SC - women in the kitchen

[cclark at vicon.net]

mattie wrote:
>does anyone know if there were ever noblewomen working in the kitchen? ...

While I don't know for sure, I doubt that such a thing would have happened
except in very unusual circumstances. Being noble was all about being too
important and powerful to have to work for your living. Nobles tended to
avoid any appearance of being too much like the lower classes. 

And a period nobleman's kitchen would not necessarily have been a fun place
to hang out. Forget the single-family kitchen, where cooking is a social
activity. This would have been more like a hot and hectic restaurant
kitchen, where the cooks work hard for long hours to feed dozens or hundreds
of people every day. Some people might enjoy that, but it's an acquired taste.

There is one case that comes to mind, but I don't have access to full
information about it at the moment. I've read that when Richard Duke of
Gloucester (later Richard III) wanted to get married to the sister-in-law of
his elder brother George Duke of Clarence, George hid her away to try to get
out of sharing his wife's inheritance. I don't recall the details, but I
think that maybe he had her work in a kitchen. She got someone to take a
message to Richard, and the rest (as they say) is history. Anyway, if that's
how it happened then it would be a case where a noblewoman was disguised as
a commoner and forced to work in a kitchen as part of that disguise.

Henry of Maldon/Alex Clark

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