Above the Bay of Angels: A Novel

by Rhys Bowen

  “Ah, the new girl’s here.” Mr Angelo looked up as I entered the kitchen. “Good news, as we’ve just had a luncheon sprung on us. Her Majesty’s daughter Princess Helena and her granddaughter Princess Thora are visiting. Here’s the menu: consommé aux fines herbes, cheese croutons, poached fillet of sole with parsley sauce and potatoes à la crème, puree of squab à la chasseur, creamed celery, pork chops with apples, red cabbage and duchesse potatoes, iced pudding à la Prince Albert, canary pudding with vanilla sauce, anchovy toast. Mr Francis, you’ll take the fish course, Mr Roland the puddings, I’ll handle the squab and pork chops and Mrs Simms, you’ll be on consommé. I’ll add the new girl to your team for now. What was your name again, my dear?”

  “It’s B—it’s Helen, sir.” My heart was thumping. I’d almost committed my first faux pas.

  “Well, Helen, you call me Cook, not sir. I am officially maître de cuisine, but that’s a mouthful, isn’t it? Simple Cook will suffice. Everyone else you address as ‘Cook’—apart from those apprentices. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Cook.”

  He nodded. “Off you go. Table by the window. And chop-chop, everybody. We don’t have that much time.”

  I went to the station I was assigned. “You can cut the veg,” Mrs Simms said. She was a round, comfortable-looking woman who didn’t look nearly as fearsome as the men in the kitchen—who all had a most superior look to them and seemed to be regarding me with displeasure if not outright loathing. “Make sure you peel them well. No scraps of skin left on those carrots.”

  She pointed to several baskets full of various vegetables.

  “How many do we need?” I asked.

  “Enough to serve eight,” she replied. “They’re only for garnish in the soup, and Her Majesty isn’t that keen on her clear soups anyway, so it will probably all come back.”

  I took a deep breath and selected some carrots, a turnip, a bunch of parsley. I checked the other baskets. “I don’t see any onions,” I said.

  Mrs Simms frowned. “Her Majesty does not use anything that could make her breath smell,” she said. “No onions, no garlic, no foreign spices.”

  “I see.” I went to work peeling the carrots, then started to chop them.

  “Don’t do that,” a voice whispered in my ear. I turned to see a tall, lanky boy with hair even brighter red than my own standing right beside me. He had the sharp features and cheeky expression of a typical cockney. “We always julienne the veg for soups.”

  “Oh, thank you.” I gave him a tentative smile. I wasn’t really sure what “julienne” meant. Mrs Tilley’s cook never used foreign terms. The boy must have seen my hesitation because he took a carrot and sliced it longways into tiny, even slivers. “This is how they like it here.”

  The smile was truly grateful this time. I nodded and got to work.

  “I’m Nelson,” he said. “Nelson Biggs.”

  He paused, all the while still cutting slices of bread into cubes. “Did you say your name was Helen?”

  I nodded, wondering how I could ask them to call me Bella instead. “Welcome to the kitchen then, Helen. You’ll find Mr Angelo runs a tight ship here. Ever so picky, he is, and quite temperamental, too.” He had lowered his voice for this last phrase. “But on the whole the work’s not too demanding, unless we have a big state banquet, then it’s crazy. And we eat well, let me tell you that. This skinny body is not a result of undernourishment.” And he grinned.

  “This certainly is a large amount of food for a luncheon,” I said. “All these courses. Does Her Majesty not take a proper dinner? Is this her main meal?”

  “On the contrary,” he replied. “The dinner is even more courses. Her Majesty likes to eat. You’ll soon notice that. And if you actually catch a glimpse of her one day, then you’ll see where all that food goes.”

  “Enough of your comments, young man,” came Mrs Simms’s voice from the other side of the table. “It’s not up to you to judge what Her Majesty does or doesn’t do. If she likes her food, I say good health to her. There’s precious little else left in her life to give her pleasure.” She wagged a chubby finger at us. “Now more work and less talk over there, or we’ll be running behind. And you’re setting our new girl a bad example.”

