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Staying current with news, developments, trends and analysis

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Financial Review - Business, Finance and Investment News

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The Australian Financial Review reports the latest news from business, finance, investment and politics, updated in real time. It has a reputation for independent, award-winning journalism and is essential reading for the business and investor community.

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It is so important to know who we are, as a nation and as a people. This is powerful.

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Aboriginal Australia Wall map. DR Horton, AIATSIS, 1996

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Tackling tough questions is central to our shared human experience. What is 'normal' and what is 'wrong'? What values are universal, if any?

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Philosophy Games - The Philosophers' Magazine

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A set of interactive philosophy games and activities.

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In Bobby's Footsteps - Battery Point History Walk, Hobart Tasmania

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In Bobby's Footsteps - Battery Point History Walk, Hobart Tasmania | Self-guided walking tour around the land that was originally granted to the Reverend Robert 'Bobby' Knopwood in 1805.

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In Bobby's Footsteps takes you on a walk around the land that was originally granted to the Reverend Robert 'Bobby' Knopwood in 1805 to build his home, Cottage Green, and establish his famous garden in Hobart's Battery Point.

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Bringing history to life: 'Experimental archaeology' with Dr Lucy Worsley

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Bringing history to life: 'Experimental archaeology' with Dr Lucy Worsley

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Active and fun learning

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A popularizing historian cooks up the past.

In the name of history, Lucy Worsley has spent the night in a Tudor rope bed ("You have to adopt the position of a banana"), chugged a pint of seawater (a Georgian cure for constipation), baked a hedgehog on an open fire ("perhaps the queasiest moment of my life"), and toiled as a sixteenth-century laundress ("Urine is a surprisingly excellent stain remover"). To learn about fifteenth-century hygiene, she forwent showers for a week and brushed her teeth with powdered cuttlefish bone. She has swum in the English Channel, in February, in a mobcap. "In the broadest sense, what I'm about is trying to get people to share my pleasure in imagining the past," she said recently.

Worsley is the chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the nonprofit organization that runs the Tower of London, Kensington Palace, Hampton Court Palace, Kew Palace, and the Banqueting House at Whitehall. She is the author of three books, the latest of which, "If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home" (it comes out in the United States next year), accompanied a four-part BBC television series of the same name. In a land of ponderous dons who go by their initials, Dr. Lucy, a thirty-seven-year-old bluestocking with a barrette, has caused a sensation. Camilla Long, of the London Sunday Times, called her "a possessed Christopher Robin." Long's colleague A. A. Gill remarked upon her "twee royal-blue travelling coat and a very intensely perky delivery, as if she were telling us about some suspicious foreign types she'd seen lurking in the squire's spinney."

For one episode, Worsley, who seemed to be wearing nothing but a marcel wave, reënacted an Art Deco-era bubble bath. A viewer tweeted, "Anyone else secretly in love with lispy toff Lucy Worsley?" (She pronounces "Regency"-as in "Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency," which she also hosted for the BBC-"Wegency.") Daisy Goodwin, the executive producer of the series, told me, "Lucy's this interesting mixture of looking like a little girl but talking like a professor, which people find very beguiling." Worsley has pink cheeks and caterpillar eyebrows. You could picture her on a Cunard ship. She likes hot water with lemon, cardigans, and the color eau de Nile.

Worsley was born in Reading in 1973. She went to Oxford and got a Ph.D. in art history at the University of Sussex, working her way up on the stately-homes circuit (her first job entailed feeding llamas) before landing the Historic Royal Palaces position, in 2003. She is often described as being very "jolly hockey sticks," which is an English way of saying that she's enthusiastic, perhaps overly so. She is an unembarrassed disciple of a school of history known as experimental archeology-or, as she calls it, "dressing up and trying things out"-which uses artifacts to channel the physical experience of everyday life in another era. The past, to Worsley, can be summoned by teacups and toilet paper. "If Walls Could Talk" includes a revealing discussion of birthing furniture. As male doctors took over from female midwives, birthing chairs got higher, making labor less comfortable for the woman undergoing it, who could no longer brace herself against the floor, and more comfortable for the doctor, who didn't have to stoop. Worsley describes her work as a search for "the dirty detail." She told me, "I approach historical research like a tabloid journalist. My job is to make sure the mistress's story gets told."

