Behind the Scenes at Downton Abbey (16 page)
Read Behind the Scenes at Downton Abbey Online
Authors: Emma Rowley
Dressing for Dinner
Downton’s dinner parties would make the most practised host fret. ‘If you are doing a dinner party scene,’ Jim Carter (Mr Carson) explains, ‘you have to reset the levels of the glasses, the food on the plates, the candles, in every shot for continuity. It’s relentless.’
Lisa Heathcote, meanwhile, makes sure the seated actors do not struggle during butler service. ‘They’re helping themselves, so I have to cut up the food into little, manageable portions,’ she says.
These Abbey dinners are usually served on a traditional Spode dinner service, bought by the prop department, and classic manners are observed throughout. ‘Food always comes in – and is taken away – from the left, and drink comes in from the right,’ notes Alastair Bruce, historical advisor. The menu card is removed after the main course and before the pudding, and the footmen serve with a seat between them, to avoid jostling each other. ‘It is old-fashioned, it’s the way it’s done and we observe it meticulously,’ Bruce says.
‘I always try to put something inoffensive like watercress or cucumber on the plate so the actors can push it around a bit. Some of them like to tuck in, but they have to remember that once they start eating, they’ve got to keep doing it each take.’
Lisa Heathcote
FOOD ECONOMIST
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Cancelled wedding banquets aside, the staff eat very simply. ‘Below stairs, they tend to get a lot of bread and cheese, and stew and porridge,’ Lisa Heathcote says. ‘Apart from when Edith’s wedding went wrong and they ate the dishes from the wedding breakfast, there’s certainly nothing exciting for them to eat, except leftovers from dinners above stairs.’
CONTINUITY IN THE KITCHEN
What is prepared in kitchen scenes always corresponds to what appears on the table upstairs, notes Heathcote. ‘Often I can do a dish that we see in the kitchens, and we see it seconds later above stairs, but the reality is we don’t actually film it until three or four weeks later, so I’ve got to recreate the same dishes again, and make sure they look exactly the same.’
Dishes of the Decade
Mrs Patmore would have produced a ‘lot of classic French cuisine’, says Heathcote, who draws on period cookbooks for inspiration for the menus, such as
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management
. The house would also have had its own cookbook and would have used recipes that had been passed down over the generations. ‘The family would have eaten very well, because they would have been able to get ingredients from the dairy and the home farm, and they would have had wonderful walled gardens filled with vegetables – as well as servants trained to cook them.’
Food is presented just as it would have been in the period, so poultry arrives at the table with its feet still on, while a simple pudding of fruit, biscuits and cream looks like an edible masterpiece. ‘They had a finickety way of presenting things to show off their culinary skills – and it’s fun,’ says Heathcote. ‘It’s like painting with food.’ She may also tweak recipes to make sure they are ‘visually strong’, such as using mango pieces and berries to brighten up a beige spongy pudding.