The Queen of GLUTTONY
Chops for breakfast and six-course dinners topped off with cold meat and pies — but then Victoria (5ft tall with a 45in waist) DID need the energy to run the greatest ever Empire
THE DOCTOR was exasperated with his patient, the Queen and Empress of India no less. She just wouldn’t stop eating — and, not surprisingly, she was complaining of stomach pains and bloating (a ‘rising’, as she called it) that had kept her up all night, the result of a heavy pudding at dinner.
The answer, he prescribed, was a strict diet of Benger’s food, a special concoction of milk and wheat that soothed the stomach while staving off hunger pangs.
She’d followed his instructions and swallowed down the Benger’s. But then, Dr James Reid discovered, she’d gone and gorged herself on her usual fare of roast beef and ice cream as well.
It was hopeless. Queen Victoria was a hearty eater who gobbled her food. Always had done. She was just 11 when her Uncle Leopold (the King of the Belgians) warned her that ‘a certain little princess eats a little too much and a little too fast’.
She took no notice, and after she became queen at the age of 18, there was nobody who could get her to mend her ways.
Not even the influential and charming Lord Melbourne, her first adviser. He warned her about over-eating and putting on weight and told her she should eat only when she was actually hungry.
But I’m always hungry, she replied, a typical teenager long before the word or the concept was coined.
When he suggested she should exercise to keep down her weight, she flounced, told him that exercise made her tired, and had her dresses let out instead.
And so a lifetime pattern was set — as food and dining historian Annie Gray explains in a new book, published this month, entitled bluntly The Greedy Queen.
They say less is more but, for Victoria, she writes, ‘truly, more was more’.
Clothing she wore in later life shows that Victoria — who stood just 5ft tall — had a waistline measuring 45 inches.
A number of pairs of her royal underwear have emerged at auction — one of which measured 50 in at the waist at full stretch.
In the 1880s, one of her petticoats appears to have been enlarged from a 38 in waist to 46 in after she put on weight. And her chemises were even bigger: 66 in across the bust.
Victoria ate for sustenance and for solace in difficult times — and because she liked the taste of food and the pleasure of consuming it. Like most people, in fact.
But, with her position and wealth, she had a greater choice and greater access than most. So she indulged herself. Even Albert, the serious-minded husband she adored and sometimes obeyed, could not change her.
HE HIMSELf was a frugal eater, seeing nourishment as a necessity rather than a pleasure and meals a chore to be got out of the way as quickly as possible. Victoria savoured her courses, every last one of them.
There were countless royal banquets, of course, that she presided over as queen, entertaining visiting monarchs and dignitaries at Buckingham Palace with a seemingly endless flow of exotic dishes from the vast royal kitchens. But even when it was just the family — and the 19th century equivalent of a night home with their feet up and a snack in front of the telly — the feasting was prodigious.
On June 8, 1857, for example, she, Albert and 16-year-old Princess Victoria (the eldest of their nine children) sat down and — according to menus listed in ledgers stored at the Royal Archive — worked their way through Italian pasta soup and rice soup; mackerel and whiting; roast beef and capon with rice; chicken rissoles and asparagus; baked meringue and filled choux buns.
Given Albert’s abstemious nature, it’s not hard to imagine who had the lion’s share.
On a different evening at home that same month, the three of them scoffed poached eggs and a clear chicken soup; sole gratin and fried whiting; roast beef and capon with asparagus; vol-auvents with béchamel sauce and grilled eggs; and apricot flan and waffles ‘mit creme’.
And, if still peckish after that spree, they could top up on cold meats and pies from the sideboard and the pick of the fruit bowl.
fresh fruit was a surprising royal favourite, given that she usually leaned towards heavy cooked meats, potatoes and puddings. But she adored a pear, an orange or a strawberry. Best of all was munching her way through a large, juicy apple.
Perhaps the roughage was good for her, though the irregularity of her movements — documented religiously by her doctors — and her constant problems with wind suggest not.
It’s fair to say that eating was an obsession for Victoria. food — or rather the lack of it — often figured in the journals she kept and the letters she wrote.
On a supposedly incognito trip in the Highlands, staying at inns, she complained that there was ‘hardly anything to eat, just two miserably starved chickens, without any potatoes! No pudding and no fun.’
Normally, she went on such outings with a hamper full of tea and cakes, just in case.
for the same reason, when a royal party went to a charity ball at the Italian Opera House in London, they were armed with a light supper of rice soup, ham, tongue, lobster salad, cold chicken, sandwiches, plovers’ eggs, patisserie, jellies and creams. Even though they had earlier dined at home!
There were times in her reign when she held back on food, for reasons beyond her control, such as in 1871 when gout crippled her hands and she could no longer wield a knife and fork.
Her daughter Beatrice had to cut up her lamb chops for her and feed her with a spoon.
for three months she dined in private, lost two stone and, says author Gray, ‘loathed every second of the experience’ until she was back eating to the full and happy again.
Similarly, with all of her nine pregnancies, she did not care for the enforced lying-in process afterwards and weeks of just beef tea and broth while she recovered. By the time she got to Princess Louise, baby number six, she was back on roasts and chocolate soufflé in days.
In her depressed state after Prince Albert died suddenly in 1861, she might have starved herself. Instead, she let herself go and pigged out even more, as a consolation. Throughout her reign, her eating was both gargantuan and regular. Between 8.30am and 9am, she ate a hefty breakfast. There is, says Gray, a much repeated myth that in the morning Queen Victoria only ever bothered with a delicately boiled egg.
