A SLUG IN ONE’S SALAD
FROM GEORGE V’S CURRY OBSESSION TO A SLIMY SHOCK FOR THE QUEEN, HERE ARE SOME DELICIOUS REVELATIONS FROM THE PALACE CHEFS
Secrets of the royal kitchen
The Queen is not a fussy eater, but she once left a terse reproach for her kitchen staff after a meal.
On a torn-off sheet from a comments book that conveys her appreciation – or not – to her chef, Her Majesty had carefully positioned a dead slug. “I found this in the salad – could you eat it?” she wrote.
Mostly, however, the book remains blank, as she is not one to complain. The Queen’s taste in food is much simpler than you may think, as revealed in the new book Dinner at Buckingham Palace, a fascinating compilation of recipes, reminiscences and menus from a royal servant whose career spanned several reigns.
Most royal dishes are so uncomplicated, despite their French names, that they could be prepared by any reasonably competent cook. The footmen who take dishes to the royal table maintain that it’s the sort of food you would expect at a good but reasonably priced restaurant. The fact that a dish may be written in the royal menu book as Côtelettes d’Agneau Jardinière doesn’t necessarily mean something extravagant – it’s still lamb chops with vegetables.
The Queen regularly selects menus from a list of suggestions presented by the royal chef (currently Mark Flanagan) in a red leather-bound book. She marks her selection in pencil, striking out dishes she doesn’t want and writing in alternatives. When a menu book is full, it is sent to the palace library, where scores of these books are filed.
With their pencilled-in notes and suggestions, they form a unique record of the eating habits and fancies of many generations of British royalty.
The menu book offers three courses for each a meal – fish, meat and a sweet or savoury to finish – but when the Queen dines alone she often orders only one course, or even just a snack, such as flakes of smoked haddock in scrambled egg on toast. It’s a far cry from the past when her antecedents grazed on a gargantuan spread of elaborate dishes at every meal.
Dinner at Buckingham Palace reflects the culinary habits of the royal family from the reign of Queen Victoria to Elizabeth II. Its author, Charlie Oliver, was part of the royal household serving the needs of the monarch, as was his father before him. Born around 1884 (no-one knows exactly when), Charlie would have known – if only from a respectful distance – Monsieur Juste Alphonse Menager, who was chef to Queen Victoria during the last decade or so of her reign and later to her gourmandising son Edward VII.
Charlie was fascinated by the royal kitchens, keeping endless notes, recording every detail and amassing a vast collection of recipes and menus, from intimate family meals to grand royal occasions. Having been gravely wounded during World War I – the only break in his long royal service – he developed a speech impediment that brought him even closer to the royal family circle, as ‘Bertie’ – later George VI – also had a stammer.
Charlie’s diligence and endless good humour endeared him to the king and his wife Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother. By the 1940s he was right-hand man to the master of the household, Sir Piers Legh, who was responsible for all the domestic workings of palace life. Charlie wanted his culinary memoir to be published as “a cookbook with a difference”, with the stipulation that this
should not happen until after his death. In fact, after he died in 1965, his vast collection lay forgotten in an attic until the 1990s.
Charlie had witnessed an era of great change. For King Edward VII, after a substantial cooked breakfast, lunch for six people might include cold pheasant, a couple of partridges, two hot roast fowls and hot beef steak. Dinner always featured a choice of at least two soups, whole salmons and turbots, vast saddles of mutton and sirloins of beef, roast turkeys, several kinds
of game such as woodcocks, plovers and snipe, a large array of vegetables, perhaps some devilled herring and cream cheese, an assortment of pastries, and enormous Stilton and Cheshire cheeses. This would be accompanied by an abundance of wines, followed by nuts and preserved fruits, then Madeira, port or sherry.
Even when he visited the theatre, Edward insisted on a one-hour interval so he could do justice to the six extravagant supper hampers delivered to his box, finishing off with four desserts and Parisian pastries, all served on gold plates.
After Edward’s death in 1910, royal appetites became more restrained. George V, who’d spent time in India, loved Bombay duck (which is actually dried fish) and happily ate curry, prepared by Indian staff, every day.
And then World War I changed everything. The king and queen insisted on rationing in the palace even before it was introduced throughout the country in 1918. Queen Mary allowed no more than two courses for breakfast. When the king banned alcohol, the scandalised royal chef asked what he should serve instead. Queen Mary wrote back: “Sugar water. Serve water, boiled with a little sugar.” And that is what
The Queen prefers ordinary breakfasts – Special K cereal with fruit, or toast and marmalade, with tea and juice
guests drank until rationing was gradually lifted by 1920.
