Even the King’s Got to Eat: The Kitchens of Britain’s Historic Houses

By Esme Krohn

While on our British Design History trip around England, we were lucky enough to visit many beautiful historic houses. The elegant living quarters of these spaces have been immaculately preserved over the centuries, showing how wealthy Britons lived in style from the medieval era through the twentieth century. However, the parts of these homes that I loved most were the kitchens. Although humbler than the glamorous apartments upstairs, these spaces preserve important elements of the past: the working lives of servants and historical foodways.

On our first full day in London, we visited Hampton Court Palace, home to generations of British monarchs. There, food historian Marc Meltonville gave us a tour of Henry VIII’s cavernous kitchens, where up to 200 servants cooked 800 servings of food every day for the Tudor court. Luckily for the cooks, the king didn’t live at Hampton Court year-round, not in the least because his massive entourage literally ate through the surplus food resources of the areas they visited in a matter of weeks. Instead, they moved around England from palace to palace, allowing the monarch to survey all regions of his kingdom and giving his servants time to plan and provision. In order to feed hundreds of hungry courtiers and their entourages, cooking was done in an assembly-line fashion, with special rooms devoted to different stages of the cooking process (including one room just for preparing chocolate!). Food deliveries were carefully checked at the gateyard before being carried into the kitchens. After being parboiled in the aptly named Boiling House, joints of meat were roasted in one of the kitchen’s six massive hearths, which are still regularly lit for visitors today. Eagle-eyed clerks carefully checked the amounts of ingredients used in dishes in order to ensure that no one was stealing the exotic spices kept in the king’s cellars.¹

About a week later, during our visit to Yorkshire, we visited Harewood House. Although this country estate is most famous for its Robert Adam interiors and Chippendale furniture, I was charmed by its Victorian kitchen, complete with a giant wood-fired stove and a full set of antique copper cookware. The mammoth kitchen table, cut from a venerable old oak, had cracks that had been repaired over the centuries by pouring lead molten on the adjacent stove into the gaps. However, while exploring the kitchen cellars one day in 2011, Mark Lascelles and Andy Langshaw found something quite unexpected. Tucked away on a dusty shelf were 59 bottles of 1780 rum: the oldest rum in the world.² This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given Harewood House’s Caribbean connections. The manor’s builders, Henry and Edwin Lascelles, made their fortune off of the slave trade. In addition to selling enslaved Africans to plantation owners in the Caribbean, the Lascelles family owned their own slave plantations in Barbados, where enslaved people cut sugarcane stalks day after day under brutal conditions to satisfy Europeans’ craving for sugar.³ Some of this sugar was turned into molasses, later distilled into the Harewood rum, which sat unnoticed in the house’s cellars for centuries until its rediscovery. 

It can be hard to feel connected to people in the past. I’ll never live in a Rococo palace or drive to a ball in a horse-drawn carriage. But these kitchens remind me of one thing: people in the past were just as human as we are. They loved, laughed, and grieved with the same intensity we do — and they needed to eat! These historical kitchens felt startlingly alive, as if the cooks had just set down their tools and could come back any minute. The past was full of beauty and elegance, but it also involved washing a lot of dishes. Quotidian as these moments may be, our humanity gives them meaning. Food can drive us to terrible acts of greed, as in the horrors of eighteenth-century sugar slavery. But it can also be a primal source of connection — we mark the biggest moments in our life with meals. If you want to know more about the past, look around you: history is being made every day, maybe even in your kitchen.

1. “Henry VIII’s Kitchens,” Historic Royal Palaces, accessed February 13, 2025 and “Virtual Tour: Henry VIII’s Royal Kitchens,” Historic Royal Palaces and Google Arts and Culture, accessed February 13, 2025. (Click on the article title in quotation marks to travel to their site!) ↩︎
2. “The Harewood Rum ‘Dark’ 1780,” Carolyn Holmes, Christie’s, lot 294 in live auction 1169, “Finest and Rarest Wines and Spirits including Rare Madeira” on December 13, 2013. You can learn more about the people who worked in Harewood’s kitchens at the Harewood Servants Database. ↩︎
3. “Harewood, Slavery and the Caribbean,” Mireille Harper, Harewood House, January 15, 2025. ↩︎