  Nelson winked at me as we went back to work. It felt so much better to have an ally, and by the end of the morning, Mrs Simms had found nothing to complain about in my work. In fact, she said, “I’m sure you’re going to do just fine here, my girl.”

  “I feel rather strange amongst so many men,” I whispered to her. “Did you also start here as a young woman?”

  “Oh no, dearie,” she said. “I only came here a few years ago. Her Majesty was visiting Lady Malmesbury’s, where I was cook, and she expressed great satisfaction with the food that was served. Of course, Lady Malmesbury had no alternative but to offer my services to the queen, who readily accepted. Although funnily enough, when I got here, I was relegated to working under the men, and only allowed to do the simpler of the dishes.”

  “Do you miss your former place of employment?” I asked.

  “I do, sometimes. I’m a country girl, like you, and I feel hemmed in in the big city, but the likes of us don’t have much say over what happens, do we? I have to admit it’s a pleasant enough atmosphere most of the time, and the work’s not too hard—although I must say it’s nice having a young woman to chat with. The men keep to themselves, and Mrs Gillespie’s not exactly a little ray of sunshine.”

  I glanced over at a far table where the grim-faced woman was chopping celery sticks with the violence of an executioner.

  As I was taking off my apron, Mr Angelo came up to me. “If you want to know what it takes to become a proper cook in this establishment, I suggest you study some of our cookery books on that shelf during your spare time. You can start with the one written by my fellow countryman, Charles Francatelli. He was chef to the queen and Prince Albert and invented many of the dishes that have become her favourite. Take it and start making notes. You can begin with your white sauces.”

  “Yes, Cook,” I murmured and went to retrieve the heavy tome from the shelf. After our supper, I sat under the electric light in our common room and started to read. Oh heavens above! I had thought, in my ignorance, that I had become quite a fair cook. Now I realized how much I had to learn. I thumbed through page after page: over fourteen hundred recipes, many involving things I had never heard of, and so complex, so complicated.

  Page after page of sauces. Page after page of soups. Bisque of snipe à la bonne bouche. Bisque of crab à la Fitzhardinge, which included adding a pint of boiling cream. Puree of asparagus à la St George involved three dozen small quenelles of fowl and half a pint of small fillets of red tongue. Mercy me.

  I flicked on. What on earth was ragout of cock’s kernels à la soubise, or ragout of ox palates? At the Tilleys’ residence, we rarely ate offal. Mr Tilley was fond of liver and bacon, but Mrs Tilley saw offal as food of the lower classes, for those who could afford nothing better. So our meals were good old-fashioned roast beef, leg of lamb, chops and steaks, with the occasional steak and kidney pie. These recipes looked horribly complicated: Put about half a pound of cock’s kernels, with cold water, into a stewpan, let it stand by the side of a slow fire to remove the little blood they contain, taking care that the water does not become too warm.

  I read on. As soon as they whiten . . . pat of butter . . . simmer . . . drain them on a napkin . . . small stewpan, with a ragout-spoonful of Soubise sauce and a little Allemande sauce . . .

  Good heavens. I looked up from my book. The rest of the cooks were sitting around the common room, reading the newspaper or writing letters. How had they learned to master all these dishes, I wondered. Who had instructed them, or had they learned from observing? I couldn’t imagine any of those superior-looking men taking the time to tell me how to make a soubise sauce. I went back to the book, feeling more overwhelmed with every page. The recipe for turtle soup began with procuring a 120-pound l
ive turtle and then included three pages of instructions on how to kill and de-shell it. I certainly hoped I’d never have to do that. I didn’t think I’d be good about killing things. I’d even been squeamish about dropping lobsters into boiling water.

  How would I ever learn all this?

  Little by little, I told myself. I was an under-cook. I would learn as I observed. If the others in the kitchen could cook all these dishes, then so would I.

