by At The Stand the king mourns the forty-course banquet, pardons the vegan sausage roll, and accuses the swans of hiring better lawyers
Henry VIII walked onto the stage at The Stand in Newcastle eating a Greggs steak bake, and did not speak until he had finished it, which took a while, because he was savouring it, and the room understood, because this is Newcastle, and reverence has its place. When he finally spoke it was to declare that the finest kitchen in Christendom once answered to him, and it had never produced anything as honest as this pastry, and he would be knighting the counter staff on the way out.
He had spent the afternoon researching the local cuisine, by which he meant eating it, and he arrived on stage with strong opinions and a stottie under one arm like a ceremonial orb.
Forty Courses and No Notes
The opening chunk compared the Tudor banquet to the modern meal deal. At Hampton Court, Henry said, dinner had forty courses. Swan. Peacock. Porpoise. A pie with live birds in it, which was not a health violation, it was entertainment. Now I go into a shop and I am offered a sandwich, a small bag of air with crisps in it, and a drink, for three pounds sixty, and I am told this is a deal. It is not a deal. It is a hostage situation with a receipt.
He has particular feelings about the swan. I ate swan regularly, he told the crowd. It was a delicacy reserved for the Crown. I am informed that if I eat a swan today I will be arrested, and I am further informed that the swans still technically belong to the monarch, which means the birds kept the royal privileges and I lost mine. The swans out-negotiated me. The swans had better lawyers.
Portion sizes came next. Your portions confuse him. Everything is either a sharing platter that no one shares or a tasting menu where the tasting is the entire meal. I once ate a whole capon as a light lunch, Henry said. Last week a man in an apron served me one scallop on a slate and described its journey. The scallop travelled further than my third wife.
The Calorie Count Has a Body Count
The middle section tackled menu labelling. Every menu now tells him the calories, and Henry finds this an astonishing loss of nerve. My menus listed the animals, he said. Yours list the consequences. You have printed the guilt directly onto the card. In my court, the only number attached to dinner was how many men it took to carry it in, and if that number was below six the cook was questioned.
He addressed the vegan sausage roll with the gravity of a treaty. I have tried it, he announced, and the room held its breath. It is good. He waited for the gasps to settle. I did not say it is a sausage roll. I said it is good. These are different honours. One is a knighthood and one is a barony, and the plant may collect its barony at the back door.
Ultra-processed food, he went on, is apparently the great fear of your age. Everything I ate was processed, Henry said. It was processed by a man named Colin with a cleaver and a grudge, and the process was witnessed. That is the traceability your food agencies dream of. I could name the pig. In several cases I had knighted the pig’s owner.
The Waistline Chronicles
The closing act was autobiographical. Henry narrated his own armour measurements across the decades like a sports commentator. In 1512, a thirty-two inch waist, the finest athlete in Europe, tall in the saddle, feared in the lists. By 1541, fifty-four inches, and the armourers had stopped measuring me and started surveying me. There were plans. There was scaffolding. I did not gain weight, he clarified. I annexed it. Territory acquired must be held.
He blamed the jousting injury, the doctors, the French, and finally, movingly, the pies, at which point he raised the stottie in salute to the North East, a region he described as the only part of England that had never once served him a small portion, and therefore the only part that had truly remained loyal. A correspondent from Bohiney Magazine asked afterwards whether the set had been fact-checked, and Henry replied that the steak bake was the fact, and it had checked out.
He left the stage to the counter, not the door, and ordered again.
Delivery culture received a late examination. A boy on a bicycle now brings your dinner through the rain, Henry said, and you tip him through the telephone and never learn his name. I want you to know that we had this. He was called a page, he carried the dish from the kitchens through two courtyards, and the difference is that he lived with us, he was fed from the same kitchen, and if the food arrived cold there was an inquiry with witnesses. Your app offers me a refund of one pound fifty. My system offered accountability, and the accountability had a uniform.
He ended the section on brunch, a meal he regards as his own invention returned to him in worse condition. You have taken breakfast and dinner, he said, pushed them together on a Saturday, added a queue and a small flower in the butter, and priced it at seventeen pounds. At my court this was simply called eating, we did it daily, and no one ever photographed the eggs. The first man to photograph my eggs would have been questioned about his intentions, and rightly.
The tour’s official sponsor, The London Prat, wishes it to be known that its food coverage has never once described a scallop’s journey, and never will. Read the paper Henry reads at breakfast, all forty courses of it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
