Buckingham Palace is one of the world’s most famous buildings. More than fifty thousand people walk through its doors each year to attend banquets, lunches, dinners, receptions, and royal garden parties. It is an official residence of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, and she spends about thirty weeks there each year. It also is the central hub of royal administration, supporting the day-to-day activities and duties of the Queen and her family, no matter where they might be. The palace is the venue for many royal ceremonies, including state visits and investitures, and is used regularly by the Queen and family for official and state entertaining.
The most active times at Buckingham Palace are late February and March, July, November, and the first part of December. In the summer the Queen hosts garden parties on the palace grounds and in the winter the palace becomes a glittering backdrop for state visits and receptions.
The chefs in the royal kitchens support all of this activity as well as the day-today feeding of the royal family and as many as three hundred full-time staff employees. Located on the ground floor, the kitchen has been modernized by Queen Elizabeth. While it’s not the cutting-edge kitchen you would find in a topnotch hotel, it is certainly more than adequate to meet the palace’s needs. As a result of modernizing the kitchen, the enormous number of cooks required during Queen Victoria’s time (as many as sixty-five if it was a large state banquet) is no longer necessary.
Today, if the Queen is in residence, there are usually around ten chefs on duty in the royal kitchen. Not that she needs ten chefs to cook dinner for her. It is just that the number of staff and support personnel increases wherever the Queen goes and unfortunately they regularly get hungry. Buckingham Palace has a brigade of twenty chefs, and these chefs provide round-the-clock service at all of the royal residences throughout the country, or abroad, whenever a member of the royal family is in residence at that location. Like a hotel, Buckingham Palace never really closes.
On my way to hunt for wild mushrooms on Balmoral Castle grounds
The royal palate hasn’t changed much even though England has grown more culturally diverse. Although the Princes William and Harry count pizza among their favorite foods, they also adore game, roasts, and typical British food such as cottage pie. Prince Charles is a very health-conscious eater and enjoys whole grains, organic vegetables, and simply prepared fish and meats. In fact, he once brought Antonio Carluccio, a well-known Italian cook in London, to Balmoral to search for and bottle wild mushrooms. Carluccio is well known as an amateur mycologist, and through him I learned to identify and use cèpes, known in Italy as “porcini mushrooms.” I quickly understood what Prince Charles had known for a long time: Balmoral is an absolute treasure trove of wild mushrooms.
Unfortunately for Prince Charles, the Queen’s head chef, Peter Page, also knew that cèpes grew abundantly on the property, and he was adamant the prince’s chefs were not going to take them. He organized mushroom raids across the estate before Prince Charles’s entourage arrived at Balmoral. The prince’s chefs were more than a little irritated. Oh well, chalk one up for the Queen’s men, I thought. We chopped mushrooms up to use in soup and used them as garnishes for all the wonderful game on the estate.
If I had to define the style of royal British cuisine, I would be forced to acknowledge that classical French influences are still very much in evidence, especially for state banquets and balls. This is partially because Queen Elizabeth has the final say on all menus, and the food at Buckingham Palace reflects her preferences.
From Kitchen to Table
Distances within the palace take some getting used to. In fact, the kitchen is located a full mile and a quarter away and several floors under the Queen’s dining rooms. So, getting hot food to its final destination has always been an issue. The current method for transporting food from one end of the palace to the other is the use of heated trolleys that are rolled quickly from the kitchen to their final destination. The trolleys hold covered silver dishes outfitted with an extra water bath beneath to keep food warm.
It is the footmen’s job to transport meals around the palace; they have their routes mapped out. For example, if they are delivering a meal to the Queen, the footmen will take an L-shaped route from the kitchen to the Queen’s private elevator. This elevator is made available during mealtimes for the sole purpose of getting the food to her quickly.
Oddly enough, sometimes the food isn’t all located in the same place. For example, if Prince Edward wants a simple meal of scrambled eggs and toast, the footman picks up the eggs made in the royal kitchen and then, about one hundred yards down the corridor, has to pick up the toast made in the coffee room kitchen. The military execution of it all would bring to mind a great Monty Python sketch.
Though meals at Buckingham Palace can be simple, the raw ingredients are always first rate. In addition to amazing game and fish, which the royal estates provide directly, the palace maintains special long-term relationships with purveyors who provide goods at a discounted price to the royal family in exchange for the “royal warrant.” The royal warrant is the royal seal and can be exhibited directly on chosen purveyors’ packaging. It’s a great marketing tool.
