Text 1: Seven hundred lunches, by Miriam Cole

An original contemporary magazine feature.

At half past eight, the hospital kitchen is already full of lunchtime. Onions soften in pans broad enough to bathe a child in, ovens release clouds of fragrant steam and seven hundred empty trays wait in silver towers. Yet the room is surprisingly calm. There is no shouting and nobody runs.

At the centre of it all is head cook Nia Rahman, who moves between the workstations with a teaspoon in her pocket. Every few minutes she tastes something, frowns thoughtfully and asks for a little more pepper, another minute in the oven or no change at all.

'The computer can tell us that a patient needs soft food or must avoid a particular ingredient,' she says, pointing to the coloured labels being printed beside us. 'It cannot tell us whether the soup tastes kind.'

Kind is an odd word for soup, but I understand it when she shows me two meals made from the same chicken and vegetables. One is arranged in neat pieces. The other has been blended for a patient who cannot swallow them safely, then carefully shaped so that the carrots look like carrots again. Nia refuses to call this decoration. 'People should recognise their own dinner,' she says.

The kitchen works with the precision of a timetable. At nine fifteen, the bread is cut. At ten, the cold meals are sealed. At eleven twenty, the first heated trolleys leave for the wards. Each tray carries a label, and two members of staff check it before it is loaded. A mistake might mean that a meal cannot be eaten, so speed is never allowed to look hurried.

The work is repetitive and hot. By noon, the air has misted Nia's glasses and one cook has counted more than a thousand spoonfuls of mashed potato. Even so, the staff compete to make the neatest trays and remember the preferences of patients who have stayed for several weeks.

Pinned above Nia's desk is a card from a former patient. It thanks the kitchen for a bowl of rice pudding served after an operation, when it was the first food the patient wanted to eat. Seven hundred lunches leave the kitchen every day, but Nia points to that single card when I ask how she judges whether the morning has gone well.

Text 2: Below stairs at the Imperial Hotel, by A City Correspondent

An original newspaper feature written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this newspaper feature, written in 1892, a journalist visits the kitchen of a large hotel.

The guests who dine beneath the chandeliers of the Imperial Hotel can have little notion of the fiery kingdom below their feet. I descended a narrow staircase and entered a kitchen in which six coal ranges burned at once and the air seemed hot enough to scorch one's breath.

More than fifty cooks, servants and kitchen boys were at work. Copper pans flashed, knives struck the tables and orders flew from one end of the room to the other. In the midst of this commotion stood Monsieur Armand, the chief cook, dressed in spotless white and wearing a cap of such height that he appeared taller than any other man present.

He governed the kitchen by pointing. One finger sent a dish towards the dining room; two fingers summoned a servant; a raised hand brought the whole company to silence. He tasted a sauce, closed his eyes and ordered it to be made again. The unlucky assistant carried it away with the expression of a soldier dismissed from parade.

The preparation of dinner had begun before dawn. At one table, four women peeled a mountain of potatoes. At another, two boys turned the handles of a machine which chopped meat with alarming speed. Near the ranges, cooks lifted pans so heavy that each required both hands. Their faces shone with heat, but the dishes sent upstairs bore no sign of the labour that had produced them.

I was shown a mechanical spit which turned twelve birds before the fire. The device saved a boy from standing all day beside the flames, though another boy was still required to carry coal to the ranges. He was small, blackened with dust and almost hidden by the basket on his shoulder.

At seven o'clock, a bell rang from the dining room and the kitchen sprang into even greater activity. Plates crossed one another in every direction but never collided. Within minutes, a procession of servants climbed the staircase carrying silver dishes above their heads.

Monsieur Armand permitted himself one smile. Upstairs, the guests applauded the orchestra, unaware that another performance had just taken place beneath them. I returned to the cool street convinced that the finest spectacle at the Imperial was one its visitors would never see.

Both of these texts are about large kitchens preparing meals for many people.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the work and the kitchen workers
• how the writers present the workers and the meals they produce

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