Eating Royally: Recipes & Remembrances from a Palace Kitchen

Windsor Castle, sitting timelessly amid its lush acres of parks, lawns, and ponds, seamlessly links England past with England present. It is a breathtaking piece of country. As you walk the enormous expanse of Great Park and Home Park, you can see white swans circling lazily in the Thames or small deer gathering in copses of ancient bent oaks. Men in traditional whites may be assembling for a serious game of cricket. Look up and you’ll see flying above it all the royal standard if the Queen is at home. Everything around you seems to say, “This is England!”

I always enjoyed my time at Windsor immensely. Its beauty and timeworn grace make it much loved by family and staff alike. For me, Windsor Castle is linked with memories of springtime in England. Her Majesty begins her stay right before Easter and the family is at the castle off and on through the spring and into early summer. Many great events take place after Easter, including two of my favorites: the Ascot Races and the Royal Horse Show. Also, lots of wonderful food begins showing up in the spring, including luscious hothouse peaches, fragile and deeply flavored strawberries—I mean real strawberries the likes of which we don’t often see anymore—and thick luscious cream culled from the Windsor cows that have been pastured outdoors in the meadows surrounding the castle.

Windsor Ablaze

Windsor Castle is old, even by English standards. It has been a royal residence for almost one thousand years. But nothing stays the same forever, and so Windsor has changed with time. Some changes reflect the desires of previous royalty or the slow wearing effects of nature. And some changes happen from unforeseen disaster. I witnessed one of those disasters, for I was living on the grounds of the castle on November 20, 1992, when a fire broke out in the Queen’s private chapel in the northeast part of the castle and rapidly moved to engulf the state apartments.

The castle’s part-time twenty-man fire brigade was dispatched along with a local firehouse. The fire quickly spread to the Brunswick Tower and the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service were called in, plus an additional ten firehouses. Even that proved to be insufficient. By the end of the day thirty-nine firehouses were on-site battling the blaze.

I remember it quite clearly. I had just arrived at Windsor and settled into my apartment at Frogmore Stables. It was midafternoon when I got a knock on the door from one of the gardeners who had been sent to rally the staff to the castle. Word came that a fire had broken out and all hands were required. It wasn’t until I was outside and saw all the smoke that I recognized how serious a fire it was. Her Majesty was in the midst of it, directing staff as they gathered up as many irreplaceable treasures as possible. I began helping the firemen, unloading spent oxygen tanks off of firemen’s backs and putting on fresh ones so they could go back inside.

At some point the Queen’s page, Paul Whybrew, came up and asked me to help clear out the Queen’s apartment in the castle. It was the first time I had been inside Her Majesty’s apartment. The corridor leading from her rooms to the rest of the castle had been boarded up to help slow the fire’s spread; as yet, there wasn’t any smoke. Inside, Paul and I started picking up paintings and furniture and carting them out as quickly as we could.

For a time it was just the Queen and me as we packed her personal items. I could see she was terribly distressed though her demeanor was calm. At one point I remember she picked up her husband’s slippers and stared at them. I was struck by the thought that all the money and position in the world means nothing at a time like this.

It had been a beautiful clear day and the sun setting over the raging fire was a raw spectacle for our eyes.

Even before nightfall I knew Windsor Castle had been absolutely devastated. It would take five years and millions of pounds to rebuild it.

THE KITCHEN AT WINDSOR CASTLE

There is one main kitchen at Windsor Castle. It’s been updated over time—electricity and running water were added more than one hundred years ago—but the original structure remains essentially unchanged and dates back hundreds of years. It is an impressive room to work in—an enormous stone barrel-vaulted room with great distances from sinks to ovens and hearths and to refrigerators. In fact, it takes almost five minutes to walk from the refrigerator to the stoves. Long distances separate the dishwashing area, larder, silver pantry, linen room, and dining room. The farthest is the coffee room. The larder chef has to take tea sandwiches down each afternoon, followed by the pastry chef with scones and tea cakes. Round trip is about twenty minutes. You could have eaten all the food along the way—just to keep up your strength, of course.

