Former royal chef lifts the lid on the bizarre and mundane eating habits of the palace
The former personal cook to the Queen and Princess Diana has revealed the sometimes eccentric likes and dislikes of the Royal Family.
Princess Diana relished his stuffed peppers. Prince William requested his chocolate biscuit cake at his wedding. Both seem like sensible preferences.
However, former Buckingham Palace chef Darren McGrady has now revealed just how very eccentric some of the Royal Family’s eating habits really are.
And none more so than the Queen’s.
McGrady – who cooked for the Queen, Prince Philip, Princes William and Harry and Princess Diana, in a royal career spanning two decades – reveals our monarch’s culinary preferences to be a bizarre blend of extravagance and thrift.
The Queen would never have garlic on the menu. She hated the smell of it and she hated the taste of it
“People always say, ‘Oh, the Queen must eat off gold plates with gold knives and forks’,” he told Marie Claire magazine.
“Yes, sometimes but at Balmoral she’d eat fruit from a plastic yellow Tupperware container.”
On other occasions Her Majesty would eat fruit from a diamond-encrusted plate.
“A marble dish encrusted in diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds. Thirty odd years ago it was valued at £500,000.”
However, the following morning the Queen would be back to Tupperware: “Breakfast was very simple for Her Majesty. Some Kellogg’s cereal from a plastic container, which she’d serve herself and Darjeeling tea.”
Some of the Queen’s preferences appear entirely comprehensible, others defy explanation.
For although her former chef reveals that chocolate is her favourite food and that she drinks a glass of champagne before bed every night, he also divulges her pet hate.
“The Queen would never have garlic on the menu,” says McGrady, who now runs his own catering company in the US.
“She hated the smell of it and she hated the taste of it.”
Princess Diana felt the same about steak.
“The only red meat she would eat was lamb and that was when she was entertaining. She’d never eat beef.”
Cleverly, Diana also demanded fat-free versions of palace food.
“She used to trick people,” reveals McGrady.
“She’d say, ‘Make me a mousse for President Reagan.’ She couldn’t have it because there was mayonnaise and sour cream. So she’d say ‘Make me a fat-free version’. So I did. Often she’d have the fat-free version and the guests were on the full-fat version and no one would know the difference.”
Meanwhile it turns out that the Duke of Edinburgh would turn up his nose at Prince Charles’s love of organic food, once walking out of the kitchen when he discovered that a tempting-looking hamper was “bloody organic”.
Diana could be unpredictable too.
McGrady tells how she once arrived in his kitchen at Kensington Palace, where he worked following his 11 years serving the Queen , and said, “Cancel lunch for the boys. I’m taking them, we’re going to McDonald’s”.
When McGrady pointed out that he could spare them the trip by cooking them burgers at home, Diana was insistent: “No, it’s the toy they want!”
On other occasions, however, it was the fast food itself they wanted.
As little boys the princes enjoyed pizza and American-style potato skins.
“They were royal princes but they had children’s palates,” he explains.
But the irascible Prince Philip did not always eat what was put in front of him.
He once marched into the kitchen to ask what was for supper.
“I have these little one-inch eyes of lamb for you, your Royal Highness,” responded McGrady.
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But Philip was more interested in the hearty chops he saw on the counter.
“He wanted to know who they were for and I said, ‘staff’. He said, ‘Oh, can’t we have those?’ I ended up giving him these big meatier pieces and the staff had the other.”
When it comes to sensible eating the Queen is said to be very disciplined.
“For lunch, it would be something like grilled fish with salad,” explained McGrady in another interview.
“She wouldn’t have potatoes. She just does the protein and the salad.”
Previously he revealed how the Queen would be presented with a “menu book”, which was sent to her two or three times a week.
“The menu book was sent up to her and she’d put a line through the ones she didn’t want.”
As for state banquets she was even more involved and liked not only to oversee the full menu but to see her own produce on it.
Yet for all the formality, the Queen can be parsimonious .
McGrady recalls a time when she preferred not to garnish her dish with a lemon so that the whole fruit would not be wasted.