  CHAPTER 4

  By the end of the next day, I had started to breathe a little easier. I had handled all the tasks given to me and had even received a couple of small compliments—on the smoothness of my gravy and mashed potatoes, for instance. But there had been precarious moments. The first was when Mrs Simms asked me to pass her a cup of flour. At least what she had said was, “Helen, get me a cup of flour.”

  I had been mashing potatoes and didn’t react.

  “Helen!” she said sharply now. “Wake up, girl. A cup of flour.”

  Nelson, working beside me, gave me a little nudge. I looked up, my cheeks flaming, and realized she had been talking to me. “Oh, so sorry,” I said and rushed to get it.

  “What were you daydreaming about?” Mrs Simms said as she took the cup from me. “Some young man, no doubt.”

  “Oh no, Cook,” I said. “I was concentrating on getting all the lumps out of these potatoes.”

  “Well, you do do a good job on the spuds, I have to give you that,” she said.

  I went back to my work, cringing with embarrassment. The problem was I hadn’t realized she had been talking to me. I had to learn to answer to my new name, rather like a dog who goes to a new home. Then, a little later that day, Mrs Simms asked me about Yorkshire, where her sister now lived.

  “Where exactly is this Sowerby Hall?” she asked. “I went to visit my sister once. She lives in Filey. Nice little seaside town, but oh so cold with that east wind off the sea.”

  I remembered the address was near Leeds and told her. “Oh, that’s a good way away, isn’t it? Up near the moors.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “And equally bleak when the wind blows.”

  “I’d imagine it would be.” She gave me a commiserating smile. “And snow in winter, no doubt.”

  “Lots of snow.”

  “I don’t like the cold weather myself,” she said. “Bad for my chilblains. In fact, I’m glad we don’t ever go to Balmoral in the winter. Osborne House is where the queen usually spends Christmas, and that’s on the Isle of Wight. Nice, pleasant climate there.”

  I was just taking in the implications of this. “Do we travel with the queen when she goes to her different palaces?”

  “Some of us do. She takes a pared-down staff with her because there is usually not much entertaining to be done at Osborne. It’s strictly family there. And Balmoral, well, she uses local servants mainly. She takes Mr Angelo and a couple of others with her because he knows what she likes to eat.”

  “And what happens to the rest of us when she’s away?” I asked.

  Mrs Simms nudged me. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play, eh?” Then she corrected herself. “Not that we’re allowed any high jinks, mind you, but we have a nice, easy time of it. We feed the remaining staff, we experiment with new dishes the queen might like. We take our own dinner early and put our feet up. Mr Williams plays the piano if he’s with us, and we have a sing-along sometimes. Or one of us reads to the rest. It’s quite pleasant.”

  In my narrow bed that night, I wondered how I might persuade them to call me by my real name. I dared to mention it to Mrs Simms when we were working together cutting up stewing steak for a meat pie. “You don’t think it would be possible to call me by my pet name that I was called at home, do you?”

  She looked up, the cleaver still in her hand. “Your pet name? What was it?”

  “Bella,” I said, blushing now.

  “Bella? That’s hardly a name for a servant, is it? How long ago were you called this? Surely not at Lady what’s-her-name’s?”

  “Oh no. Not at Lady Sowerby’s,” I said quickly. “I just always liked Bella better than Helen. Helen’s such a harsh name, don’t you think?”

  She sniffed. “We can’t choose what name we were christened with, can we? My own is Mildred, which I confess I’m not fond of either. But I’m afraid you’re stuck with Helen, my dear, until you become a cook like me, and then you can call yourself Mrs Barton.”

  So I had to put any notion of being called Isabella aside and simply train myself to become Helen. After a few days, I had learned to answer to my new name. Other than that worry, the work was not arduous. If we were not on breakfast duty, we rose at seven thirty, and our breakfast was served at eight. It was porridge and bread and jam, sometimes with scrambled eggs or bacon. I was assigned basic tasks, all of which I could handle with ease—apart from a blunder with an artichoke. I had never seen one before and did not realize I should have snipped off the sharp spikes before serving. Luckily my mistake was caught before I poked the queen’s eye out!