Called the Great Kitchen, it is split into three parts. The main kitchen takes care of entrees and vegetables, the larder kitchen prepares all the cold foods, and the royal pastry kitchen is responsible for puddings, pastries, and dessert fruit. The main kitchen, with about a dozen chefs working full time, was a fun place to work when court was in residence. We needed that many chefs. Chefs feed everyone, not just the royal family. At Windsor that includes all staff, stewards, officials and senior officials, butlers, porters, junior chefs, and housemaids. And don’t forget the typists, secretaries, and personal assistants.

In an odd twist of bureaucratic space allocation, Windsor Castle has its own fully stocked bar situated right across from the kitchen. With a break between sending up royal meals and getting staff meals out, a senior chef might disappear to the “canteen” for a quick pint . . . and then another. I remember several Windsor weekends when junior chefs cooked the entire dinner because the senior chef was rather tipsy from a convivial visit to the canteen.

At least the kitchens had windows and we could see daylight. The larder kitchen windows look out onto the North Terrace and on quiet days the tourists were fed samples of “royal” food. Goodness knows how many vacation photos have been taken with a gaggle of chefs all posing at the larder window!

The kitchen’s workbenches were very old and very low. So low, in fact, that the chefs had wooden blocks made to hold chopping boards eighteen inches off the tables. I’m fairly tall; I always left Windsor with a bad back from bending over those tables while working. The stoves were tucked away in little alcoves and chefs would knock their hats off as they bent to look into a pan. I believe it was the working kitchen most hated by the chefs, but it was the prettiest and had the most character.

Under the larder kitchen was another room that we used as a spare kitchen during busy times. And beneath that was a big empty cave. It was an excellent location for staff discos. I became the resident DJ, spinning old 45 records for the Royal Household Social Club. Dancing would start around ten o’clock, after the staff had finished work, and went on sometimes until after two o’clock in the morning. Of course by then most of the chefs were hungry again.

Lucky for us we had to walk through the kitchen and knew where to find the key to the larder fridge. Many a night we could be found making Scooby-snack–sized sandwiches to eat in the Brunswick Tower elevator before retiring to bed. The next morning we would all tiptoe around the breakfast chef who would be cursing us under his breath as he quickly defrosted bread for the royal breakfast.

WINDSOR WEEKEND

“Windsor weekends” is the name given to the time the Queen spends at Windsor when she is actually in residence at Buckingham Palace. When she heads up to Windsor Castle, the Buckingham Palace kitchen sends lots of food along in two large Ascot boxes, one with food from the main kitchen and another filled with provisions from the pastry kitchen. As senior pastry chef it was my job on Friday to make sure that everything was set to go into the van.

Did the Queen want apple pie? OK, the sweet pastry was packed and I double-checked that the Granny Smith apples were on the fruit order. Chocolate mousse? I added a block of D6 dark chocolate to the box. Coffee mousse? Was there a jar of Nestle Gold Blend and some liqueur coffee beans in there? Check. Beef Wellington? Don’t forget the puff pastry. Brandy snaps for tea? I’ll just pop in a recipe and the wooden dowels to mold them. Pain Pruneaux? I needed to send the Victorian copper mold to make it in and more importantly, make sure the mold was returned on Monday. Scones and Friday afternoon tea cakes and tea sandwiches were a must and were added alongside the rest of the weekend’s ingredients. I tried not to forget anything, but occasionally there was a lapse and over the telephone I had to calm panicked chefs looking for a missing ingredient.

Provisioning the Kitchen

The greatest asset for drivers who deliver food to Windsor Castle is a mild temperament. After a congested twenty-mile drive from London, deliverymen have to haul boxes of food down a flight of stairs, along the basement corridor, and up another flight of stairs to the kitchen. It’s not so bad if the Queen hasn’t arrived at the castle yet. Then the trucks are allowed into the quadrangle and closer to the staff dining-room-door entrance to unload. But if the Queen is in residence, no trucks are allowed in the yard and provisions have to be carried in from even farther away.

