Queen Camilla’s son reveals Charles III’s tastes in book

Tom Parker Bowles, Queen Camilla’s son and food critic, has published a book of recipes beloved by the British monarchy, from Victoria to King Charles III.

What do you eat in Buckingham? To answer this burning question, Tom Parker Bowles, a food critic, is publishing this Wednesday, September 25, a recipe book entitled Crown Recipes.

To do this, Tom Parker Bowles, who is none other than the son of Queen Camilla – born from her first marriage to Andrew Parker Bowles – explored the royal “archives, letters, diaries, cookbooks”, as he explains in his book, to deliver a series of recipes served at Buckingham, Windsor or Balmoral for big and small occasions.

“Stuffing a boar’s head”

He has kept the most feasible and the most adapted to contemporary taste buds and schedules, because, as he notes not without humor: “these days, few people have the time, the skill or the desire to bone a snipe, stuff a boar’s head, roast a whole leg of beef or spend three days preparing a pheasant consommé with quenelles.”

So these are fairly simple recipes to make that we find in these pages. And of course we leaf through the book looking for anecdotes about the royal family.

It is said that Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth’s husband, “was known as a barbecue expert.” He had professional equipment and a “special picnic trailer, designed to be towed by a Land Rover, with a whole bunch of compartments, to accommodate spices, aromatic herbs, accessories, plates and cutlery.”

Queen Elizabeth II had simple tastes and a small appetite, her mother, the “queen mum” had a predilection for picnics and gin – a cocktail recipe is dedicated to her – and King Charles III “does not eat lunch”.

Indispensable “tea time”

On the other hand, he would not miss tea time, the snack with his tea at 5 p.m., for anything in the world.

“For Charles III and Queen Camilla, teatime remains the 5pm ritual, where we all gather around a round table in the drawing room at Birkhall, after an afternoon spent outdoors mushroom hunting,” says Tom Parker Bowles.

They serve cakes “usually one with chocolate and one with fruit, but also flapjacks (a type of energy bar, made with oat flakes, butter, brown sugar and golden syrup, editor’s note), sometimes shrimp terrine, crumpets in winter and, above all, sandwiches.”

Not French-style ham and butter sandwiches, but cute little sandwiches “generously buttered, crustless and sliced ​​into two-finger-wide rectangles.” On sandwich bread, they are made with smoked salmon, ham and mustard or egg mayonnaise.

Eggs are very popular at Buckingham, in all their forms, from omelettes to meurettes and casseroles. Queen Camilla has her own recipe for scrambled eggs, and “the King particularly enjoys an egg as a starter for dinner.”

We also learn that Charles and Camilla love mushrooms, and that “wild mushrooms are something of an obsession of King Charles III and Queen Camilla.”

The French will be delighted to find in the pages of Tom Parker Bowles, eggs meurette and artichokes à la barigoule, a Provençal recipe served to Queen Victoria on October 24, 1841. Finally, a quiche recipe appears in Crown Recipesbut this is not the coronation quiche, but a quiche Lorraine. A recipe that will perhaps make purists shudder, since for Tom Parker Bowles “there is nothing to stop” adding Gruyere.