On the Menu

Naturally, good food was critical to any dining experience curated by Duke John. He cared greatly about meals, as shown in a letter to his friend, John Russell: 

“If you will be with us by ten o’clock tomorrow morning we’ll go and see the pictures and we should be glad if Mrs Russell would come with you and go with us and that you both dine with us afterwards and I wish you would send me the recipe for your olio today and you shall have one at dinner tomorrow.”

The olio, a Spanish stew, was a success, as were many other meals at Montagu House, Whitehall. When Handel visited on Monday, May 4, 1747, he enjoyed a rich breakfast, dinner, and supper. For breakfast, the Duke, Duchess, and five esteemed guests were served drinking chocolate, bread and butter, and mutton broth. The latter may seem strange by today’s standards, but a few centuries ago, it was a perfectly ordinary way to begin the day. Queen Elizabeth I is said to have enjoyed pottage, a mutton stew thickened with grains like oats, wheat or barley.

Dinner, the heaviest meal, would have been eaten at midday. To maximize efficiency, the cooks designed menus that used different parts of the same ingredient. So, mutton appears twice more, as a “rice soup with mutton in it” and “mutton loin, roasted.” The seven diners would have also shared twelve lamb’s ears, a roasted goose, two roasted chickens, boiled asparagus and a “sallet,” or a cooked salad. Four kinds of dessert would have been available, too. With such a spread, it was reasonable that supper would be much lighter. Handel and his companions enjoyed a chicken fricassée, or stew. 

Notably, when picturing the dining table in use, it is important to remember that the kinds of dinner scenes featured in episodes of Downton Abbey are not reflective of Duke John’s hosting experiences. Guests at Downton enjoyed their meals in the service à la russe, which remains popular today. In this Russian style, which became popular in the 1860s, footmen brought dishes to the table in the order they were meant to be eaten, and they were served individually to the guests. 

However, through the mid-nineteenth century, service à la française was the leading style. In this French fashion, all of the food was laid out at once in an elaborate display, and a leisurely pace of eating was encouraged. The drawback was that it might take longer to acquire one’s desired food. In a letter to a friend, Jane Austen observed that a dining companion “had an empty plate, & even asked [a fellow guest] to give her some mutton twice without being attended to for some time.”