Some of the foods that made their way to the kitchen were gifts received by the Queen. I remember one such gift, a delivery of ripe mangoes from a Saudi prince. On this occasion we had instructions that the fruit was for the Queen and Duke only. Prince Andrew had stopped in the kitchen, seen the mangoes, and asked for one. Robert Pine, the Queen’s pastry chef of thirty years, flatly told him, “No. They are for the Queen only.”

I put my head down and carried on rolling out pastry. Had a chef just told a member of the royal family no? Prince Andrew was clever, though, and he came back to the kitchen when he knew all the chefs would be at breakfast. Chef Pine was cleverer yet. He had locked the door to the fruit room. For the Queen and the Duke only—those were the orders.

Windsor weekends meant just a few chefs were needed. Typically there was a senior cook in charge and two junior cooks. Not many of the royal family were about, either. Most often it was just the Queen for meals, or perhaps the Queen and the Duke. I loved that because it meant I got to cook everything on the menu, not just sauces or desserts, like the more regimented partie system in place at Buckingham Palace. No, as a senior chef at Windsor Castle I was responsible for it all and that was fine with me. Not so for some other chefs.

I remember one senior chef who hated making dessert. He just couldn’t do it. So, one weekend he had a junior chef prepare a chocolate soufflé for the royal dinner. The poor young chef was so nervous—especially when he opened the oven and realized the soufflé hadn’t risen. Quick as a flash the senior chef took the dish out of the oven and tipped it onto the floor.

“Oh dear,” he said, “accidents do happen—they’ll have to have ice cream instead.” And with a smile he walked off to inform the page of the “soufflé accident.” Far better the Queen was told about a kitchen accident than to have her complain to the head chef in London about having been served a less-than-perfect soufflé.

Depending on the skill (and sobriety) of the senior chef, the junior chefs were rarely allowed to prepare the royal food. Maybe they would do a salad or perhaps vegetables. It was really an opportunity for a senior cook to stand out among the cadres of chefs who work for the Queen. I’ve seen fellow chefs, myself included, get quite puffed up when the page called the head chef in London on a Monday morning to say the Queen had really enjoyed the food that weekend.

Maids- a- Milking

There are two enormous parks that surround Windsor Castle, the Windsor Great Park and the Home Park. The Home Park is split into two parks by name—Home Park Public and Home Park Private. The latter is the Queen’s private backyard. There she can drive and walk freely. It is also the home of the Windsor dairy, mausoleum, and gardens.

A dairy herd has been part of the castle’s landscape for more than a century. Today there are two main breeds of cattle kept at Windsor: Jersey and Ayershire. Carefully tended, the herds yield some of the best milk and cream found anywhere in England.

Milking takes place twice a day in the royal dairy. The dairy is a relatively new feature at Windsor. It was built in 1858 under the direction of Prince Albert, using advanced technology for its time. The main innovation is the use of double walls to keep the dairy cool, a must in the days before refrigeration. Although the milking process has changed over the years—it’s no longer done by hand—the creamery remains the same.

It has a beautiful painted ceiling supported by six pillars and all of the walls are decorated with ornate tiles. Two tables covered in thick marble stretch the length of the room and more tables surround the edge of the room. All the original separating basins are in place and scattered around the marble tops. The original cream jugs are also still there, which were used to transport cream from the dairy to the castle.

Milking basins line the dairy walls

When I worked at Windsor, the cream was still separated by hand. Mrs. Williams, the milkmaid, would hand spin the milk a gallon at a time using an old separator. Eight pints of milk from the royal cows would produce one pint of royal cream. Using a hand method for milk separation took hours, and if there were an upcoming state visit or garden party, we chefs had to give the dairy advance warning. Both milk and cream were unpasteurized.

The cream was so thick that you could literally stand a spoon up in it. It was even thicker than Cornish clotted cream. Crème brûlée, which the royals loved, achieved a new level when made with Windsor cream. Even vanilla ice cream turned into a voluptuous treat. The extra milk is turned into cheese made in little three-inch pots set in polystyrene boxes. The royal family loves it and they have it sent up to Balmoral during the summer for the lunchtime cheese boards.

Decorative statuary displayed along with antique pitchers in the Home Park Private mausoleum. Notice the beautiful hand-painted tiles.