One major purveyor is Hyams & Cockerton, who supplies fruit and vegetables for the royal family. They handpick produce for the palace and the quality is incredible. So good, in fact, that when the chefs have to pack up to travel to Balmoral or Sandringham, or even abroad, H & C produce is loaded along with our standard supplies. We shipped quite a lot of food to Balmoral in particular. Each day fresh supplies were dropped off at Buckingham Palace, checked by the chef on duty, and then readied for the nightly trip to Balmoral. The deliveries from London were a necessity. After all, you could never serve an unripe pear to the royal table.
What Will the Queen Eat?
While the Queen does have the final say on what she wants to eat, she doesn’t spend her time scribbling up menus and shopping lists! When I was at Buckingham Palace, Chef Page, the head chef at the time, would develop a list of menu suggestions each day to present to the Queen for her approval. Page, a portly man who liked a drink or two, was an endless font of information and talent. He had served the Queen for more than forty years and was one of the very few staff that the Queen would call by first name.
Each day he would write his suggestions down in a red leather-bound book with “Menu Royal” embossed in gold on the cover. As soon as one book was filled, it was sent to the royal archives and a new book was sent to the kitchen as a replacement. When I was the chef for Princess Diana at Kensington Palace, I intended to continue the “Menu Royal” tradition. After all, she had a menu book—all of the royals did—until she and Prince Charles separated. Princess Diana, however, objected. She thought it was a waste of money and asked, “Why would anyone in years to come want to know what I ate?” Instead I kept plain, cheap notebooks for my files and to this day I have held on to the last one.
DAY-TO-DAY LIFE
Queen Elizabeth really treats Buckingham Palace as “the office” and spends most of her time there as a duty rather than by choice. It is clear that she can’t wait for Friday afternoon when she can head off to Windsor Castle for the weekend.
At Buckingham Palace, the daily routine for meals is set: breakfast at 9:00 a.m., lunch promptly at 1:15 p.m., tea at 5:00 p.m., and dinner at 8:15 p.m. Breakfast is almost no work for a palace chef as the Queen is quite happy with tea and toast. Lunch and dinner are more elaborate, especially if guests are invited in.
Cooking meals for royalty, even simple meals, connotes a high standard of preparation and service. Even if I had to make a simple cold lunch, it still needed to be gracefully and beautifully presented. A good example was a popular first course dish of tomato and dill mousse with lobster. Princess Diana routinely requested it, and it was as delicious as it was elegant. The recipe is enriched with sour cream, heavy cream, and mayonnaise. When I moved across to Kensington Palace as Diana’s chef, this mousse was one of the first recipes I reworked into a nonfat version. Both are good.
Who Foots the Bill?
The cost of the monarchy is borne by the state. So, while royal entertaining may be lavish, the day-to-day royal meals for family and staff are quite simple. This trend toward simpler meals is partly a reflection of contemporary British society, but is also influenced by economics. Truth be told, the modern royal family is on a budget. The cost of maintaining the monarchy was roughly one dollar per British citizen last year. That is a great “deal” for the British if you consider how many tourists come to England to see Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and other royal attractions. The monarchy today brings in significant tourism and a lot of cash.
The royal family loved all types of fish dishes, as well as stew and roasted vegetables. We would serve these often for small lunches or dinners. As chefs in the royal kitchens, our culinary mantra was that the food should taste wonderful, look beautiful, be of superior quality, and put guests at ease.
STATE VISITS AND STATE BANQUETS
There are a number of special events that happen each year at Buckingham Palace. The most complex events are state visits and the largest event (besides garden parties) is the annual diplomatic reception.
The goal of state visits is to help further political or economic solutions between Great Britain and other countries, as well as to cement relationships with longtime allies. They are an important political function of the monarchy and are executed with an eye to modern comfort and a serving of royal style. When the President of the United States makes a royal visit to Britain, he and his entourage are met by the Queen and are transported by royal carriage through the streets of London to Buckingham Palace.
Medals presented to me by visiting heads of government at state banquets
At the palace the guests attend an arrival lunch that usually serves fifty to sixty people. That evening, a formal banquet is held and the guest list expands to include dignitaries and businesspeople. The dinners are served in an enormous ballroom with opulent silver or gold place settings and the meal typically includes five or six courses. When the tables are completely set up, the ballroom is a regal sight, perfectly appropriate for a queen’s dinner.
