Want to dine like a high-born Brit?  Eating Royally: Recipes and Remembrances from a Palace Kitchen is my latest cookbook crush: a beautifully produced, full-colour hardcover by Darren McGrady, one-time personal chef to the households of HM Queen Elizabeth II and HRH Princess Diana. 

More than 100 recipes, along with personal photographs and touching memories of his years with the royal family make McGrady’s book both a highly readable memoir and (perhaps surprisingly) a source of the kind of time-tested family meals we’d actually cook for our own families.

The Royal Chef

Trained at the swank Savoy in London, McGrady’s tenor in the Royal Kitchens began at Buckingham Palace in  1982, serving as personal chef to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, and traveling with the royal family to Windsor Castle, Sandringham House,Balmoral Castle, and around the world on the Royal Yacht Britannia. (I suppose even the nobility are vulnerable to shipboard buffets, on a cruise?)

In 1993, he moved to Kensington Palace to become private chef to the Princess of Wales, where he was in charge of  the daily food preparation for Princess Diana, Prince William and Prince Harry, as well as catering luncheons and dinners for their many distinguished guests.  That idyll lasted four years – until 1997, when the lovely and sad Diana (easily the most photographed woman and one of the highest profile celebrities in the world at the time) died in a tragic car crash, pursued by the paparazzi. 

McGrady has cooked for no less than five US Presidents in his notable career, and now lives in the United States.

Kate and William’s Wedding Cake

If there’s a wedding in your plans, it might be fun to put Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding cake on the menu.  The now-famous Chocolate Biscuit Cake – the groom’s cake for the royal wedding – is  just one of the fabulous recipes included in this cookbook (page 31). 

No, really – think about it!

You’d have not just a royally special cake to serve for a life-changing occasion, but a dessert that would get even your crowd-shy guests chatting together at the reception, sharing memories of the 1980s, of the glamorous Princess Diana, and of the significance of all those special recipes that are passed down from generation to generation within our own families.

Royal Recipes… with a Story

Some of the collected recipes in Eating Royally were “comfort food” to various members of the royal family, while other recipes are more the fancy fare served to guests or on holidays and other festive occasions.  Some of my own favourites:

• Eggs Drumkilbo – Lobsters and shrimp meet eggs and vine-ripened tomatoes in this favourite dish of the late Queen Mother; it was also served at the 1973 wedding breakfast of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips.
• Christmas Pudding – I mention this now, as the “prep time is 3 months to 2 years”: the generous aging time is to give the dark beer, dark rum, brandy and other rich flavours in this traditional recipe time to develop  and mellow.
• Coffee Mousse – It’s made with chocolate-covered coffee beans!
• Crepes Islandaise – The Duke of Edinburgh was served crepes with heavy whipped cream and seedless raspberry jam on a state visit to Iceland; he liked the dish so much that he asked for the recipe.
• Goujons of Salmon with Tyrolienne Sauce – Regular readers will know I’m a mad fan of salmon (a taste I share with Prince Andrew, it seems), but you can make this with almost any kind of fish that takes well to being breaded. The garnish is interesting – fried fresh parsley!

But even more interesting, I think, are The Royal Chef’s notes and stories of life with the Windsors, and particularly of “The Royal Year” in which they moved from residence to residence, and the menus changed with the seasons.  To be sure, Chef McGrady had me turning pages quite avidly from the start of Eating Royally, where, opposite to an autographed “to Darren with love” photo of a blue-jeaned Princess Diana, he tells of landing his plum gig in the Royal Kitchens – can’t you just imagine the damp palms and rapid heartbeat, as he went for that job interview?!

Sometimes you just need to bake up a fancy treat in a hurry, right?

Well, here’s a recipe that’s bailed out this disorganized cook more than once! In fact, just this past week I managed to forget all about our beekeepers’ potluck supper until that very day… and hadn’t been to the grocery store, so there wasn’t a big choice of exotic ingredients in the pantry.

Jelly cakes to the rescue!

p.s. If you’re wondering about my battered old mini-muffin pans — those were a great frugal find, picked up for mere pennies when a local cooking school yard-saled their old kitchen gear!

