Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
HARRY’S FIRST LOVE MY SCRUMMY TREACLE TARTS
Carolyn Robb, the chef who cooked for Charles, Diana and their boys, shares some tantalising titbits from the royal supper table
‘The boys would pop to the kitchen to chat’
Like most of us, Carolyn Robb will be watching the royal wedding with her children. Her daughters Lucy and Mandy, aged nine and five, are slightly too young to grasp what a personal event it will be for her. The royal princes were a similar age (Prince William was seven, Prince Harry, four) when their mum started working as a chef in the royal household. Or ‘living the dream’ as she puts it.
‘As a young chef, it was a dream job. It couldn’t have been more perfect,’ she points out. ‘You’re cooking with the freshest ingredients in well- equipped kitchens, for people who tell you when they particularly enjoy a meal. It’s a complete joy. And so exciting. I mean, you get to travel the world with them. I cooked on the Royal Yacht Britannia. I’d go with them to Balmoral and make the picnics. You have this extraordinary role right at the heart of that world. It’s a complete privilege.’
It’s also a hard thing to translate to children who were never part of that world. ‘It’s funny because we watched the news recently when Prince William took his children into the hospital to meet the new baby. I pointed out to them that I used to cook for William when he was a little boy, and look, he now has children of his own. They are starting to be interested in all that. But I await the questions, in a sense.’
When her girls can grasp it all, what a treat they will have. Listening to Carolyn recall her days with the royals is delicious – and we don’t just mean when she talks about the recipes. From the off, it’s clear she is made in a different mould to royal butler Paul Burrell (Princess Diana’s self-styled ‘rock’ was a one-time colleague) though. She has little time for tittle-tattle and thinks his path into public life – by spilling very unsavoury beans – is a ‘betrayal’.
But her account is fascinating. When she was ‘poached’ by the Prince and Princess of Wales, she was working for the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, having completed a Cordon Bleu course. In 1989 she went for an interview with the princess herself – then the most famous woman in the world. ‘I was incredibly nervous,’ she says. ‘I’d grown up in South Africa, but I’d been desperate to get my hands on every magazine that had pictures of her in it. When you’ve grown up with that and you have this person in front of you… well, you can imagine. The wonderful thing was she immediately put me at ease by saying that she was nervous. She said, “Oh I’m not very good at interviews. I haven’t done many of these before, but I’m sure you have lots of questions for me.”’ Carolyn would come to marvel at that skill of putting people at ease. ‘If you could bottle it, we’d all be able to do it,’ she notes. ‘But it was all very natural with her, completely effortless.’
That meeting was at Kensington Palace, and Carolyn must have impressed because she was asked to cook a meal for the royal couple at Highgrove, and then offered the job – one that would involve cooking not just for the family but their guests, such as Stephen Fry, a regular dining companion of Prince Charles at Highgrove.
She had already met the boys, fleetingly, when they had come for playdates with the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester’s children, but before long they were popping into her new kitchen to say hello.
‘I don’t remember a formal introduction, but they said “hello!”, it was very relaxed. The kitchen at Kensington Palace wasn’t like a restaurant kitchen. It was the centre of the home and the gathering place. Members of staff used to come in for a cup of tea. The boys would pop in and talk to you, ask questions. When they were at Eton they had access to a kitchen, and they would ask for recipes. Or if there was an event here, a dinner party, they’d be interested in what we were doing. What I remember most was them being typical boys, scampering about, always on the way somewhere.’
Well-brought-up boys, though. ‘Everyone would dream of having a little boy like that,’ she says. ‘They were very mature. Very well-behaved and courteous. William was the caring big brother, and Harry must have been a wonderful little brother to have. He was the more mischievous one. You could just see the mischief in his face. William, I always thought, was very like his mother, with a wonderful twinkle in his eye.’
Carolyn has published a recipe book based on the dishes she cooked for the Royal Family, and which we are serialising in Weekend this week and next. The personal favourites as far as the boys were concerned were her treacle tarts – ‘Prince Harry would ask for them. Once I sent him to ask his mother if it would be OK, and he came back with a note saying, “Mummy says it’s okay”’ – and her chocolate fridge cake, which Prince William adored so much that he asked for it to be replicated as the Groom’s Cake on his wedding day. ‘ That was lovely,’ she concedes. ‘It’s nice to think they look back on some of those things with fondness.’ Both of these recipes are featured today.
Mos t ly t he meals were wholesome and healthy, full of produce from the Prince’s gardens. ‘The Royal Family are quite disciplined in the way they eat,’ she says. ‘ There wasn’t snacking between meals. And they wouldn’t pop in and grab something, as a rule. We wouldn’t
have copious supplies of chocolate and crisps. All the food we served was home-made, nothing that came out of a packet or the freezer.’
Carolyn would discuss menus with Princess Diana – ‘for the boys when they were little it was very British nursery food. Roast chicken, sausages and mash, shepherd’s pie’ – and was always thrilled when they went down well. ‘They were very good employers when it came to showing their gratitude. Even though they were very busy they would write you personal notes. I’ve kept some, they’re very treasured.’
