Thursday, 7 August 2008
Like any historic house, the Mansion House has an extensive series of rooms where servants prepared and stored food. In the single-storey service wing at the rear of the premises was a back kitchen, a little back kitchen, larder and pastry larder and, most important of all, the great kitchen. In this room were prepared all the great feasts which the corporation held to entertain the local and the visiting gentry and nobility.
In the early nineteenth century, the mayor routinely hosted six great feasts each year. There was an October feast, held after his election to office, balls and suppers in honour of both the king and the queen, two dinners for the assize judges and a 'Green Goose feast'. There would also be 'occasional dinners to strangers to support the credit of the corporation'.The great kitchen was converted into a dining room in the 1980s, although many of its historic features, including the impressive kitchen range, were retained.
The Mansion House also boasts a range of cellars. Up to the 1830s, the inventories (available at Doncaster Archives) show that they were used to store prodigious quantities of port for consumption by council members.