There has been much discussion of late about pasteurization, especially in regard to cheesemaking. Cheese made with pasteurized milk often lacks the depth of flavor found in nonpasteurized or “raw” cheeses. It wasn’t until 1990 that the Queen agreed to have the milk pasteurized for “safety reasons.” All the royal chefs mourned this change and we agreed that some of the milk’s incomparable taste was lost.

SPRINGTIME AT THE CASTLE

Certain rituals mark Windsor’s year. In early spring, the entire Windsor family celebrates Easter with services at St. George’s chapel. In June, the Order of the Garter ceremony takes place, an annual celebration of Britain’s oldest and highest order of chivalry. For sports enthusiasts there are two big events: the Windsor Horse Show in May and Royal Ascot in June. The Queen also allows celebrity charity cricket matches to take place in Home Park, and there is the annual fiercely competitive match between the Lords Taverners Team and the Royal Household Cricket Team.

Windsor Mulberries

Beginning in the 1200s, English kings decided to attempt the production of silk on their own lands. Mulberry trees were imported and planted in hopes of providing silkworms with their favorite food. The cool, damp climate kept silk production low and sporadic, even though the trees flourished.

Stemming from that time, the walkway along the royal dairy is lined with beautiful mulberry trees. To a chef, mulberry trees mean mulberry gin. We would collect ripe mulberries from the ground under the trees, then wash and steep them in gin for several weeks. The gin takes on the flavor of the ripe berries and turns a gorgeous purple hue. It is a fine drink and, in my opinion, much superior to sloe gin, which we made from pricked sloe berries. After we tasted the mulberry gin to ensure it was properly steeped (very important tasting that was), it was sent to the royal cellars to be used for shooting lunches in the Scottish highlands and at Sandringham Castle.

Easter Traditions

The royal family doesn’t celebrate Easter publicly, but enjoys the holiday as a private family affair with wonderful traditions. Of course, there are hot cross buns to eat on Good Friday and on Shrove Tuesday the Queen, as head of the Church of England and like the rest of Christian England, has pancakes for dinner, which are what Americans would call “crepes.” Two hot thin pancakes are filled with vanilla sugar, folded and served with lemon juice and cream. Prince Philip prefers his cold and filled with raspberry jam and whipped cream. These are called “Crepes Islandaise” or Icelandic pancakes because he was visiting Iceland when he first tasted them.

Pancake day meant making around seven hundred crepes for everyone. It sounds like a lot, but with crepe pans on each burner, it would actually go fairly quickly. There is a rhythm to making them, and once I got into that rhythm hot crepes seemed to fill every available surface around me. During one Christmas at Sandringham, I was manning my crepe pans on all six burners when the Queen and her sister, Princess Margaret, came into the kitchen. The Queen was headed for the larder section and Princess Margaret was headed toward me.

Happy Easter for children and grownups alike

“Lillibet, come look at this!” the princess shouted to her sister.

Oh yes, I thought, the Queen will be impressed watching me with six pans.

Instead she said, “Isn’t that cheating? Aren’t you supposed to toss them?”

I quickly put down my spatula and tossed the first one. Increasingly nervous, I continued pouring and flipping and said a quick prayer under my breath that I didn’t spill a pancake on the floor. They both continued to watch for a few minutes, and then satisfied, moved on.

The Queen gives up chocolate for Lent, so banished are her favorite Bendicks Bittermints and Charbonel et Walker chocolates. On Easter Sunday the chefs would go to great lengths to prepare all sorts of chocolate treats to make up for the forty days of abstinence. There were chocolate cakes plus milk chocolate, white chocolate, and bittersweet chocolate eggs. This trove of chocolate treats would be served at royal teatime for several days, before finding its way into the staff dining room. The Queen’s birthday is shortly after Easter, and she celebrates each April 21 at Windsor with another lovely chocolate cake. It’s a large twelve-inch cake layered with and covered in ganache. A simple “Happy Birthday” is handwritten on the top in royal icing.

