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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. 

eating-royally-darren-mcgrady 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?)

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