Behind the kitchen doors at St Aldric’s, by Priya Venner

An original contemporary online feature.

At half past five in the morning, the basement kitchen at St Aldric’s Hospital already smells of porridge. By the time the last tray leaves at seven in the evening, the team of fourteen cooks and porters will have prepared around nine hundred meals for patients on twenty-two wards.

Head chef Daniel Ogunleye runs the kitchen from a small office with a window onto the ovens. He plans menus three weeks ahead and cooks almost everything from fresh ingredients, including the soup, the bread rolls and a shepherd’s pie that patients regularly ask for by name. Every tray for a patient with a food allergy is given a bright purple lid and a printed label, and it is checked by two members of staff before it goes up in the lift, so that nobody receives something that could harm them.

Ogunleye worked in restaurants for fifteen years before taking the job. ‘People think hospital food is the bit you put up with,’ he says. ‘But if someone has had an operation and they eat properly, they get their strength back faster. A good plate of food is part of the treatment.’

On Fridays he walks round two wards himself and asks patients what they thought of the week’s menu. Last month a woman on the stroke unit asked for rice pudding with nutmeg. It is now on the menu every Sunday.

(a) About how many meals does the kitchen prepare each day? (b) How does the kitchen make sure patients with food allergies are not harmed? (c) What does Daniel Ogunleye’s Friday visit to the wards suggest about him?