You won’t find any of the latest juicers, blenders or fashionable steam ovens in Robert Deeley’s kitchen.
But if dangle spits, bottle jacks and faggot ovens from centuries long past are more your taste in culinary gadgets, then the cavernous room with its flagstone floor and two roaring open fires in his French chateau will definitely get your juices flowing.
Briton Mr Deeley, 77, has been collecting historic cooking utensils since he was six years old when an aunt gave him an early English copper drinking pot. He now has more than 1,500 weird and wonderful items dating from the 13th to the 19th centuries.
You won’t find any of the latest juicers, blenders or fashionable steam ovens in Robert Deeley’s kitchen
He even uses some of them to roast joints of meat like cooks would have done in medieval times — and today his food preparation can be more like Game Of Thrones than MasterChef.
When Mr Deeley, a former farmer and antiques dealer, began restoring the historic chateau in Gascony in 1990, the kitchen was a ruin with a tree growing through the ceiling. Now it is like a fully-working museum of gastronomy, while he and wife Melanie, 71, and their faithful labrador Teal, eight, live in a wing of the castle above.
Mr Deeley explains the chateau, which dates back to the 1160s, had probably not been used since the Napoleonic era in terms of a working kitchen before he and Melanie restored it.
‘It had no roof on when I came here, and it hadn’t been touched since the French Revolution in 1789 so it was unique in that everything was as it was,’ he says. ‘I put the roof back on and the ceiling, and restored the two monumental fireplaces, one at each end.’
But if dangle spits, bottle jacks and faggot ovens from centuries long past are more your taste in culinary gadgets, then the cavernous room with its flagstone floor and two roaring open fires in his French chateau will definitely get your juices flowing
The cooking utensils, farming equipment, bowls and cutlery that now populate the kitchen have been gathered from all over England, France and elsewhere in Europe and form a working social history of the kitchens used by our forebears.
Mr Deeley, a great-great grandfather, adds: ‘You can go to loads of National Trust homes and see rows and rows of copper saucepans, but I’ve tried to collect the things that possibly our ancestors would have used in a humbler home, too.
‘For the cooking I have things like a dangle spit, which is brass with two knobs on the end. You wind it up and it rotates one way with the meat and then rotates the other way — and then you wind it up again.
‘We have faggot ovens, which cooked the food by charcoal or bundles of sticks.
Briton Mr Deeley, 77, has been collecting historic cooking utensils since he was six years old when an aunt gave him an early English copper drinking pot
‘I have a medieval fork and scummer, which dates back possibly to the 13th century, so I can eat dinner having used an 800-year-old utensil to remove it from the cauldron.’
Bottle jacks were used to turn meat when cooking over an open hearth in the 18th and 19th centuries. The contraptions had to be wound up on a spring to make the joint — hanging from an attached hook — twist from side to side while roasting.
His collection also includes hasteners, used in front of an open fire to reflect heat back onto a joint of meat hanging from a hook. The combination of bottle jack and meat hastener was designed to get the meat evenly roasted without constant attention from the cook.
Roasting duck on an early English brass spit engine (1650 to 1660) with a fat tray and basting ladle
The exterior of the restored chateau. Mr Deeley hopes that one day he will be able to find a buyer for his collection when it becomes too much hard work to look after
Mr Deeley hopes that one day he will be able to find a buyer for his collection when it becomes too much hard work to look after.
He says: ‘My wife has been incredible to put up with me. I’m the eccentric I suppose. I would never have done this if I hadn’t had her help.’
Mrs Deeley admits: ‘It’s a lot of work to keep the collection together and to clean it all. We don’t have many servants like they would have done in medieval times — there’s only me.
‘I think it would be a shame for Rob’s collection to be broken up, I don’t think anyone else could get what he has got together very easily now.’