Hampton Court Palace chocolate kitchen and recipe

Since the restored Hampton Court Palace royal Chocolate Kitchen reopened to the public on Valentine’s Day of this year, it has been very popular with visitors. The palace website now has a great section about the Chocolate Kitchens and have recently uploaded a couple of fascinating videos.

The first covers the kitchen’s history, its rediscovery and the intense work that went into recreating the Georgian environment.
It was William III who introduced chocolate drinking to England when he arrived from Holland in 1689. He installed the Hampton Court Palace chocolate kitchen. It’s the only royal chocolate kitchen surviving today, but documents record him building chocolate kitchens at Kensington Palace and Windsor Castle as well. Subsequent monarchs continued the practice, each retaining his own chocolate maker who would travel with the court from palace to palace. It ended with George III who hated Hampton Court Palace and refused to set foot in the place; his successors followed in his footsteps

The reason nobody knew where the Chocolate Kitchen was is that after it stopped being used to make chocolate for the monarch and queen, it was used as a kitchen for the Grace and Favour Apartments where other members of the royal family sometimes lived. By the Victorian era when the palace was opened to the public, the existence of the Chocolate Kitchen had become a legend like the stories of ghosts and scandals used to attract visitors. Besides, many buildings had been demolished since Georgian times and a devastating fire in 1986 had caused much damage.

Then, in 2013, curatorial intern Charlotte Barker found an 18th century inventory document written after the death of William III that recorded every room in the palace and their locations, including the Chocolate Kitchen. It was known simply as Door Eight to the curators. It had been used as storeroom for the annual Hampton Court summer flower show and was filled with racks, pots, vases, steel shelves.

They figured the room would have been bare bones, all the original chocolate-making accessories long gone. When they removed the clutter, however, they found the full Georgian chocolate kitchen, with original shelves on the wall, the fireplace with a smoke jack inside the chimney, a prep table that folded down from the wall, a cupboard, and the Georgian version of a stove top: a pair of charcoal braziers in a brick housing. Charcoal was placed under the grates and then copper pots placed on top to melt the chocolate with whatever liquids (water, milk, liquor) and spices for the beverage.

A smoke jack, also known as a turnspit, is a mechanism that uses hot air rising from the fireplace up the chimney to turn a fan which turns a pinion that turns wheels that turn a chain that turns a spit over the fire. The one in the the chocolate kitchen wasn’t used to roast pheasants and great joints of beef, but only for roasting the chocolate beans. An automated roasting device was extremely high tech for any kitchen, never mind one dedicated solely to the production of chocolate.

Once the beans were roasted, the nuts were shelled and the innermost bits, the cocoa nibs, were made into chocolate. The curved slab of granite used as a mortar to grind the cocoa nibs would be placed over the brazier to keep it warm during the grinding process. Once the grind was smooth, the chocolate would be formed into flat discs and stored for a month for the flavors to meld.

Just down the hall from the kitchen is the Chocolate Room. It too was being used for storage but unfortunately wasn’t kept in pristine condition underneath the clutter. The late 18th century fireplace and barred windows were all that was left of the original fittings. They were able to recreate the shelves from the marks on the walls indicating where they had once been and were also able to restore damaged fireplace iron tools.

The real trick was outfitting the Chocolate Room with all the gear — chocolate pots, wooden whisks called molinets that were threaded through holes in the lids of the serving pots to give the beverage a nice froth, china and delftware cups, frames the cups were placed in, glass sweetmeat vessels — that were needed to present the royals with their delicious and luxurious beverage. The palace curators enlisted craftsmen who use the traditional methods so everything is as historically accurate as possible. Pewterer David Williams used period antique bronze and lead molds to make replicas of Georgian chocolate pots in the Ashmolean and V&A Museums, only the new pieces were are out of pewter instead of the silver and gold of the royal court originals.

Chocolate was often served with breakfast or after dinner and sweetmeats would have been among the foods on offer. Glassmaker Mark Taylor made the replica sweetmeat jars. Hampton Court Palace archaeological collection includes fragments of original chocolate cups. They were used by potter John Hudson to reproduce the exact cups the Georgian royal family drank out of.

It’s fascinating to see the archivists, curators, craftsmen and food historian at work recreating the Chocolate Kitchen and Room.

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If you want to try your own hand a Georgian style chocolate beverage, food historian Marc Meltonville has a fabulous instructional video on how to make Chocolate Port. He’s working in the Hampton Court Palace chocolate kitchen using the reproduction period tools and the chocolate he roasted and ground from the whole pod. It’s so hardcore. For the rest of who are not so cool, we can follow along starting with store bought chocolate that’s 80% or more cocoa solids.

The recipe calls for a pint of port to one ounce of pure chocolate, so teetotalers be warned. I’m guessing this was more for the after supper chocolate service rather than the breakfast of champions.

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Here’s a written version of the Chocolate Port recipe (pdf), plus a 1692 recipe for the pure chocolate discs (pdf) that were the basis of all the goodies, and a very yummy looking chocolate cream dessert (pdf) from George I’s 1716 royal cookbook