State banquet menus
For state banquets, a chef really earns his stripes. Menus are carefully chosen, provisions sent back if they don’t meet the highest standards, and sauces are tasted and retasted. The garnishes alone are elaborate and time-consuming. For example, the banquet tables, when fully set, include large fruit baskets. “Basket” is a bit of a misnomer, since they are all highly decorated Meissen china, some footed and some not. Fruit has to be carefully picked, polished, and gently laid on the china. Even the fruit leaves are individually polished and arranged.
Petit fours pastillage on gilt plates ready for the state banquet
Often we made pastillage dishes. These are a combination of egg whites, powdered sugar, and cornstarch, which can be modeled into all sorts of shapes. The paste would sometimes be formed into delicate little baskets for petit fours with a spun sugar British flag popped on the side of the basket and a flag from the visiting country on the other. They took an enormous amount of time and care to make. Usually I could retrieve a number of these after dinner to reuse again in the future. I say usually, because that was never true when the French visited. After polishing off the petit fours, the French assumed the dish was akin to an ashtray and they would use it to stub out their cigarettes.
On a state visit, each guest would have a silver fruit bowl, a box of chocolates (with the ribbon colors of their country), and some cookies placed in their room. The more important they were, the bigger the fruit bowl and chocolates. The ones for the President’s suite are far left.
State banquets did have their perks. After each banquet, the Queen would send each member of the staff two miniature bottles of whiskey or gin. It was her way of saying thank you. Mind you, she was wise to send the bottles after the event. Given how stressful state banquets were, it would have been too tempting had we received the bottles beforehand.
A sultan’s gift to the Queen, valued at over $500,000. The dessert dish had a marble bowl set on three gilded horses and was decorated with diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds.
Visiting heads of state often gave gifts as well. The most generous visitors? Without a doubt, Arab heads of state. In truth, they also made us work harder. They brought their own chefs to provide halal meals, they often asked for meals at all hours, and we had to make certain that specific foods were banned from their chefs’ workspace. But they were very generous. Staff was picked to receive watches and brooches, footmen were tipped thousands of pounds for their work, and the kitchen would often get a box of saffron and mangoes from the visiting chef.
The Diplomatic Reception
Another annual event at Buckingham Palace is the diplomatic reception. Each year the Queen hosts one such reception as a way to bring together diplomats and staff from every embassy in London. As many as fifteen hundred people typically attend, and each guest is greeted by the Queen. Now, imagine you are the Queen and you have to say hello to fifteen hundred people before having a strong gin and dubonnet. It’s a real workout, believe me.
Royal Politesse
Other members of the royal family often join the Queen during diplomatic receptions. Prince Philip and Prince Charles are usually in attendance, and Princess Diana often came as well. Even after the separation, Princess Diana would attend certain Buckingham Palace functions. She didn’t love it, but she was a good trouper all the same. Once, a Saudi Prince cornered her, extolling the virtues of different fruit in his country, especially mangoes. Diana, at a loss for words, told him that indeed she loved mangoes. A week later she lugged a box of mangoes into the kitchen and plopped them down in front of me.
“Do you believe this, Darren?” she said. “That man sent me a whole crate of mangoes because I mentioned that I like them. Next time I need to mention how much I like diamonds.”
The chefs get a workout too. Crafting individual canapés for fifteen hundred is mind-boggling. Assuming six hors d’oeuvres per invited guest, we would make about ten thousand canapés. Typically the hot canapés are much more popular than the cold ones. I remember chucking mounds of cold tomato aspic canapés directly into the garbage one year. The use of aspic is a holdover from the Victorian era when jellies could be used to preserve food without requiring refrigeration. But modern dignitaries are used to modern food, and they would devour Stilton and Pecan Sable with Poached Pear or Croques Monsieurs while lobster tails preserved in aspic were returned to the kitchen uneaten.
Teatime and Garden Tea Parties
The Queen is especially fond of teatime. If I was making tea for the Queen and Prince Philip, which was quite often, generally there would be two different types of sandwiches with different fillings. The bread was either whole wheat or white, sliced very thinly and cut into squares with the corners trimmed to create a kind of octagon. I remember early on in my career I asked a fellow chef why it was necessary to trim corners off of tea sandwiches. I was told to never cut a square or a rectangle. It looked too much like a coffin and it meant you wished the Queen ill. I was mindful never to make that mistake.
Instructions from the Duchess of York’s menu book
There were also scones, one large cake, and one small cake such as a fruit tart or éclair. The fillings might vary a bit or the fruit used would change from season to season, but essentially the tea menu was the same every day.
