Kitchen

Bawn Area

Archaeologist Eric Klingelhofer suggests that a kitchen building may have been attached to an interior bawn wall (also hypothetical) that runs roughly SW-NE between the Tower House and the east bawn wall. A small kitchen building is therefore recreated at the intersection of this interior wall and the east bawn wall. A covered servants’ corridor runs between the kitchen and the Great Hall.

It is almost certain that Kilcolman also had some form of kitchen garden for growing fruit, vegetables and herbs (see Bawn area: garden and Tower House Parlor: apples).

Literary Connections

Spenser’s House of Temperance, an allegory for the human body (see also Tower House Study: desk and Tower House Privy), has a huge kitchen, symbolizing the stomach:

It was a vaut ybuilt for great dispence,
With many raunges reard along the wall;
And one great chimney, whose long tonnell thence,
The smoke forth threw. And in the midst of all
There placed was a caudron wide and tall,
Vpon a mightie fornace, burning whott,
More whott, then Aetn’, or flaming Mongiball:
For day and night it brent, ne ceased not,
So long as any thing it in the caudron got.

But to delay the heat, least by mischaunce
It might breake out, and set the whole on fyre,
There added was by goodly ordinaunce,
An huge great payre of bellowes, which did styre
Continually, and cooling breath inspyre.
About the Caudron many Cookes accoyld,
With hookes and ladles, as need did requyre;
The whyles the viaundes in the vessel boyld
They did about their businesse sweat, and sorely toyld. (FQ II.ix.29-30)

Links

https://www.hrp.org.uk/hampton-court-palace/schools/key-stage-3/tudor-kitchens-revealed/ (accessed 1/30/18) [the kitchens of the Tudor palace, Hampton Court, near London]

Dr. Thomas Herron, ECU

Bibliography:
Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012): 221, 325-6.

Eric Klingelhofer, “Edmund Spenser at Kilcolman Castle: the archaeological evidence.” Post-Medieval Archaeology 39.1 (2005), 133-54.