And now, on to the recipe…

Lemon Jelly Cakes

¾ cup butter
¾ cup sugar
1 beaten egg
1 Tbsp lemon juice
pinch of salt
1½ cups flour
jam or jelly

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Cream together butter and sugar. Add the beaten egg, lemon juice, salt, and flour.

Shape 1 slightly rounded teaspoon of the dough into (greased and floured) miniature cupcake tins.

Make a dent and fill with jelly.

Bake about 12 minutes at 350°F, watching after 10 minutes to make sure that the cakes don’t get brown. Cool slightly before removing from the tins.

Tips:

• One teaspoon of dough doesn’t sound like much, but take my word for this! It’s important not to use too much dough — each muffin cup should be no more than one-third full, because these will rise a great deal.
• Grape jelly or high-bush cranberry jelly are my favourites, because they’re not overly sweet and have a good strong flavour to balance out the lemon cake part — but a nice strawberry jam is a good alternative, too.

Here’s a great quick idea for a kid’s birthday cake — a Building Block Cake, spotted on the Betty Crocker website.

Just cut a basic single-layer cake into squares and rectangles, then frost the blocks in bright colours.

The secret to the LEGO effect? Too easy — those are slices of marshmallows, under the frosting!

Our family often serves this War Cake on Remembrance Day as a reminder of what life was like on the home front in the Second World War. But this heavy dark cake is a tasty family favourite. In fact, my sister liked it so well that as a child she always demanded it for her birthday cake!

War cake recipes vary, but they are traditionally butter-less, egg-less, milk-less, and sometimes sugarless, reflecting those difficult days when many “luxury foods” were in short supply and prohibitively expensive, or even under wartime rationing controls.

This particular old recipe comes from the well-worn pages of Grandmother’s own handwritten cookbook. It does call for a bit of butter but substitutes brown sugar for the refined white sugar which was hard to come by in Atlantic Canada. It is well-suited to a topping of boiled frosting or whipped cream, but of course Grammie used to serve it plain.

War Cake

Combine and boil for 5 minutes only:

        1 lb (about 2 cups) raisin
        1 cup water
        1 cup dark brown sugar
        1/4 cup lard
        1/4 cup butter
        1 tsp each cinnamon, ginger, ground cloves
        1/2 tsp salt

Let cool to lukewarm, then sift together and add:

        2 cups flour
        2 tsp baking soda

Flavour with vanilla or brandy, if desired.

Pour into a well-greased pan, about 8″ square.

Bake at 325°F for about one hour, or until a toothpick inserted into the middle of the cake doesn’t come out sticky.

Into every woman’s life comes a need for a special sweet treat, something impressive you can whip up in a hurry. Like, when you suddenly learn that your in-laws are coming for tea, and they’ll be here in an hour!

You can make an emergency trip to the bakery (if there’s time, and if it’s open), or you can scrabble around in the kitchen cupboards and use what you have on hand to make an ordinary dessert a bit more fancy, or some combination of the two. Keeping just a couple of key ingredients on hand for domestic emergencies will make it that much easier.

Here are a few of our favourite sweets to put together quickly for company:

• Drizzle a bit of coffee-flavoured liqueur over a dollop of vanilla ice cream, and top it with a few curls of dark chocolate. Or try a splash of creme-de-menthe on lime sherbet, garnished with a citrus twist.
• Fancy up a basic spice cake (got a mix?) or some store-bought shortbread cookies with a simple caramel icing
• Serve up a trendy Dessert Soup in goblets or small pretty bowls. Blend 1 cup of fresh or frozen strawberries with 1 cup of plain yogurt, chill, and mix with 2 cups of ginger ale just before dishing it out.
• Chunks of store-bought pound cake are made special with Venetian Cream, also known as Zabaglione — an astonishingly easy and versatile Italian custard.
• Don’t underestimate the power of a nice cheese plate!
• Skip the dessert and serve a really good perked coffee (whipped cream and cinnamon sprinkles are optional) with homemade chocolate-dipped spoons for stirring.

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