Everyone has a favorite cake and the Queen of England is no exception. Hers is chocolate cake, either with a sponge or biscuit base. Once a chocolate cake is made, the Queen has it brought out again and again at teatime until it is gone. I have even packed half a cake into “Ascot boxes” and sent it along with other provisions to Windsor Castle for the Queen’s teas during the weekend.
The Queen requests chocolate sponge cake each year for her birthday. It is basically a dark bittersweet chocolate genoise cut into three layers and each layer filled with a rich chocolate ganache. And I mean rich. The ganache is made with cream from the Windsor dairies. To complete the cake, more hot ganache is poured over the top and allowed to run down the sides. It is excessive and utterly delicious. Any leftover ganache is cooled and used to decorate the cake with a simple “Happy Birthday.”
The menu of the wedding breakfast for Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York
Even more delicious, in my opinion, is the chocolate biscuit cake. All the chefs loved it. One night a fairly new chef must have thought it was his birthday when a chocolate biscuit cake was returned from teatime with only a tiny wedge missing. Well, he decided to skip dinner and instead ate his way through the cake, piece by piece, until it was finished. The next day, the head of pastry was frantically looking for the cake, questioning everyone until finally the sheepish glutton admitted his guilt. We quickly made a new cake and just before it left the kitchen, I cut out a tiny wedge. I am not sure if the Queen ever noticed the substitution.
Of course the Queen was not the only person who liked teatime. Most members of the royal family liked a good afternoon tea. Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, loved elaborate afternoon teas. She had an office in Buckingham Palace and regularly held teas for twelve or more. In addition to the regular tea provisions, she would add several more cakes and sausage rolls. She loved Battenburg Cake and I once sent up an absolutely perfect Battenburg Cake that I had made for her tea. It was returned uneaten with instructions not to serve her “store-bought” tea cakes again. A bit of a backhanded compliment I suppose! Oh well, the chefs enjoyed it.
Garden Tea Parties
Garden parties have been hosted by the English monarchy since the late-1800s. The Queen throws four garden parties a year, all but one at Buckingham Palace. The first party takes place in mid-July. Annual attendance at all the garden events combined typically exceeds thirty thousand people. Invitations are sent out by the Lord Chamberlain’s office to government groups, charities, and diplomatic organizations. Dress is important: men are expected to wear morning cutaways, evening suits, or military uniforms, and ladies wear dresses and hats. You can also wear a national costume, like a Scottish kilt. The parties are a genuine “thank you” from the Queen to charitable organizations that work so hard throughout the year. Garden parties are extremely popular and provide ordinary Britons a chance to feel like a royal, if only for a few hours!
Christmas Ball
Of all my favorite events at Buckingham Palace, I loved the staff Christmas Ball the best. And not just because it meant I didn’t have to cook! You were allowed to attend every other year and could bring one member of your family. Over the years, I squired my mom, grandmother, sister, my wife, Wendy, and on one memorable occasion, my father.
I guess it could be seen as a bit singular to take your dad to a ball. But my father was keen to meet Princess Diana and by then she and I had a quite proper but sweet friendship. In fact, I had boasted to my dad that the princess knew me quite well. She had the last laugh though. When she met my dad she pretended to have no idea who I was. My father looked at me in consternation. Laughing it off, Diana asked me to dance and asked my father to hold her purse. Off we went to dance and my father stood there, purse in hand, enchanted.
Central London seems to go back in time on garden party days. The gold and black palace gates swing open at three o’clock to allow all of these quite formally dressed guests to enter—through the first arch, across the quadrangle, into the palace, and out onto the manicured lawns of the Queen’s backyard. There is just enough time to get a table, grab a cup or two of Earl Grey tea and a bit of sandwich or cake, before getting a good place in line as the clock strikes four. Then Her Majesty and other royals make their way to the garden steps and the military band plays the national anthem.
The Queen and the junior royals head for the royal tea tent in the far right-hand corner of the garden; they all take a different route in order to shake hands with their guests. By the time the Queen reaches the royal tent she is grateful for a pot of Earl Grey and a scoop of homemade ice cream. If Her Majesty is especially hungry, she can choose from a variety of sandwiches and fillings, large slices of cake, jam tarts or fruit tarts, éclairs, ice cream, four different kinds of cakes including scones, and iced coffee. The large cakes might vary, but usually include a sponge cake with cream filling, a chocolate cake, a lemon cake, or a ginger cake.