The present Queen’s father, George VI, was annoyed when, during the austerity years that followed World War II, a chef got drunk and burned the dinner he was preparing for a small private party. As the royal cupboard was bare, the king issued an instruction to send out to the nearest hotel for a takeaway for four. Nothing more was said and the chef was forgiven.
Like her father, the Queen is no foodie and her taste is for quite ordinary food. She rarely has breakfast in bed and prefers Special K cereal with fruit, or toast and marmalade, served with tea (Darjeeling, Earl Grey or Assam) and a jug of fresh orange juice. If she has eggs for breakfast, she insists that a brown egg tastes better.
On one morning visit to a diplomat’s wife, the hostess offered Champagne or sherry – but the Queen spotted a silver teapot and confided, “We are nearly always offered something alcoholic when we visit people in the morning, you know, but what I really do like is a nice cup of tea.” Prince Philip prefers gin and tonic or lager to Champagne.
For at least three generations, the Queen’s tea services and silverware were jealously guarded by an elderly, bespectacled spinster known as Maggie Smith, whose unofficial title was the Queen’s tea maker – though, in fact, she did no such thing. She kept everything locked away in a cabinet that nobody, not even Prince Philip, dared to go near.
Her finest hour each year was at Christmas at Sandringham when she became the official toast-maker for the royal caviar. The royal family don’t often indulge in caviar, but it’s always a Christmas treat. Maggie
would ensure that the toast was just right, pacing the kitchen and insisting that the under-butler remained on hand to transport it as soon as it was ready.
Maggie’s precious tea things were counted in and out to ensure that nothing went missing. Only two cups and saucers were left out overnight, for the drink that Prince Philip makes for the Queen before they settle down for the night.
A magnificent gold and silver plate is used only on occasions such as state banquets, but the Queen likes to serve dainty sandwiches on gold plates when she entertains her guests with film shows at Buckingham Palace.
The Queen gives eight or nine informal lunches every year for a diverse array of guests. They sit down to four courses – a typical menu offers smoked salmon, roast veal with peas and carrots, apple meringue, and cheese and biscuits.
“I had thought it would be a toffee-nosed affair, but it turned out to be a happy family lunch,” recalled one business tycoon.
“The Queen made me feel absolutely at home. She took me to the window to look at the garden and laughed a great deal when I said it would be a prime site for development.”
From an early age, Prince Charles was interested in cooking, and regularly visited the kitchens to help by fetching and carrying, and weighing ingredients. He would also stand guard over kettles and saucepans to warn when they were coming to the boil.
Princess Anne was less keen and helped only sporadically. At boarding school she acquired a taste for fish and chips, served the traditional way – out of newspaper.
When the children’s greatgrandmother Queen Mary was still alive, their treat was to choose a chocolate from the big box she always kept beside her as she worked on her tapestries.
Prince Philip often returned from visits abroad with recipe ideas. One royal chef, Ronald Aubrey, knew that if a new dish didn’t arrive at the table exactly as the prince remembered it, there would be a visit to the kitchens and a discussion about what went wrong. The duke even insisted that Mr Aubrey go on a course at the Ritz in Paris to improve his skills.
Sometimes, Prince Philip experimented for himself. His most ambitious dish was snipe, which he plucked, cleaned and prepared after shooting it at Sandringham. The meat and game larder in the cold stone basement at Balmoral features a row of huge refrigerators stocked with all manner of joints and plucked birds, and sometimes even an entire stag carcass.
In London, the staff ball at Buckingham Palace is the social function of the year for the royal household. At one ball soon after World War II, the Queen Mother asked a young man where he came from. She expected him to name a royal residence, but in fact he was a news vendor from Victoria Station invited as someone’s plus-one, and he blurted out, “Elephant and Castle, Ma’am.”
An embarrassing Upstairs Downstairs moment occurred at Sandringham one New Year’s Eve. As midnight approached, the Queen Mother was blindfolded for a kissing game – and planted a kiss on a blushing footman instead of a family member.
The Queen Mother laughed louder than anyone – and the footman recovered to join them all in a toast to the New Year.
‘ I had thought it would be a toffeenosed affair, but it turned out to be a happy family lunch’