They are quaintly charming. Prince Charles refers to her ‘deft touch’ in one note and in another praises her first course as a ‘triumph’.
If the formality sounds odd, then we must remember this wasn’t a normal household. The structure of mealtimes says as much. ‘The prince and princess led very busy lives,’ Carolyn says, referencing the period before the marriage collapsed. ‘Even when I first started cooking for them, it wasn’t as if every night all four sat down to a family meal. Or at the weekends they weren’t always together. There would frequently be engagements. One might be in for dinner, one might be out. Prince Charles might be up in Scotland, Princess Diana in London. Their work diaries dictated all that. They ate together when they could, but bearing in mind William was eight when he went to boarding school, that was mostly at weekends.’
Tellingly, she says her happiest times were when the family was all together at Balmoral, and she’d pack them a picnic. ‘I treasure those moments. Seeing them away from all the pressures, just relaxing like any other family.’
The more exotic chapters of her career involved travelling on royal tours – case after case packed with cooking implements and goodies, including fruit cake. She ticked off Brazil, Trinidad, Guyana, Mexico, Kuwait, Bhutan and Nepal, and was in Hong Kong on Britannia during the handover. She has vivid memories of visiting food markets. ‘I cherish the opportunity I had to be part of a royal tour.’
But there were darker days, too. She was with the Waleses as their marriage disintegrated but she scoffs at the picture painted by some, of the couple constantly at each other’s throats, with the boys in the middle. ‘ None of that was ever evident to me. Staff were on the other side of the green baize door and you didn’t know what was going on.’ Really? ‘Absolutely. You wouldn’t have realised what was going on if you hadn’t read it in the papers.’
You could live in Kensington Palace (her quarters were there) and not be aware of the state of the marriage? ‘They are big houses,’ she insists.
When the newspaper headlines were distressing, her heart went out to the boys. ‘Both of them could read but William was old enough to understand. I remember thinking, “This must be awful for him.” I felt very concerned for them but the prince and princess were incredible at handling it.’
After the split, Carolyn continued to work for Prince Charles, yet still lived at Kensington Palace. ‘I didn’t take sides. I would’ve been just as happy working for the princess. I still saw her regularly as she was coming and going at the palace and she’d say hello.’
Then came that fatal Paris crash, which took Princess Diana’s life, left the boys without a mother, and the whole country in turmoil. Carolyn was at Highgrove when the news came in, doing something so humdrum that it makes the account more chilling. ‘Prince Charles was at Balmoral but there’d been fruit to pick at Highgrove for freezing or bottling, so I was there sorting that out. It’s one of those events where you always remember where you were. I was in the kitchen. The radio was on... it still seems surreal.’
The boys returned to Highgrove after the funeral. She kept cooking. ‘It was difficult to know what the best thing was to do. All I really could do was do my job as well as I possibly could and make sure anything that was needed was there.’ Did she hug the boys, offer condolences? ‘It certainly wasn’t my place to hug them. And there were so many people around them. I just remember it being so incredibly sad.’
She is still quite angry about that awful period between Diana’s death and the funeral – when the public turned against the Royal Family and the Queen was criticised for not hurrying back to London from Balmoral.
‘How dare people question where they should be? This family had just had a massive bereavement. It wasn’t for the rest of the world to decide. How could they? If it was any other family, you’d work it out amongst the family and decide what’s best for you.’
She didn’t attend the funeral but was at St James’s Palace in the morning, then at Highgrove in the evening. It was a sombre place. ‘I saw bits of the funeral. The boys were incredible. So brave. It must’ve been the hardest thing in the world for them to walk behind the coffin.’ There was criticism then, and since, about them being expected to do that. ‘ Who knows if it was the right thing or not? Perhaps they look back and think it was right. Perhaps they don’t. I just think it was such a hard thing for them to do.’
The boys were ‘sad for a very long time’, she says. ‘But Prince Charles provided incredible suppor t. He’s the most fantastic father. Everyone did their best, and it all being so public must have made it 100 per cent worse. But they’ve grown into marvellous young men and there’s a lot of their parents in them. It’s incredible that they are the way they are.’
She’s delighted Harry has found love. ‘When they were little I thought there’d be two very lucky girls out there if they ever ended up with William and Harry. Now it’s so lovely to see Harry settling down with Meghan.’
Carolyn left the Royal Family in 2000 to concentrate on her own family. ‘It’s not the sort of job you can do with other commitments. My parents were elderly. It was the right time.’ She married in 2005 but was sadly widowed. ‘This wasn’t the way I thought things would work out – a single mother to two young children.’ But she says she is ‘very lucky to have my beautiful girls’.
She hasn’t stayed in touch with her former employers, but wishes them well. ‘I’m so happy to see how they’ve turned out, and to see William with children of his own. It would be lovely to see Harry with a family.’
And if those children burst into a future royal kitchen asking for treacle tarts, she will be delighted indeed.
‘The royals don’t snack as a rule, they’re disciplined’