  The tasks I was assigned were well within my capabilities, but I couldn’t help gazing in awe at some of the dishes that were being composed around the kitchen. Something that looked like a pineapple on a fine crystal dish turned out to be a salmis of partridges in aspic. It was an absolute work of art.

  Mr Angelo usually made the most complicated dishes himself. I spotted him working at a table that was full of tiny bones.

  “What is Cook making?” I whispered to Mrs Simms.

  She glanced across at his table. “Oh, he’s making a lark pie,” she said and went back to trimming her beef.

  “Lark pie? You mean larks? Little birds?”

  My mind went back to a day on Hampstead Heath with my father, when he had paused, a look of rapture on his face, and pointed at the sky. “Listen,” he said. “A lark is singing.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs Simms said, as if this was an ordinary matter for discussion. “Forty Dunstable larks are needed for that pie, and they all have to be boned first. I’m glad it’s Mr Angelo doing it and not me. There is hell to pay if one of the royal guests finds a bone.”

  “I had no idea they made pies of little birds,” I said.

  Mrs Simms grinned. “Oh yes. The queen’s very fond of her larks. Sometimes it’s blackbirds, too.”

  “You mean like four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie?” I was astonished.

  “They say they’re quite tasty, but you can only eat them in the winter months for some reason. And, of course, they line the pie with a layer of beef scallops, and that makes anything taste good.”

  She went back to her work while I digested that I’d one day have to learn to bone little birds if I wanted to call myself a master cook. This made me pause. Would I ever rise through the ranks in this kitchen where men clearly ruled the roost? Did I want to be one?

  One step at a time, I decided. At this moment, I was happy learning my trade.

  For that first week, I would not have guessed that I was working in a palace. Every morning we walked down uncarpeted back stairs to the kitchen and worked in our own little universe. Light came in through high windows, but we saw only sky, only the slightest hint of the weather outside. Every morning we heard marching feet and barked commands, and sometimes sounds of a brass band as guards marched on their way to the forecourt. But that was our only hint that we were not in an ordinary house. We certainly saw no royal persons. If we stepped outside the palace, it was through the plain little gate on to Buckingham Palace Road. But the weather had turned inclement, and during the hour we had off after serving luncheon, I had no wish to go into the outside world. In fact, I only went out once during the week, and that was to find the nearest post office, near Victoria Station, where I arranged to have any letters held in their poste restante. Now at least Louisa would have a way of contacting me.

  By the end of that week, I had almost worked out who was who in the kitchen. The maître de cuisine was Mr Angelo, the cockney Italian.
Under him were Mr Francis and Mr Roland, the pastry chef. They were considered master cooks. Mr Francis was an older man, with bristling grey eyebrows and a perpetual scowl. Mr Roland was French, and highly strung, I was told. Then there were four that were known as “yeoman cooks”: Mr Phelps, Mr Williams, Mr O’Rourke and Mr Fitch. Four men of indeterminate age, clean-shaven, pasty-faced. It was hard at this stage to know which was which, as none of them seemed to acknowledge my presence. The only females were two older cooks: Mrs Simms and Mrs Gillespie. I couldn’t tell whether they were above or below the yeomen in rank. They certainly weren’t allotted the more complicated dishes. Nelson was an under-cook like myself. Then there were three apprentices, Arthur, Jimmy and Fred, all lanky and cheerful chaps about my age.

  There were also three kitchens and a scullery where two scullery servants, a man and a girl called Ruby, did things like peel potatoes and wash pots. Most of us worked in the main kitchen. This had both coal and gas stoves, a spit for roasting and a charcoal burner for finishing, so it was always rather warm. On one of the stoves was a giant stockpot, and all the bits and pieces went into it. I was told it had been going non-stop for twenty years!