Philip mans the BBQ, the Queen does the washing up
BARRED from the Queen’s official red boxes and audiences with prime ministers, Prince Philip became a domestic god in the early days of their marriage.
He was the one who reviewed the menus and decided on the meals for the day, and the staff also deferred to him on other domestic matters. Along the way, he developed a love of cooking.
In recent years, Philip has found another passion — foodie TV shows. Indeed, the Queen makes a great joke of teasing him about his craze for watching all the cookery programmes.
One of his favourite presenters is Mary Berry, who became known to a new generation through television’s The Great British Bake Off.
‘The Duke of Edinburgh understands cooking,’ says Mary Berry. ‘I’m very lucky to have had lunch with the Queen. I was seated next to the Duke — a delightful man — who talked about barbecuing.
‘He was saying that he took his game birds at Sandringham and stuffed them with haggis, but put more breadcrumbs in to absorb the fat . . . you knew that he knew what he was talking about.’
Philip not only knows a great deal about cooking, but he thoroughly enjoys his food.
While his eldest son, Charles, is the slowest of royal eaters, Philip is the fastest — gobbling everything up so quickly that he’s been known to put fastidious eaters right off their dinner.
In the days when he used to frequently travel abroad, he’d always return with some new dish that he urged the Buckingham Palace chefs to make. They came to dread the sound of his purposeful footfall as he made his way to the kitchens to bark instructions.
If the dish didn’t arrive at the table exactly as he remembered it, there’d be another visit to the kitchen and a searching discussion to find out what had gone wrong.
Philip always issued precise instructions about exactly how the dish should be made in the future.
He called these meals his ‘experiment lunches’ — and made sure that they were served only on the rare occasions during the week when he and the Queen were dining together.
This is because neither of them would dream of giving guests something they hadn’t already eaten themselves.
As Philip still takes a great interest in food, it is usually him — not the Queen — who will write any alterations or suggestions in the official menu book.
Of course, he doesn’t just preach: according to those who’ve sampled the meals he makes, he’s no mean cook himself. One of his most ambitious dishes used to be snipe.
After shooting the birds at Sandringham, he’d arrange to be called especially early in the morning so he could pluck and
clean them before breakfast. While he was out on his day’s duties, the snipe remained in the larder almost under armed guard — and when he returned in the evening, he quickly changed and set about cooking the birds.
Aside from the menu book, Philip has his own cookbook which contains his personal favourites. One is a Swedish recipe for casserole of pigeon. Whenever he fancied having this for lunch or dinner, he’d go out to shoot a brace himself.
HE ALSO used to enjoy cooking breakfast for himself and the Queen in a glass-topped electric frying pan, which had to travel with him everywhere. Omelettes were another speciality, and he was good at producing quick, light supper snacks which he and the Queen enjoyed after the staff had been dismissed for the night. Scrambled eggs, smoked haddock, kidneys, mushrooms, and bean shoots with mushrooms and chicken livers were favourites.
But nothing tastes as good to Philip as food cooked in the open air on the Balmoral estate.
Once his barbecue is going, he rapidly produces a selection of chops, steaks, sausages and game. He not only cooks for the family, but the chauffeurs and detectives in the party as well.
If there’s a stream handy, the Queen insists on donning rubber gloves and doing the washing up. Nowadays, however, she and Philip usually lunch at one of the huts on the estate, where she has better facilities for her dish-washing.
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