Food and drink are perhaps the most effective of Worsley's tools for revivifying the past. Last year, she installed a wine fountain in the main courtyard of Hampton Court Palace, the home of Henry VIII, pointing out to critics, "A glass is a reasonable £3.50." (The wine is now free; a "pewter wine fountain drinking cup" is £24.99.) The Tudor Kitchens, where visitors can watch a team of "food archeologists" prepare forgotten dishes, such as perre (a kind of pea soup) and fylettys en galentyne (pork stew with onion gravy), are Hampton Court's banner attraction. This fall's events at Historic Royal Palaces included "To the Queen's Taste," an Elizabethan-cookery workshop (spinach fritters and a trout baked or minced), and a "Historic Cheese Tasting Session," in which guests could sample an eighteenth-century-esque Cheddar. At Kew, Worsley and a team of more than a dozen curators and other employees are restoring a set of Georgian kitchens that have remained untouched since 1818. They will open next summer.

Worsley's detractors accuse her of practicing an unchallenging Hello! History, or History Lite, in which anecdote trumps evidence, individuals overshadow groups, and the past is generally depicted as quaint and cheerful, with little sign of the misery that most likely intruded on the days of, say, a medieval housewife.

I was with her at Kensington Palace this summer when an older man approached: "Lucy, they've trashed this place. They've done a Harry Potter!" One day, as she was crossing Covent Garden in a crinoline, someone shouted, "Fuck off, Little Bo Peep!" At times, Worsley's reliance on sex and scatology to enliven history verges on shtick. "There's a place for buxom wenches in the world, but it doesn't have to be in Royal Palaces," the cultural critic Stephen Bayley told me. "Where does it end? Are they going to reënact burning martyrs at the stake?"

In September, the historian Alison Light was on BBC Radio 4's morning show, discussing whether period dramas like "Upstairs, Downstairs" and the wildly popular "Downton Abbey" romanticize the past:

I just want to say one thing, which is that I'm not in a sort of moral panic about these programs. I'm much more alarmed and exercised about what's happening to serious history programs on the television, you know, where the whole heritage interest in objects and costume has kind of taken over the show. And historians are under pressure to get in carriages and wear bonnets and careen around the country.

Worsley, a known bonnet wearer, retaliated with a piece in the TV section of the Daily Mail -not traditionally the Caesars Palace of tussles between academics-in which she wrote, "Instead of having fun with social history, I should apparently have been exploring big, serious ideas." Light told me recently that her problem is not so much with Worsley's shows as with the way that their popularity has contributed to the extinction of more substantive programs. When the historian David Starkey griped that his "usually quite pretty" peers had taken to posing on their book jackets as though the books were "historical Mills & Boon"-British bodice-rippers-Worsley told the papers, "If it wasn't insulting and degrading to judge historians by their looks, I would point out that Dr Starkey looks like a cross owl in the pictures on his own book."

Last year, at the annual meeting of the National Trust, which oversees many of Britain's grandest estates, Worsley participated in an Oxford Union-style debate, standing against the motion " 'Bringing houses to life' is another way of saying 'Dumbing them down.' " She wore a cherry-red sweater with a large rosette on the left shoulder. "Dear members of the National Trust," she said, waving a fist, "for the future of our heritage, we can't afford to cater only to well-educated, historically aware, sophisticated people like you!" She continued, "I don't feel my job will be done until history is as popular as 'The X-Factor.' "

Worsley is more than happy to play the ham. In 2009, for example, she starred in a short video in which she pretended to do Henry VIII's weekly grocery shopping. "So we're not getting any water, because that's not safe to drink," Worsley says, passing by shelves of Perrier. "But the Tudors got around this by drinking an awful lot of ale-ten pints a day, we think, for Henry VIII, so we need seventy pints! " Worsley loads the shopping cart with ducks, strawberries, cases of Heineken, pallets of hamburger buns. Her waifish frame barely manages to push the load to the checkout. Henry VIII, we learn, ate five thousand calories and twenty grams of salt each day. The supermarket is out of swans and peacocks.

On a recent Saturday, Worsley and I and a few others attempted to whip up the dinner that King George III ate on the evening of February 6, 1789.

