5 of Queen Elizabeth's Eating Quirks, According to the Royal Chef
Darren McGrady, the British royals’ former personal chef, has spilled the tea.
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When you’re the Queen of England, with a staff attending to your every want and whim, it’s probably difficult to keep certain things secret. Your particular food likes and dislikes, for instance, are likely eventually going to trickle out.
Consequently, we already know a lot about Queen Elizabeth II’s modest breakfast habits and the favorite dessert she likes to eat every day as well as her preferred brand of bottled water and the food she really can’t abide. (Hold the garlic, please.)
It turns out, however, there is yet more to learn about the eating habits of the 93-year-old monarch; Darren McGrady, who for 15 years served as the British royal family’s personal chef, has spilled the tea in a video on Delish. Here are a few things we learned:
- She is a proud standard bearer for the locavore movement. Well, maybe not formally, but McGrady reveals in the video that the Queen loves eating vegetables and venison grown or hunted on her own Sandringham or Balmoral estates when she’s spending time on them.
- Queen Elizabeth II likes small portions but is not a weight watcher, favoring dishes that are loaded with cream, butter and fat. “Calories didn’t really matter,” McGrady said.
- The Queen is not a very experimental eater (not “a real foodie,” as McGrady put it), sticking with the same tried-and-true dishes over and over again and carefully vetting the ingredients of any new dishes her chefs seek to introduce. “She eats to live; she doesn’t live to eat,” McGrady said.
- Queen Elizabeth enjoys a tipple now and again. Among her favorite alcoholic beverages are Champagne, the German wine Gewurztraminer, a gin and Dubonnet, and port.
- The Queen was a marvel of self-discipline, McGrady says, able to restrict herself to just one teensy piece of chocolate cake with her afternoon tea and save the rest of the cake for the next day.
Photo: GettyImages
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