The children in the nursery would also get some sugar mice to eat and special chocolate eggs illustrating a nursery tale or fable. One year I decided it would be “Hickory, Dickory, Dock.” I labored over a twelve-inch hollow chocolate egg. Inserted into that egg was a sugar mouse with its head poking out, and on the front was a clock’s face set at one o’clock—“as the mouse ran down.” Prince William loved it and immediately bit off the mouse’s head with gusto, transforming the egg from art to food in record time! The nanny sent it back to the kitchen, quickly saying that the headless mouse was distressing the younger children. I gave it a quick makeover with a new mouse and back up it went. All better.

Diana at the Castle

I always looked forward to seeing Princess Diana and the boys at the castle. The princess seemed to enjoy the break too. Often she would spend time visiting in the kitchen, chatting with me about the day and finding out what we were cooking for dinner.

The princess quite liked Windsor. It wasn’t too far from London and, as she once said, she could get “passes” to sneak back to the city. One afternoon, I was walking my dogs in the Home Park and saw her car approaching. She spotted me, stopped the car, rolled her window down about two inches, and said, “Does the Queen know you keep wolves in her back garden, Darren?”

I laughed and the younger of my two German shepherds enthusiastically jumped up to her car window, wagging her tail. The princess let out a yelp and said good-bye before quickly driving off. The next morning, the Queen’s page caught up with me and mentioned, “I hear you set your wolves onto Princess Diana yesterday.”

Good Lord! I don’t know who else she told. I realized then that she wasn’t all that fond of dogs.

I always enjoyed Easter court at Windsor. Spring was just around the corner, the asparagus and lettuces were in season, and there was always a glorious lamb to roast for Easter lunch. On Sundays the Queen’s garden was open to the public and a military band would play. Luckily, my room in Brunswick Tower looked right over the garden. In the afternoons I could sit there with the window open and listen to the music float up. Other days I would watch Princess Diana playing with the boys and having fun. It was a timeless scene of England.

The Order of the Garter

The Order of the Garter is the highest honor bestowed on a British citizen as a reward for loyalty to the Crown, military merit, or to those who have significantly contributed to English life. Appointments are made solely by the Queen, are for life, and are restricted to no more than twenty-four people at any time.

Every June, the Order gathers at Windsor Castle to invest any new members and to reaffirm their commitment. A lunch is given in the Waterloo chamber, which is one of Windsor’s main dining rooms. It’s an elegantly decorated room with a dining table set to match. The food is served on gilt plates, solid silver covered with a thin layer of gold. The members are dressed in traditional blue velvet robes and the mood is festive. For dessert the invitees have a traditional “pudding,” one of my favorites: Framboises St. George. St. George is the patron saint of England and his image is closely connected with the Windsor family. The dessert mimics the flag of St. George, a red cross on a white field.

Before the Windsor fire in ’92, there wasn’t an elevator in the kitchen, so the food was collected on large mahogany trays with a footman on either end. The middle footmen carried a tray in each hand as they marched out. It looked like a train with its carriages leaving the kitchens.

Ascot

Windsor is perfectly suited for sports of all kinds. Some have a long and venerable history of play on the Windsor properties. Others are more recent. But none carries with it the cachet of the Royal Ascot races. It attracts aristocrats and rogues alike and is an immensely popular part of springtime at the castle. Even the Queen takes a keen interest in Ascot since she has some of her own horses running in the races.

The races take place around mid-June and racing goes on for four days. The racetrack, owned by the royal family, is not in the Great Park, but across town. My favorite day of the races is “Ladies Day,” a throwback to the time when only men were allowed to bet on horses. Women show up in beautiful dresses with hats to match. I always tried to attend races that day, since my unscientific survey led me to believe that Ladies Day at Ascot held more stunning women per square inch than any place on earth.

Ascot is a busy time for chefs. The house is full, with at least fifteen to twenty members of the royal family, plus guests, in residence. There can be no dawdling over meals back at the castle, as the Queen is always in attendance in the royal box when the first race begins at 1:30 p.m. Lunch starts promptly at noon, and then the royal retinue piles into cars and drives halfway down the long walk, before getting out and switching to horse-drawn carriages for the rest of the journey across town. Making a grand entrance, the Queen’s carriage arrives on the racetrack before moving into the royal enclosure—the best box seats in the world.