George III, who reigned from 1760 to 1820, was Britain's third Hanoverian monarch-the Mad King, also known as the King Who Lost America. For much of his life, he suffered debilitating bouts of mental illness. In the fall of 1788, he underwent an episode during which he foamed at the mouth and talked incessantly. He attacked his son, the Prince of Wales. (His eyes were so bloodshot that they reminded the Queen of black-currant jelly.) It is now thought that George may have had bipolar disorder or porphyria, a metabolic disorder. His infirmity triggered a constitutional crisis, as Whigs and Tories maneuvered for advantage in a deal that would transfer power to the Prince of Wales. In February of 1789, the House of Commons passed a bill establishing the regency, but before the House of Lords could ratify it the King's physician declared that his charge had recovered.

During his convalescence, George retreated to Kew Palace, ten miles up the Thames from London. Robert Fulke Greville, an equerry to the Crown, charted the King's progress in his diary. On Tuesday, February 3, 1789, he wrote:

Dr Willis allowed the K to shave himself. Two walks. Visit by Queen, P Augusta and Elizabeth. . . . HM proposed singing and for some time the various voices of the K, Q, princesses and Dr John Willis were heard in catches and choruses. K joined heartily in Rule Britannia.

By Friday, the King had played the flute and conversed with his gardener. That evening, Greville wrote, "HM has also been allowed this day for the first time to have a knife and fork."

Even when the King was well, he and his wife, Queen Charlotte, were not known as voluptuaries. James Gillray mocked their abstemiousness in a 1792 cartoon entitled "Temperance Enjoying a Frugal Meal," which showed the King dining on a boiled egg. (George, like Prince Charles, was also pilloried for his interest in agriculture and animal husbandry.) One of his attendants complained that after a "whole hard day's hunting" he was offered only a "little barley water." But George's reputation for miserliness was probably exaggerated, and his improving health merited nourishment. Plus, putting on a good spread was a way to demonstrate that the court, and its leader, had regained equilibrium.

In September, Susanne Groom, a curator at Historic Royal Palaces, took me to the National Archives, in Kew, where we ordered up a large volume, bound in opalescent vellum with leather hinges. It was labelled "Kew Ledger," for the years 1788-97. We turned to the entry for February 6, 1789, George's first evening back at the table. In feathery handwriting, William Gordon, the clerk of the kitchen, had recorded the menu:

THEIR MAJESTIES DINNER

Soupe barley

4 chickens roasted

3 pullets minced and broiled

7 ¾ mutton collop pyes

6 perch boiled

2 breasts of lamb a la pluck

2 salmic of ducks

13 loin veal smort

That was the first course.

The early English kitchen, Worsley explains in "If Walls Could Talk," was for commoners typically also the living room and the bedroom. Medieval censuses counted "hearths," not rooms or people, because the cooking fire-above which a peasant would keep a vat of pottage simmering-was the nexus of the household. Landowners, however, had grander means. Fearing fire, they tended to set their kitchens apart from the estate's main hall. The kitchens at Kew, a series of freestanding outbuildings, were built in 1731. (They were shuttered after Queen Charlotte's death, in 1818, and were most recently used for storage.) They comprised a great kitchen, laid out along lines that a modern cook would recognize; a scullery; a spicery; a buttery; a wine cellar; a bakehouse; wet and dry larders; and administrative offices-the infrastructure of a small town. Kew produced its own ice. A Georgian cook of royal calibre would have required, among other implements, cake hoops and lemon squeezers. The flat-bottomed saucepan had just been invented.

During the Georgian era, meat became available to the masses. Farmers learned to produce fodder (turnips, swedes, and clover) that could sustain their cattle through the winter. The average ox sold at Smithfield Market in 1710 weighed three hundred and seventy pounds; by 1795, it had reached eight hundred. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had carvery lessons three times a week, during which she practiced on wooden replicas of various joints of meat. Seafood was plentiful, too: an account book shows that thirteen varieties, from salmon to smelts, were requisitioned in a month at Kew. A barrel of oysters cost five shillings. Cod was ordered "crimped"-the fishmonger would score it to the bone, while it was still alive, to give it a firmer flesh. [cartoon id="a16056"]

