All round

Why Prince Philip didn’t like Dining with the Queen

Via

News Desk

Updated on April 15, 2021

130 Comments

See more articles on:

get top stories via email

Prince Philip, according to former royal chef Darren McGrady, had somewhat different food preferences than his more reserved wife.

Prince Philip, unlike the Queen, was a much more adventurous eater

For 15 years, Darren McGrady was Queen Elizabeth II’s, Prince Philip’s, Princess Diana’s, and Princes William and Harry’s personal chef. The prince could be seen at the grill four to five days a week, but he also knew his way around the kitchen, he told Delish. He enjoyed going into the kitchen late at night for a snack he could prepare himself. Why, though, didn’t he like to dine with the queen and share the fruits of his labor?

“Prince Philip has a much broader palate than Her Majesty,” Chef McGrady told Delish in a video clip. The prince, according to McGrady, “lives to eat,” as opposed to Queen Elizabeth, who “eats to live.” Since the couple’s meals were cooked by royal cooks, and meal they ate was clearly prepared to the queen’s specifications, since she is not just the head of the household but also the ruler of the whole country. So well, if she says no garlic, then no garlic it is.

“When the queen was away on engagements,” McGrady recalled, “Prince Philip could taste all of his own favorite ingredients. I think sometimes, Prince Philip actually enjoyed eating on his own,” he said. And what did he like eating? According to McGrady, the prince enjoyed “real spicy food” and collected recipes from all over the world during his lengthy travels.

The Queen’s meals

According to McGrady, the Queen consumes four meals a day, but just tiny amounts at each. In a collection of YouTube Q&A posts, he claims that the Queen ate breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, and dinner when he was her personal chef from 1982 to 1993.

She keeps it basic for breakfast. “HRH typically starts with a simple cup of tea and biscuits, followed by a bowl of cereal,” royal biographer Katie Nicholl previously said. (As previously stated by The Guardian, she prefers to store it in Tupperware to keep it fresh.)

According to McGrady, this is followed by a meal of grilled fish with wilted spinach or courgettes. She often enjoys grilled chicken with salad, which is a low-carbohydrate choice.

The Queen would then have afternoon tea in the late afternoon, according to McGrady. (The Queen still has jelly and clotted cream on her scones, and she places the jam on first.)

“She’d always have afternoon tea wherever she was in the world. We’d flown out to Australia and were on the Royal Yacht. It was five o’clock in the morning but for the Queen it was five in the afternoon so my first job was making scones .”

Prince Philip enjoyed breakfast with his wife

Prince Philip had a flair for artistic expression, which was one of his lesser-known gifts. While he mainly painted landscapes (oil paints were his favorite medium), possibly his most well-known painting is a 1965 portrait of his wife named The Queen at Breakfast, Windsor Castle (via Metro). HRH is seen quietly eating a solitary meal of toast and marmalade while listening to the radio and reading the newspaper.

For most days, though, the queen ate breakfast with her spouse rather than alone. The royal couple’s first breakfast of the day was at 8:30 a.m., according to the Daily Mail. He’d have coffee, she’d have Earl Grey tea, and they’d eat bananas, yogurt, and cereal for breakfast (the last-named item kept in rather mundane plastic tubs). They already had two kinds of marmalade on the table for the queen’s toast, as well as a bottle of maple syrup for who knows what. It may have acted as a reminder of those overseas subjects in the Great White North, but we like to believe they had a deep fondness for their great-grandson’s breakfast of waffles.

Chef Philip

That’s correct, the father-of-four was a kitchen machine, and according to author Ingrid Seward, who wrote My Husband and I: The Inside Story Of 70 Years Of Royal Marriage, he often prepared dinner for Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, and Prince Edward while The Queen was away on service.

He was known for his omelettes, fried eggs, and smoked haddock, and he liked to prepare breakfast for his partner in crime while she was around.