Chenies Street Chambers Dining Hall
Although the marble pillars and the four panels of Angels by Ellen Mary Rope
were agreed to be a great success, the food at the communal dining rooms
was not. The poor quality of the cooking attracted constant complaints from
the residents from the very beginning of the building's history. In 1896,
cooks at both Chenies Street Chambers and York Buildings were given lessons
by Col. A. Kenny-Herbert (Wyvern), an enormously popular cook of the day,
whose second edition of Common Sense Cookery for English
Households was published by Edward Arnold in London in 1894.
Here is a recipe from that edition:
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to make about 125 g (4 oz) butter
Boil the spinach, drain it thoroughly, squeeze the leaves through a piece of muslin and save all the green colouring so obtained in a bowl or saucer. Pass the anchovies through a fine-meshed sieve and save the pulp. Blanch the parsley, drain, and mince as finely as possible enough parsley to fill a tablespoon. Pound the capers to a paste. Have these ingredients ready, first colour the butter by working into it, as lightly as you can, enough of the spinach colouring to secure the tint you require. Always order a little more spinach than you think you may want, to be on the safe side. Let the colour be pale green rather than dark green. Lastly, add the other things by degrees and, when they are thoroughly incorporated, trim the butter into a neat shape or sundry pretty patlets, and set it in the incebox or over a dish containing crumbled ice.
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