For reasons of hygiene as well as of fashion, the Georgians mistrusted raw fruits and vegetables. Cucumbers, lettuce, and celery were served stewed. Tomatoes-known as "apples of love"-had been in England since the sixteenth century, but people didn't start eating them until around 1800. Still, the Georgian palate was sophisticated, especially in its marriage of sweet and savory flavors, evident in delicacies such as pistachio ice cream. The grocery list for Kew in February, 1789, includes hams (379 ¼ pounds), anchovies, "vermicelly," "Parmazan cheese," isinglass (gelatinized dried fish bladder, for clarifying beer), and sago (the pith of palm stems, for milk puddings). Many Georgian dishes would strike contemporary taste buds as almost Christmassy. "It's rich beefiness, it's meats, it's the velvety sensation of butter and cream," Marc Meltonville, the co-head of the Historic Kitchens team at Historic Royal Palaces, told me. "You can still taste a Georgian dish as you leave the room, because the flavors continue unfolding."

It was a chilly morning at Hampton Court Palace, with the smell of woodsmoke in the air. Since the Georgian kitchens were under renovation, we had decided to cook King George's meal in the Tudor kitchens. (A Spanish visitor in 1554 said that they were "veritable hells, such is the stir and bustle in them. . . . There is plenty of beer here, and they drink more than would fill the Valladolid river.") Meltonville, wearing a chef's coat, was in the former buttery, which is now a test kitchen, unloading provisions. Worsley hadn't arrived yet. Near the stove was a sheaf of xeroxes from the 1725 edition of "Court Cookery; or, the Compleat English Cook. Containing the Choicest and Newest Receipts for Making Soops, Pottages, Fricasseys . . . As Likewise of Pastes, Pies, Pastys . . ." Meltonville, whose training is in the decorative arts, got into historical cooking after spending a few years in a provincial museum, "trying to convince schoolkids that old chairs aren't shit." Obscure ingredients and vague instructions do not easily intimidate him-his team once successfully produced a cockatrice, a Tudor specialty that joins the bottom of a pig and the head of a turkey. (You sew them together.) But the day's menu presented a challenge. "What we're having to do is retrofit a meal," Meltonville said. "We have the menu but no recipes."

Not having the yeoman cooks and doorkeepers and grooms who would have attended the kitchen in George's day, Meltonville was unable to attempt all twenty-one dishes on King George's menu. He had selected for our dinner the barley soup, roast mutton, and partridges, accompanied by "spinnage" and crayfish à la crème. He began by chopping some shallots. This was a base for the barley soup.

"We know nothing about preparation," he pointed out. In experimenting with steak pies, Meltonville's team had found that they tasted totally different depending on whether half-inch or two-inch cubes of beef were used. "I have no idea how they would have cut vegetables," Meltonville said. He thought dicing was a decent guess, reasoning, "You can't give someone a job to do repeatedly without him finding an efficient way."

Meltonville is a tireless excavator of England's culinary heritage, and his services are coveted by the cadre of chefs who have recently become interested in resurrecting antique tastes and techniques. "Meat fruit, that was me," Meltonville said, referring to the idea that became the trompe-l'oeil mandarin orange, filled with chicken-liver pâté, that Heston Blumenthal serves, to much fanfare, at his London restaurant Dinner. "Marc's boundless enthusiasm and energy is infectious," Blumenthal said. "He is our own walking encyclopedia!"

Meltonville melted some butter in a copper saucepan and sautéed the shallots. Then he dumped in a pint of good gravy that he had made the previous night. Good gravy, a sauce of beef, truffles, and red wine, was a sort of all-purpose Georgian condiment-in an industrial-sized kitchen like George's, bins of it would have been kept warming in a bain-marie. It looked like a grayer version of refried beans. Ready-made ingredients, Meltonville explained, can trip up a historical cook. "It's like if in two hundred years somebody says, 'Oh, we'll do a burger, they used to do burgers then,' and the recipe said, 'Use some ketchup.' "

Meltonville had extrapolated his good gravy from a recipe in "Court Cookery."

" 'At a Distance from the Fire'-how would you translate that?" he quizzed me. "It means 'low heat.' "

" 'Strew in some Flower'?"

