Read Online Below Stairs by Margaret Powell - Free Book Online

fish course. Sometimes salmon if salmon was in season, sometimes lemon soles, sometimes turbot, each with the appropriate sauce; hollandaise, tartare, or mayonnaise. It was my job to make the mayonnaise sauce. And what a job it was too. I never thought I’d get it right. First I would drop one egg yolk in a basin, then add olive oil, one spot at a time, only one spot, and I kept stirring and stirring and stirring, until I got a lovely thick yellow mixture, rather like custard. But if I tried to hurry it – to put the olive oil in a bit quick – the whole thing curdled and I had to throw it away and start all over again. I threw away a lot of mayonnaise sauce in my time!
    Then came the main course, sometimes a round of beef, sometimes, if they had visitors, it would be a whole saddle of mutton, sometimes just a leg of lamb.
    Mrs McIlroy used to make a beautiful sort of glaze. I really never knew how she did it. You can buy it out of bottles now, but she used to make her own out of a kind of burnt sugar. It used to melt and go a lovely toffee colour, and she would spread this over the leg or saddle before she sent it up; it really looked glorious.
    Then the sweet. This could be anything, but was nearly always something cold; perhaps a chocolate whisk, which used to be made with grated chocolate, eggs, and castor sugar; or perhaps fruit, fresh fruit with sugar boiled down into a syrup and tipped on top of it; perhaps a compote of oranges, or a compote of bananas; not always a savoury because the Reverend Clydesdale wasn’t very fond of savouries. He sometimes liked sardines or anchovies on toast. Nothing too fancy.
    Then came cheese and coffee. That was their dinner.
    What we had at night were the left-overs of the day before or a macaroni cheese or welsh rarebit. It wasn’t Mrs McIlroy’s fault, she wasn’t allowed to give us more. Some of the maids used to moan like mad and say they never got enough to eat. I didn’t moan, but I used to feel it wasn’t fair.
    Although their dinner at night wasn’t until eight, I had to get things ready for Mrs McIlroy before six o’clock because as well as laying out the table, everything she cooked was prepared by hand. For instance, if she was making a cheese soufflé, which was a thing they were very fond of, Mrs McIlroy used to do it with Parmesan cheese because it’s a lighter cheese in texture and in weight than the ordinary kind. Now today, of course, you can buy Parmesan cheese ready grated in bottles; in those days you had a lump of it, and believe me, it was as hard as a rock, and I used to have to grate this on the fine side of the grater. That took quite a long time, and some of my knuckles at first.
    If it was horseradish sauce, that had to be done by hand too. Grating horseradish is far worse than doing onions. The tears used to stream from my eyes. I used to dread having to do it. If it was creamed spinach, this had to be put through the sieve and that was another long chore.
    The worst job of the lot was when they had minced beef cake. The raw beef, generally a fillet, had to go through the mincer. This wasn’t easy. But then I had to get it through a wire sieve, still raw, so you can imagine how long this took. I thought it was impossible when I first tried, but I found I could do it if I kept on long enough.
    The sieved beef was then mixed with herbs and a yolk of egg, tied up in a piece of muslin, and dropped into a little stock and simmered for not more than twenty minutes. So that when it was cut open the steak was still more or less raw, but because it was so fine after going through the sieve, it tasted as if it had been cooked until it was tender. It was a marvellous thing but it took a lot of work.
    If they were serving game they had potato crisps with it. Nowadays everybody buys potato crisps in bags or tins, but in those days they had to be done by hand. First of all you peeled the potatoes, then you got a clean tea cloth and laid it out full length on