Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

In this series compiled from our archives,

we explore the history of food and dining across our palaces.

In this talk, food historian Penn Vogler

explores the art of describing culinary delights and disasters

and the origins of food writing.

I came up with five kind of, five reasons why I feel that cookery writing is a sort of untapped,

I suppose, resource, a historical resource that mainstream historians tend not, tend to

ignore. And it gives us an insight into, into sort of social history, into the way that people

live, ate, obviously, and into very much into their relationships with each other, into kind of

who's on top, you know,

the relationship between servants and mistresses. And you get a lot of that kind of coming

through food books. But obviously the principal reason when people still look at old

cookery books, and a lot of this is coming back, which is really pleasing. It comes back

in the Great British Breakoffs. They talk about old recipes. You know, Heston Blumenthal and his famous restaurant dinner is going, you know,

taking back old recipes. There's a lot of kind of interest in old recipes out there, which is really

wonderful. And you see in books, the originals of some dishes that we sort of take for granted. So coming up to Christmas,

Christmas pudding is one example. And Christmas pudding would have started its life as a potterge,

you know, a kind of gloopy substance of some kind of grain. And if you were rich enough, you could afford to put spices and sugar and, you know,

...