"That's 'Sprinkle in some flour,' "

Meltonville tipped some veal stock into the saucepan. The stove had gas burners, but, for maximum authenticity, Meltonville was treating it as if it burned charcoal, controlling the heat by moving the pot on and off the stovetop. Next, he added the barley. He said, "I'm going to cook it down, and finish it with some butter and cream."

The latter additions were Meltonville's flourish; he argued that though none of the writers he had consulted specified them, they were probably understood. French cooking was the default mode of the upper classes in Georgian England, particularly in the years following the French Revolution. Meltonville explained, "When you cut the heads off your rich folks, you tend to end up with a lot of unemployed chefs." (The great French cook Carême, known as "the chef of kings and the king of chefs," joined the Georgian court in 1816, but, miserable in England, he left the following year. He died just shy of fifty, after years of inhaling carcinogens.) Meltonville continued, "The Georgian attitude was: if butter and cream can make it better, more butter and cream will make it better still." The Justice Scalias of historical cooking, he admitted, would disagree. "Are these recipes the letter of the law, or are they an aide-mémoire for a cook who knows what he's doing?" Meltonville said. He considered his own question. "There is no answer, because the person who wrote it down is dead."

Downstairs, a groom-a Historic Royal Palaces employee-had laid a fire in Henry VIII's great roasting fireplace. It had required a quarter ton of seasoned beech. Technically, roasting involves placing meat in front of, not over, a fire, and cooking the meat by the fire's radiated heat. Because it is extremely fuel-inefficient, it was a high-status form of cooking. (There is a Tudor recipe for spit-roasted porpoise.) In a nearby courtyard, Meltonville and Robert Hoare, another history chef, were lancing the leg of mutton with an eight-foot-long spit. Inserting the spit, once as common a kitchen chore as slicing bread, is a lost art, and Meltonville wasn't sure they'd girded the meat sufficiently. The men carried the giant kebab to the fire, where they placed it gingerly in the notches of a rest.

When Worsley arrived, she asked, "Can I do a bit of turning?" She took her station on a wooden stool, and began to churn the spit.

Meltonville scrutinized the roast. "I'm looking to see how much it wobbles as it goes round," he said.

Worsley was turning the spit counterclockwise, so that the fatty side of the meat would meet the flame. Meltonville detected shakiness between eleven and twelve o'clock.

He summoned Hoare to add a skewer to the meat. He hovered like a bullfighter, and, with a little stutter step, plunged the skewer into the haunch.

Meltonville had calculated that the mutton would take three hours, so the three of us returned to the buttery to prepare the partridge sauce. The recipe we were consulting demanded that the cook begin in this manner: "Take a Penny-Loaf, and cut off all the Crust, and cut the Crumb in three slices, and put it in a Pint of cold Water, and set it over the Fire till it boils."

Meltonville sportingly chiselled the crust off a round roll.

"This is completely pointless," he said.

"Maybe it was a job-creation scheme," Worsley replied.

"My guess is that the bread was old."

Soon, it was my turn to attend to the mutton. A spit roast is as demanding of human energy as it is of wood, and turnbroaches-also known as spitjacks-must have had a hard time of it. In 1526, Cardinal Wolsey warned Henry VIII that his scullions were no longer to "go naked, or in garments of such vileness as they do now." They had apparently got overheated and taken off their clothes. According to Worsley, someone eventually started breeding dogs with long bodies and stubby legs that could power a wheel, which was attached to the spit by chains. (Other experts think this unlikely.) In any case, turnspit dogs ( Canis vertigus) died out when mechanical spits were invented, only to be re-replaced by human attendants, who can make minute adjustments as required. Connoisseurs say that mechanical spits-supermarket rotisseries, for instance-are to spit-roasting as Auto-Tune is to singing.

I sat down and started turning. The goal was to propel the spit at a moderate speed (about eight rotations a minute), so that the meat would cook evenly. It was hard not to let the roast come flying over the peak of the rotation and then barrelling down, like a weight machine.

The fat began to bubble, forming a sort of gravy on the surface of the skin. Meltonville told me to start turning quickly, to conserve the liquid. He wasn't thrilled with my technique. "We're getting to the tricky stage where it actually matters," he said. "If you hear hissing, you want to speed up."

