Grains of
Paradise. I think
I’m their best
customer!
There aren’t
many records of
the real staff that
worked here at
number 13, so
we’ve had to invent
some. Volunteers
play the roles
of Mrs Simpson, the cook, and Mrs Ainsley,
the housekeeper. I play the visiting cook, Mr
Couchman. On a special occasion, you would
always have had a male cook visiting.
The next event is a Halloween special so
we’ll be hearing ghost stories over dinner.
I didn’t think there were any ghosts here but
I had an odd experience just the other day in
the housekeeper’s room where objects were
inexplicably overturned and sooty marks
appeared near the fireplace. I’ve started to
wonder...
I came here as a volunteer plasterer
originally. I helped rebuild the kitchen. But it
was just being used as a wood store. I decided to
cook in it. I started with a chocolate tart recipe
by Hannah Glasse, a predecessor of Mrs Beeton,
and worked my way from there.
The kitchen is coming back to life bit by bit.
Every time we do Dine Like A Servant we raise
a bit more money and are able to restore another
piece. The next thing is going to be putting back
the original larder. I can’t wait.
As told to Nione Meakin by Paul Couchman
The Regency Town House, Oct 31st.
paulcouchman.co.uk
Photo by Clive Reedman
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