In his new cookbook, Cuisine and the crown: royal recipes from Queen Victoria to King Charles III, Tom Parker-Bowles includes recipes for many spectacular dishes, like barigoule artichokes and a smoked haddock soufflé. But the first is surprisingly simple: Queen CamilleIt’s porridge. Parker Bowles, the Queen’s son from her first marriage to Andrew Parker-Bowles, has direct knowledge of the inner workings of the kitchen with which she shares King Charles III. Young Parker Bowles shares some of these details, but otherwise attempts to connect his modern culinary experiences to great chefs and meals from the royal family’s past.

“People will think, oh my God, it’s a middle-aged boy doing this,” he says over a cup of green tea at the Carlyle Hotel, his home base during a recent trip to New York. “I tried to keep it to a minimum with the current king and my mother, having fought it like the plague – the subject of the royal family – for 25 years of writing about food. Sometimes I would mention my mother’s roast chicken, and that would be it. But it’s such a rich vein!

Parker Bowles got into food writing as a columnist at Tatler in 2001, and since then he has turned his penchant for world travel and openness to unusual experiences into a series of books on the subject. “I’ve always been obsessed with food, but I guess when I got fired for the fifth time because I was terrible at a normal job, I suddenly realized I could make a career out of it.” , he explains. “For me, food is the easiest way to get to know someone. Even if you don’t speak Thai or your Spanish is bad, you can still rub your belly and have a meal.

For this book, he looked further afield, including visiting the Royal Archives at Windsor, where he studied the handwritten records of the chefs who served the most famous royal gourmand, King Edward VII. “Food unites us, but it also divides us. Everyone expects the royals of this golden world to eat completely differently from us, and they have done so in the past. In the days of Victoria, Edward and George V, they had the best French food you could ever eat,” he says. “But if you look at the way the king and my mother eat now, it’s very much in line with the rest of us. You no longer have 12 breakfast items, 8 lunch items, and 12 dinner items.

Yet even today’s Queen’s Porridge recipe has a slightly luxurious touch. Parker Bowles says his mother loves adding a little honey from her own hives to Ray Mill, her private family home. The honey is of high quality and what does not make it into the royal breakfast is often bottled and sold at Fortnum & Mason. However, royal life imposed certain limits on her mother’s eating habits. “You can’t really eat a monster southern Thai curry before going out the next day. There can be a risk when you go out to meet 500 people! he said. “It’s the same thing with garlic. My mother doesn’t eat garlic.

He credits his mother’s no-nonsense approach to cooking and his happy childhood for inspiring him to become a food writer. “I grew up in the countryside and my mother was a very good cook. We ate very English food: roast chicken, salmon, trout and game,” he says. Parker Bowles, a chilli obsessive who grows a variety on his London balcony, has admitted his childhood was spice-free, but he champions the cuisine nonetheless. “English cuisine is extremely underrated, because at its best it is very, very simple. To achieve this, you need to have the best ingredients.

He says the queen denies teaching him to cook, but that as a child he learned tricks from his work in the kitchen. “Her scrambled eggs were really good, and she taught me. Even though she said, ‘Oh, I didn’t learn anything,’ she said the scrambled eggs had to be cooked for 20 to 30 minutes,” he adds. She also improvised with her roast chicken. “My mother never had a recipe, she would just collect all the ingredients for a sauce – all the ugly fats too – and put it on the stove. She would throw in a whole lump of double cream and mix it, then go to the garden, get a handful of tarragon, mix it and pour it over the chicken.

He also includes some reminiscences of some of the figures from his parents’ aristocratic era, such as a recipe from Deborah Mitford, the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, which he remembers as “at once terrifying, extremely glamorous, funny and very kind “. » of their meetings when he was a child. “She starts her cookbook by saying, ‘I’ve never cooked in my life, but I talk to chefs a lot,'” he says with a laugh. “She was a great friend of my father and an extraordinary woman. An Elvis obsessive!