Page 24 Daily Mail, Thursday, March 5, 2020
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.
M r D e e l e y e x p l a i n s t h e
chateau, which dates back to
the 1160s, had probably not
been used since the Napoleonic
e r a i n t e r m s o f a w o r k i n g
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.’
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 grand-
father, adds: ‘You can go to loads
of National Trust homes and see
rows and rows of copper sauce-pans, 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.
‘I have a medieval fork and
scummer, which dates back pos-
sibly 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 tomake 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.
Mr Deeley hopes that one day
he will be able to find a buyer
f o r h i s c o l l e c t i o n w h e n i t
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 medie-
val 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.’y
ou won’t find any of the latest
juicers, blenders or fashion-
able 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.
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 historicOur dream kitchen... with nO mOd-cOns!
How one British couple restored
a French chateau to its original
glory – complete with 1,500
antique cooking implements
they still use to make meals
by David
Wilkes
Ancient pile: Robert Deeley’s restored
chateau dates back to the 1160sas their circulatory systems cannot
cope with short bursts of exercise.
A Tesco spokesman apologised and
said it wants to ensure the highest
standards for all its food. It asked
that customers with affected meat
return it for a refund and so it can be
investigated further. A Sainsbury’s
spokesman said it was investigating
with its supplier.
Morrisons and Asda could not be
reached for comment.photo of the Sainsbury’s chicken she
bought last month.
Sainsbury’s customer service team
apologised to Gilly and said: ‘Green
muscle meat is not harmful but cer-
tainly not appealing.’
Morrison’s customer Amber North
said she felt sick after she cooked her
chicken, cut into it and found the
meat was green. She tweeted: ‘The
smell made me feel so sick. Lucky
our children didn’t eat any before we
realised it was green.’
Sam Mundell from Gosport, Hamp-
shire, also spotted green flesh in her
Asda chicken bought last month.
The meat’s green appearance is
thought to be because of a disease
called deep pectoral myopathy, or
green muscle disease. It occurs when
birds flap their wings too hard which
starves muscles of oxygen and
bruises them, turning them green.
The issue is more common in birds
bred specifically for their meat which
are inactive for long periods of time,
SHoppERS at the uK’s big
four supermarkets told of their
disgust after finding green
meat in their roast chickens.
The discoloration was reported
in birds sold by Tesco, Sains-
bury’s, Asda and Morrisons.
It sparked complaints and some
customers said they were left feeling
sick. It is unclear whether the chick-
ens came from the same supplier.
The meat, likely to be discoloured
due to bruising, is safe to eat but is
only discovered after the chicken has
been cooked and cut into.
posting a picture of her roast
chicken online, Kelly Smith from
Yateley, Hampshire, wrote: ‘Every-
one be careful eating chicken from
Tesco. It’s bright green and looks
like a chemical in the meat.’
Twitter user Gilly complained of
the same green stain and tweeted a
I feel sick!
Disgust at
green meat
in chickens
Asda: Sam Mundell’s chicken
‘Not harmful but
not appealing’By Kamal Sultan
Record 1 in 4 pregnant
women has an abortion
PREGNANT women are more likely Daily Mail Reporter
than ever to have an abortion,
figures showed yesterday.
Nearly a quarter of pregnancies
led to a termination in 2018 – the
most since records began in 1990.
The Office for National Statistics
figures, the most recent available,
showed the proportion had gone
up from 22 per cent a year earlier.
Meanwhile, the number of babies
conceived in England and Wales fell
for the third year running, to
839,043. And the conception rate
for girls aged 17 and below dropped
for the 11th year in a row – the long-
est continued fall since records
began. Teenagers in deprived areas
were more likely to get pregnant
but less likely to have an abortion.
Women over 40 were the only
ones whose chances of conceiving
rose, for the third year running.
Clare Murphy, of the British Preg-
nancy Advisory Service, said: ‘What
these figures show is a drop in the
overall number of conceptions and,
within that, a small increase in the
proportion that end in abortion.
‘Women take the prospect of
becoming a parent extremely seri-
ously and want to achieve financial
security and ideally a home of their
own before doing so.’Sainsbury’s: Gilly’s green dinner