The way we used to eat: The Tudor kitchen

Jorge Kelman, a stout fellow in 16th century garb – which includes a codpiece – breaks off from straining his aromatic apple purée to make sure I note this down correctly: "The Tudors did not disguise raw meat with spices," he insists. "I can't tell you how many people get that wrong." His colleague Mark Hawtree, whose face is framed by a beard like a bawdy Shakespearean actor's, can't help but join in. "What would be the point?" he says. Nutmeg, he has just explained, was sourced by the Tudors from an island 600 miles north of Australia: at least one very long sea voyage from London. "Spices were expensive. Meat was cheap. It wouldn't make any sense!"

Kelman and Hawtree are food historians, and they are passionate about their subject. Their commitment to their project – recreating a working Tudor kitchen in the bowels of Hampton Court Palace – is admirable. They and their fellow cooks, all men of a certain age, do have a slightly evangelical air about them.

"Food connects with everything," says Marc Meltonville, the project's frontman. "We each came from other historical specialisms, but discovered that food was a route to all sorts of information."

Once a month, these 12 men – among them a trained leather worker, two blacksmiths, a carpenter, a graphic designer, a photographer and a marine biologist – congregate for a weekend in Hampton Court's cavernous kitchens, publicly to prepare a meal from the recipes of a particular monarch's reign. Their repertoire stretches from the 16th to the 18th century, the last time a monarch, George II, kept the palace as an official residence.

Hampton Court is gearing up to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII's accession next year, so today we're revisiting the 1530s, following the instructions of A Noble Book of Cookery, one of just two surviving cook books published under Henry's rule. "The books are ambiguous," Meltonville explains. "They have no measurements; they just say take this and that, put them together and cook it. They aren't like modern cookery books – they're a cook's aide-memoire."

To help them understand the finer details of each dish, Meltonville and his colleagues also spend a day each month experimenting with variations on each of the vague recipes. "We've discovered basic stuff such as the proportions of ingredients. We've found that, if we chop meat into inch cubes for a pie or a stew, it tastes completely different to half-inch or two-inch cubes. And we've now got recording equipment to measure temperature, so we're starting to understand how our stoves and fire work, and why a spit-roast produces such succulent meat."

On the table today is a single course of seven dishes, explains Richard Fitch, who designs the monthly menus: "perre", an early incarnation of mushy peas; roast chicken, a rare treat for a Tudor; a pair of stews – one beef, the other a chicken "buknade"; custard tart; Kelman's "appleard ryalle" (royal apples?); and a veal "chawettys", which is a meat pie made with minced veal, dates and raisins. Contrary to expectation, not everyone gets a mountainous plateful of each dish. Instead, they are shared like meze.

This is the typical dinner of a mid-level group of palace workers. The lowest ranked would receive only four dishes, while those at the king's table might enjoy two courses, of up to 10 dishes each. Hampton Court's are the largest-surviving Tudor-era kitchens in Europe; their original staff of 200 cooks might have had to feed about 1,000 people twice a day. One of the constant refrains of the food historians is the concept of food as politics: a grand banquet, made up of far-fetched foreign ingredients alongside the best of British, would let the king demonstrate to influential guests not only his intimidating wealth and power, but also his continued ability to trade overseas.

This being the 1530s, even the court was as yet unfamiliar with certain New World ingredients. Thus we are some years from discovering coffee and chocolate, or potatoes, tomatoes, and corn on the cob. Equally, we 21st century types have forgotten other fantastic ingredients, says Meltonville. "When chillies came over from the Americas, they virtually killed off the more subtle peppers that we'd been using for hundreds of years – for instance, the north African "Grain of Paradise", the Javanese "cubeb", and the long pepper, which looks like a little catkin. These three, ground and combined with ordinary black pepper, can give you a fantastic range of flavours.

"We also eat less of the hedgerow now. We're so used to greenery coming from greenhouses that we forget there are lots of interesting salad components that people used to pick, like "Fat Hen" and "Good King Henry". We should be eating them. Thankfully, we've also stopped eating a lot of small endangered songbirds. To our ancestors, if it moved, it was a source of food. We even discovered a recipe for spit-roasted dolphin, but we wouldn't cook that."

The 16th century was a hearty period in British history. Those who could afford it ate as varied a diet as we do now. Those less well off would eat healthily enough from their gardens: cabbage, onions, mushrooms, the occasional rasher of bacon. The recipe books from which the food historians work do not contain many vegetable dishes, but they've done their research: the palace ledgers contain regular deliveries of fruit and veg.

While today it might be seen as a cheap family feed, a 16th century roast chicken was a luxury reserved for the rich. For most, keeping it alive for its eggs was a far more economical use of the bird. Fitch, meanwhile, has another sobering fact: today's average restaurant has a waste rate of about 40 per cent, he says. The average household throws out about 35 per cent of its food. His kitchen (circa 1530) wasted close to nothing. It seems we've more to learn from our ancestors than just cookery.

'The Tudors: The Complete Second Season' is out on DVD and Blu-Ray now

Tudor treats Chawettys, Buknade and Perre

Chawettys

"Take buttys of Vele, and mynce hem smal, or Porke, and put on a potte; take Wyne, and caste ther-to pouder of Gyngere, pepir, and Safroun, and Salt, and a lytel verthous, and do hem in a cofyn with olkys of Eyroun, and kutte Datys and Roysonys of Corraunce, Clowys, Mace, and then ceuere thin cofyn, and lat it bake tyl it be y-now."

Put minced veal or pork into a saucepan along with wine, ground ginger, saffron, verjuice, pepper and salt, and cook until the meat is done. When cool, mix in raw egg yolks, chopped dates, currants, ground cloves and mace. Place the mixture into a pastry case and cook in the oven until golden.

Buknade

Take veal, kid or chicken, and boil in water or stock until half cooked. Remove and drain, then cut it up into bite-sized pieces. Place in a pan with chopped sage, hyssop, mace and cloves, then strain the liquid from the first pan into the new one. Cook slowly until the meat is completely cooked, then add ginger, saffron, salt and verjuice. Thicken with egg yolks, and when these are cooked, serve.

Perre

Boil some peas in water until very soft. Pass through a sieve to create a purée, remove the husks, then return to the heat. Add chopped onions, parsley, ground cinnamon and pepper, and continue to cook. Then add ground ginger, vinegar, saffron and salt, along with a small quantity of white bread. Continue cooking until the bread is incorporated into the purée, then serve.

Compiled by Harry Byford