As with the stone masons building Europe's great cathedrals, the whalers out of Nantucket, or the Rangers with Rogers in the north woods, I would have loved to be a waiter or a bartender at Vauxhall. John Barrell reviews David Coke and Alan Borg's Vauxhall Gardens: A history ...
The gardens provided refreshments on a scale never attempted before and perhaps rarely since, when we bear in mind that, unlike the concessions at sports grounds or festivals today, everything eaten and drunk in the gardens came from one single outlet. On some occasions, 5,000, even 7,000, were fed in an evening. The food was plain English fare, with none of your fiddly French sauces: chicken, ham, beef with custard, served cold except perhaps when unexpected numbers required the cooks to roast extra chickens: one former waiter remembered an order suddenly coming into the kitchen for “400 roast fowls”. The gardens were famed for their portion control, meat carved so paper-thin it was described as “sliced cobwebs”; the wine was neither good nor cheap. Being English, the customers did not often complain; if the fare left them unimpressed, they must still have marvelled at the sublime logistics of supplying food on this scale. Ranelagh, after all, Vauxhall’s main competitor in the eighteenth century, served only tea and coffee. An army of waiters was employed, each wearing identifying numbers as if in a football team. Except, I suppose, when 400 chickens were ordered at once, the waiters were prevented from cheating the management by being made to pay cash from their own pockets for everything they ordered from the kitchens, reimbursing themselves when the customers settled their bills.
Read the rest at The Times Literary Supplement. Thank you, Arts & Letters Daily.
More at vauxhallgardens.com.
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