LADY FIONA CARNARVON

The Lady of Highclere Castle, also known as the real-life Downton Abbey, on food, feasting and entertaining the Prince of Wales.

We still cook in the same kitchen at Highclere, which has been used for hundreds of years.

It’s the same space but very differently adapted. There’s still a patisserie with a cold marble top and it’s the best place for making pastry. There are two game larders – we’ve turned one into a walk-in freezer and the other into a walk-in fridge. There was a smoking house just above the stove. They would put hay in there and smoke fish and meat. It was really well set up to feed a large household.

There were 100 gardeners in 1908.

The cook would have gone up to the kitchen garden and would have given them a list of what she wanted for the day. In a larger house like this, you had 14 footmen, three butlers, the chefs, the under chefs, the sous chefs, the kitchen porters. You had a lot more support. And they prided themselves on the quality of the food.

My predecessor Almina was the fifth Countess,

and reading about her dinner parties and the flowers – they had everything they wanted when they wanted, and just cooked the best for the time of year. And all the downstairs [staff] ate very well as well. The chefs worked very hard, as they do today.

When Almina was entertaining the Prince of Wales in 1895

[the menu] was always in French. Grilled salmon. Rice and soufflé. Lamb with sauce piquante. Then there were some roasts, which were partridge, goose, venison avec salade. Artichokes. Profiteroles. Rissoles au fromage – yummy. And then a buffet in case you were hungry at the end of it!

Geordie, my husband [George Herbert, the Earl of Carnarvon], loves soup,

so if I weren’t able to make soup, there’s no way he would have asked me to marry him. We had a roast chicken yesterday, so from the bones I’ll make a stock, and from the stock I’ll make a vegetable soup. At the moment I’ve got a lot of zucchini, so I’m making zucchini and lemon soup, which is just delicious. I’ve been working so hard lately and I haven’t gone shopping, so it’s what I can find – it’s called foraging!

My husband loves soup, so if I weren’t able to make soup, there’s no way he would have asked me to marry him.

All visitors from Australia want to book afternoon tea [at Highclere Castle] which is a huge treat.

I love my cup of tea in the afternoon and if there is something delicious I love to share it… I think

I’m a sharer of food. I was brought up with five younger sisters. We had an amazing cook called Queenie, who would wheel an afternoon tea trolley into the drawing room, and would always share and make sure that everyone had a bit because there seemed to be so many of us.

When the first series of Downton Abbey came out

I remember ringing Emma Fellowes [screenwriter and wife of creator Julian Fellowes] after it was quite well received – four million people had watched it – and I said to her, how do we know if we’ll get a second series? Will the numbers need to go up? The next week it went up to six million, and the week after that it beat The X Factor and went over nine million. It’s been an amazing journey.

The second Downton Abbey film was made during lockdown.

I think for all of us – for the crew, for the cast – it was absolutely lovely having such a positive project to work on. It was lovely to see people’s faces, although everyone was very conscious and wore masks and took a [Covid] test every other day. Everyone was being very careful, because without that, effectively, everyone was going to lose their jobs.

It has been a joy to watch them take lines on a page and turn those lines into three-dimensional characters that we all fall in love with.

It has been an extraordinary process to watch. And I know that when I write my books, I have a habit of writing in scenes because it’s embedded in me now. I think it’s a legacy of watching them film a scene endlessly, thinking: “Are you done yet?”

Seasons at Highclere (Century, $65) by the Countess of Carnarvon is on sale November 30.