Ascot

The Queen is never more gleeful than when one of her horses comes in first at Ascot. She is a keen horsewoman and has always maintained her own racing stable with Lord Porchester as her racing manager. Typically there are about twenty-five thoroughbred horses in training at any given time, and the Queen knows each horse’s lineage and racing times.

Ascot is about racing and betting. The royal family does place wagers, though the sums are fairly modest. Of course, the bets placed are higher when one of the Queen’s horses takes to the tracks. It’s easy to spot her horses. The Queen’s jockeys stand out in their royal racing colors of purple, gold, and scarlet.

Close behind would be the Ascot van that held all the food the family and guests would enjoy while watching the races. The van was loaded with Ascot boxes, three-foot-tall wooden boxes with a door on one side. Inside each box was room for six trays of food. The larder chef would pack the trays with at least two different kinds of tea sandwiches, cut small enough for a single bite. I would send three different kinds of tea cakes, scones, fresh ice cream, and the very popular iced coffee mixed with milk, sugar syrup, and Windsor cream, served in a huge thermos flask. We even had a recipe for it so that it tasted exactly the same for every Ascot and garden party. The tension of horse racing must stimulate the appetite, for I noticed that very little food came back uneaten.

Ascot kicked off the summer for palace chefs. Now we could use strawberries, cherries, and all the wonderful summer fruits. The Queen was quite particular about eating fruit in season. We could serve strawberries almost every day during the summer—but woe betide any chef who put them on the menu in January.

The Windsor hothouses grow white peaches that are absolutely beautiful to look at and even better to eat. Each peach is handpicked, wrapped individually in gauze, and stored in specially made crates. We could cook bruised peaches, but the unblemished beauties were eaten in their pristine state. Forget chocolate desserts when Windsor peaches were in season—a whole Windsor peach on your plate with a silver jug of Windsor dairy cream—bliss.

Windsor Horse Show

The Horse Show is a classic horse exhibition. There is show jumping—which the Queen and Princess Anne both took part in—Shetland pony races and carriage driving. One of the events much loved by the Duke of Edinburgh is the International Driving Grand Prix, an absolutely hair-raising competition of small phaetons led by four to six horses. The grand prix is always run individually and against the clock while traveling full bore through rough terrain. To the viewers it always seems like a miracle that horse and driver end up at the finish line in one piece. The Duke participates each year in the race and, even as a man now in his eighties, he shows no sign of “giving up the reins.”

The staff at Windsor did not need to attend the show to know how the Duke was ranking. His disposition told all. If he was in a grumpy mood, then we knew that he was a lot further down in the rankings than he thought he should be. Same thing when he was competing in yacht races during Cowes Week on HMY Britannia. The only difference was that he would come into Britannia’s galley kitchen and rant at the chefs. Good thing the kitchens at Windsor were farther away from the royal apartments!

The Windsor Horse Show

The Windsor Horse Show takes place in the private half of Home Park, typically around mid-May, and it highlights the equestrian activities that are part of the royal household. Attendance is open to the public, but participation is by royal invitation only. While some may argue it is not the best equestrian event in the country, most agree that with Windsor Castle as a backdrop it is the most impressive. At night the castle is floodlit and looks like a picturesque fairy tale.

Staff is offered one free ticket each to attend the show and most choose Sunday to catch the finale firework display. Some mates and I would head down to the show as soon as we had sent up royal dinner and changed out of our chef whites. My favorite part was the musical ride by the royal horse artillery and their finale when all six guns were first fired individually and then all together. It can be heard all over Windsor. We would then make a mad dash back up the hill to the castle and up onto the north terrace to watch the fireworks. From that terrace, we were at eye level and the display was amazing.

During the horse show, the house is full and many of the guests are friends of the Duke’s or competitors in the events. One faithful guest is Count Andrassy, a close relation of the Windsors’. I would always make “Andrassy Pudding” as one of the special desserts during his stay. Basically, a chocolate soufflé, turned out and cooled, is sliced and filled with a really rich thick chocolate cream. The sides are coated with the chocolate cream and dusted with chocolate shavings. It is chocolaty and excessive and everyone eats it up. Even me.