Stomach of a king

From cygnets to ptarmigan, Queen Victoria would eat it all washed down with a whisky-claret cocktail. By Lewis Jones

she deserves respect”. We may wonder if greed really was Victoria’s pre-eminent trait, and why omnivorousness should be so respectable. But The Greedy Queen does establish its central thesis, which is that Victoria “ate a lot”.

At her first official dinner as Queen, at Buckingham Palace in 1837, the menu included chicken or vegetable soup; fish (red trout, dory, whitings, soles), followed by beefsteak, capon, roast lamb, baby chicken with tongue; then lamb cutlets, more sole, four additional chicken dishes, sweetbreads; roast quail and capon; German sausage, soufflé omelette; lobster salad, fricassée with jelly, peas and artichokes; fruits, creams, biscuits, cakes and nougat; with beef and mutton on the sideboard. “Mutton was a particular weakness,” notes Gray, “and she took every opportunity to eat it.”

She was fond, too, of grouse, partridge, pheasant, ptarmigan, capercaillie, plover, lark and swan, especially fattened cygnets from Norfolk, and also ortolan. One could have done with some detail about the ortolan. Were the birds drowned in armagnac? And did Victoria eat them as the French do, covering her head with a napkin to hide from God?

She ate bustard, ostrich eggs and turtle, and after she became Empress of India in 1877 (“which put her on an equal footing,” Gray explains, “status-wise, with all the other Empresses in the world – Empresses beat Queens in the title rank”), chicken curry was usually a feature of her Sunday menus. About the only thing she didn’t eat was “the mythical brown Windsor soup”, which wasn’t invented until the Twenties.

She was also an enthusiastic drinker. In 1839 Lord Melbourne told her off for drinking too much beer, and after she married Albert in 1840 one of his advisers suggested he curb his wife’s consumption, as “a Queen does not drink a bottle of wine at a meal”. She loved whisky, and Gladstone was appalled when he noticed that she drank “claret strengthened, I should have thought spoiled, with whisky”.

Gray introduces The Greedy Queen, her first book, as “a sort of culinary biography”, and her approach is loosely chronological,

‘Truffled not wisely but too well’: plates from contemporary cookbooks described towering croquembouche puddings, left, and baroque cold cuts, far right