The fire had gone a bluish orange. It was sixteen hundred degrees. In time, the meat began to pull away from the leg bone. It was mesmerizing to watch the tendons shrink and curl against high wisps of flame as the spit rose, crested, and fell.

The table was laid. The silver was silver; the plates were Spode. "The only way you can eat like a king is to eat like a king," Meltonville had said, liberating a gleaming ladle, part of Hampton Court's collection, from its bubble-wrap cocoon. In the crockery closet, I had noticed something called a puzzle jug-a pitcher full of holes, a sort of party game, in which guests had to figure out how to drink without spilling. Meltonville didn't think it was something King George would have used.

The meal took place in Worsley's office, a high-ceilinged aerie-with candelabras and a fireplace-that overlooks the Chapel Court. We had all served as footmen, running plates along corridors and up staircases. (The distance from kitchen to table could be so far in Georgian days that servants sometimes insulated the food with blankets.) Meltonville was, by now, red-faced and breathing hard. He had selected the wine: a 2010 Tesco claret. "It would have come here in a barrel and then been put in a bottle for dinner," he said. "So I've gone for the simplest, youngest one. I didn't want anything but from the Bordeaux region." Our wineglasses were long-stemmed, with tiny cups at the top that reminded me of bluebells. Our forks had two tines.

"Robert, I'll have a glass of wine, please!" Worsley said, in a grand voice, getting into the spirit.

Dinner service at the Georgian court was performed à la française-each course was made up of several dishes, brought to the table all at once. After they were taken away-the "remove"-a new selection of dishes would appear. Guests were known to bribe servants to place the food they desired in front of them. In the nineteenth century, service à la russe, with the dishes served individually, and the proliferation of utensils that they required, caught on. "But there was something a bit nouveau riche about taking this too far," Worsley writes in "If Walls Could Talk." ("Phone for the fish knives, Norman," the poet John Betjeman wrote in "How to Get On in Society.") Until the twentieth century, seating charts were rigidly dictated by birth. Edward VII shuffled the seating hierarchy after the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, drew a worse card at a dinner than the undergraduate son of a peer.

I dipped the ladle into a white tureen and served myself some barley soup. It looked like bilge, but it was delicious: fallish, with a farmyard undertone and none of the virtuousness that normally accompanies recipes involving pulses. The crayfish appeared to have been repatriated to a river of heavy cream. The spinach, which had been minced and boiled to a pap, had the nutmeggy warmth of a pie. The mutton tasted like a normal roast, except that it was cooked more uniformly. "I've got something bristly in my teeth," Worsley said at one point. We had also roasted some potatoes, from Meltonville's garden, in a dripping pan beneath the spit.

"Do examine the potatoes," Meltonville said. "If they look as though they're covered in ash, they probably are."

The partridges, heart-shaped and lustrous, sat atop a bed of spinach. Worsley took a sliver.

"I think they taste like rats!" she exclaimed.

If every age has its sounds and smells, it also has its flavors. The taste of 1789 can be a dog whistle to modern palates. "The big problem is that we're modern people who've grown up with refined sugars and refined proteins all of our lives," Meltonville said. "It's possible that our taste buds are a little more jaded. The Georgians were not as used to extremes. You've had your tongue burnt off by a Mexican chili, and you've been eating sugar cookies since you've been able to stand-if something's subtle, sweetened with rose petals, how are you going to be able to taste it? It's like going to a really loud concert, and someone tries to make you listen to a harp."

Worsley had to catch a train for a lecture that she was giving at a literary festival in Saffron Walden. I helped Meltonville take some plates back to the buttery. It had the look of any kitchen after a Saturday-night dinner party: stained dishtowels, runny butter, orphaned spoons. Just outside was a bit of floor, worn smooth like the skin of a grape, where people had been kicking the door open for five hundred years. ♦

Lauren Collins began working at The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in 2008. She is the author of " When in French: Love in a Second Language."
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In the name of history, Lucy Worsley has spent the night in a Tudor rope bed ("You have to adopt the position of a banana"), chugged a pint of seawater (a Georgian cure for constipation), baked a hedgehog on an open fire ("perhaps the queasiest moment of my life"), and toiled as a sixteenth-century laundress ("Urine is a surprisingly excellent stain remover").