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As train lunches go, it takes some beating. Starting with a mound of caviar, the menu moves through trout, lamb, chicken and partridge, asparagus and cheese soufflé, before finishing with a few serious puddings. It certainly beats a Greggs sausage roll.
But this was no ordinary lunch, rather a feast served for Edward VII aboard a train from Paris to Cherbourg on May 4, 1903. And one of ten royal menus about to be auctioned off at Drouot Auctioneers in Paris.
They range from a dinner for Queen Victoria at Balmoral in October 1885, right up to the dinner served after the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales in 2011. And they make fascinating reading, an insight into over a century’s worth of royal eating.
‘A good digestion was essential in those days,’ noted Gabriel Tschumi, a chef who started under Victoria and ended his career as Royal Chef for Queen Mary, ‘when each meal was equivalent to a present day banquet’.
Take that dinner at Balmoral, on October 20, 1885. The menu was deeply seasonal, as royal menus were, and still are. They were written in French (ditto) and filled with the fruits of the royal estates. Soups, fish, sweetbread croquettes, roast birds and beef, savouries and pudding. A marathon, rather than a sprint.
Buckingham Palace 1981: Charles and Diana’s wedding guests feasted on egg-shaped poached brill mousses served in a lobster sauce followed by boneless chicken with crispy skin, broad beans in butter, creamed sweetcorn, new potatoes and salad. Dessert was strawberries and clotted cream.
Queen Victoria 1885: Dinner at Balmoral commenced with calf’s head pate, trout and turbot in breadcrumbs followed by veal sweetbread croquettes, venison cutlets, fattened chicken in a salt crust and roast beef. The main course featured pheasant and chicken, with fried puffed potatoes. Dessert was a ginger soufflé and almond tart filled with vanilla and orange blossom cream. For those still with room, there was a side table of cold cuts including tongue and beef
Buckingham Palace April 2011: William and Catherine chose a very British menu with dishes from all four corners of the nation, including a tasteful nod to the bride’s Berkshire roots to accompany William’s favourite chocolate parfait
Buckingham Palace menu 1911: George V’s guests started lunch with a meat broth followed by lobster escalopes. Next came cold chicken in jelly, Russian-style quail with apples, lamb cutlets, chicken and tongue in aspic, and ham with mushrooms, sausage and truffle. Plover eggs, rolls and sandwiches followed. For dessert there was champagne fruit jelly, chocolate mousse, cakes and baskets of sweets.
Windsor Castle 2008: Served for French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his ex-supermodel wife Carla Bruni were fillet of brill followed by a main course of medallion of lamb with artichokes and broad beans, cauliflower in Hollandaise sauce, carrots with tarragon, thinly-sliced potatoes and salad. Dessert was rhubarb cake with vanilla cream and fruit. Note the quality of wines – Margaux 1961, currently on sale for £2,340, and a magnum of Krug 1982, now £3,950.
The White House 2007: President George W Bush hosted a dinner for Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. First was pea and lavender soup with chive-infused waffles topped with caviar from U.S. sturgeon. Next, on gold-rimmed plates, was sole fried in butter, followed by lamb in a chanterelle mushroom sauce and baby vegetables. A salad of rocket, savanna mustard leaves and crisp ‘mint romaine’ lettuce was served with a champagne dressing. After a cheese course, guests were served sweet candy ‘rose blossoms’.
Victoria’s son, Edward VII was one of history’s great trenchermen. As one biographer so rightly pointed out, ‘he never toyed with his food’. The more cream, brandy and foie gras, the better.
His son, George V, was a naval man and his tastes were rather more austere. Although the official royal lunches and dinner were very much high church French cuisine (as seen in the menu from Buckingham Palace on May 9, 1911) at home he favoured either British comfort food – cutlets, roasts and cottage pie – or curries, which he adored.
Perhaps the last truly great old school banquet was that thrown for the King and Queen by the French government to ’consolidate the entente cordiale’ in April 1914, three months before the start of the First World War. Starting with turtle soup, there were 18 dishes, including foie gras, Bresse chicken with truffles and a Veuve Clicquot champagne sorbet.
But as the strictures of the war hit hard, King George and Queen Mary were determined to set an example to their subjects. Alcohol was banned, to the horror of the Household, breakfast cut from ten courses to two, lunch shaved down to three courses and meat served no more than three times a week. This was the beginning of the end for great royal feasting.
George VI was also a man who preferred the plain, although his wife, Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) certainly appreciated good food. But the soft power of the State banquet is as important as ever. And these menus are an elegant reminder of ‘Soufflé diplomacy’ at its finest.
- Tom’s book, Cooking And The Crown: Royal Recipes From Queen Victoria To King Charles III, is out later this year.
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