Food was a big deal for King Henry VIII at Hampton Court Palace.

He was always entertaining large numbers of people from all over the world, and back then having lots of important people at the palace meant a feast!

The Kitchens at Hampton Court Palace

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Hampton Court Palace is well prepared to cater for huge numbers of people enjoying a feast at the Palace.

The kitchens were a labyrinth of rooms all with a job to do for the upcoming meal.

In some rooms meat would be cooking over fires, in others vegetables would be boiling and in other ingredients would be sorted and prepared.

It was hot and hard work for the 200 cooks and kitchen workers that would work down there everyday!

What would normal people eat in the Tudor times?

Regular people would eat a lot of soup and stews.

These were easy meals as you can just throw everything you have into the pot.

If a family didn’t quite have enough soup or stewed meat to go around, they would bulk it out by adding oatmeal and barley.

They would often throw some herbs into the pot too to give it some flavour (if they had any herbs that is.)

What would King Henry VIII eat?

Henry would get whatever he wanted.

No one knows exactly what he liked the best but we think he really loved fruit, with cherries and strawberries being his favourites.

However back then people thought that raw fruit would give you a fever so they would always bake them into pies or would add sugar to them and make desserts with them. Not the healthiest way to get fruit into your diet!

He would have eaten a lot of meat too. henry loved to hunt so the kitchens would often cook venison that the king had killed himself!

Sometimes (often when the king was looking to impress) the kitchen would make impressive looking dishes that they had died a vibrant colour or even coated in gold sometimes!

And that’s not the only thing that would have been gold, the King would eat off gold plates and drink from gold goblets!