But those ledgers of royal menus show her piling her plate with mutton chops and potatoes first thing or choosing from sausages, grilled whiting, poached eggs and hot and cold roast fowl. Or there was asparagus omelette, grilled chicken, bacon and sole. for ballast, she could take her pick of bread, toast, biscuits, spreads and, at Balmoral, porridge.
Lunch was at 1pm and often was
at some official function where she would pick at what was in front of her. But if at home there would be lamb cutlets (of course), asparagus, cold fowl, cinnamon rice pudding and fruit compote.
She was very anxious when her eldest daughter married, went to live in Germany and reported back in a letter that she didn’t have time for lunch.
‘I think it hardly safe to go from 9¼ till 5 without anything,’ the Queen wrote back sternly. ‘I would advise never to do it.’ She urged at least a biscuit or a dry crust to get her daughter through until tea.
Tea was another daily essential, taken outdoors if the weather permitted (and under a shelter when it did not). Scones, toast, cakes and biscuits were provided. It was noted that the Queen ‘dunked’ — a German custom from her childhood.
And so to dinner, and those formal occasions when the food entered a stratosphere that the bulk of her subjects could not even begin to fantasise about, it was so beyond their experience.
The poor, making up at least two thirds of the British population, lived largely on bread, cheese, potatoes and tea, with perhaps some jam or condensed milk as a spread. No wonder malnourishment was common.
The lucky ones with a bit of cash splurged on muffins, eels, pies, baked potatoes, oysters and trotters from street hawkers and, increasingly, fried fish and chips.
For the growing middle class, a typical small family dinner might consist of jugged hare (from the remains of a roast hare the day before), boiled knuckle of veal and rice, boiled bacon cheek and apple pudding.
BUT the rich, the aristocratic and the royal — led by the Queen — gorged to their hearts’ content on meat-heavy meals with expensive ingredients until their stomachs ached and their waistlines exploded.
The choice was immense. An army of cooks and kitchen staff sliced, diced, boiled, spit-roasted and made sauces, ragouts, quenelles, fricassees and gratins, all to perfection. Seafood ranged from humble whitebait to turbot, salmon, lobster and even turtle. The meat staples of beef, mutton and chicken were enlivened by pheasant, partridge, snipe, plover and lark.
The Queen — always adventurous with her food — seems to have tried them all.
Boar’s head was on the menu, a favourite of Prince Albert. She sampled bird’s nest soup from China at an international exhibition in 1884, and especially liked an ostrich-egg omelette she was presented with in France. For afters, she loved sweet things, from ice cream to fruit jelly, chocolate profiteroles, doughnuts, blancmange and pineapple pudding. It all went down the royal hatch.
But as she chomped away, was she a good companion? The Aga Khan thought so when he came to dinner with her in 1898.
He found her affable and was impressed by her appetite. He recalled: ‘The dinner was long and elaborate — course after course, three or four choices of meat, a hot pudding and an iced pudding, a savoury and all kinds of hothouse fruit — slow and stately in its serving.
‘We sat down at a quarter past nine, and it must have been a quarter to eleven before it was all over.
‘In spite of her age [nearly 80], the Queen ate and drank heartily — every kind of wine that was offered, and every course, including both the hot and the iced pudding.’
But she could be a bit of a pig when there were no eminent guests to entertain and she was dining with members of her immediate entourage. Then she would eat rapidly, and royal protocol dictated that once she had finished everyone’s plates were cleared away. ‘Her table, her rules,’ as Gray puts it.
Marie Mallet, a lady-in-waiting in Victoria’s old age, complained that ‘the Queen’s dinner was timed to last exactly half an hour. The service was so rapid that a slow eater such as myself never had time to finish even a moderate helping. Pecking like a bird I could usually satisfy my hunger, but could not enjoy it.’
On other occasions, the dinners were lengthy and companiable affairs, particularly on ladies-only nights at Balmoral, which she liked because she opened out more than she did in mixed company.
She would roar with laughter — not something normally associated with Victoria — and delight everyone around her.
More often, though, she was moody and shy, especially with politicians present. One, the imperious Lord Ribblesdale, observed: ‘I personally never heard her say anything at dinner which I remembered the next day. Her manners were not affable.
‘She spoke very little at meals, and she ate fast and very seldom laughed. To the dishes she rejected she made a peevish moue [a grimace], with crumpled brow more eloquent than words.’
She was, he noted, a dab hand with peas — a dinner party difficulty then as now — scooping them off her plate ‘with marvellous skill and celerity’ while chatting away to the Duke of Devonshire.
SHE finished before he had even started, at which point a scarletclad footman stepped forward to take away his plate of uneaten lamb. ‘Here, bring that back!’ the duke roared.
Ribblesdale recounts how ‘we courtiers present held our breath — we were mostly of a deferential breed.’ But this time the Queen saw the funny side of it. ‘I knew this by one of her rare smiles.’
Not every evening ended with her in a jolly mood. Indigestion and wind were the bane of her life. Dr Reid recalled her being convinced she was having a heart attack when ‘I fancy Her Majesty had flatulence’.
She was her own worst enemy when it came to food. She couldn’t say no, nor could she accept the consequences of her greed. She complained to another of her doctors that a cranberry tart with cream had left her quite ill. ‘Well, don’t eat it again,’ he suggested — advice which apparently left Her Majesty ‘very much annoyed’.
She didn’t learn. But that’s the nature of gluttony — even for a great Queen.