DELICACIES AND SECRETS OF THE QUEEN ELIZABETH II KITCHEN

They're the most famous family in the world. They're used to the very best of everything, and that includes their food. Ask Graham Newbold. For six years, he was a royal chef. When you're cooking for the royal family, things have to be done fairly simple but elegantly. Things not too spicy, things not too cold, which could be harsh on the teeth. Portions not too big, portions not too small. They wouldn't like to be over-faced, and they wouldn't like to think that food had been wasted. There's no room for error. You can't really make mistakes. That's why everything's so well-practiced and rehearsed. They like things done a certain way, whether it's right or whether it's wrong. And that's the way they like it, and that's what you've got to do. Windsor, the royal's favourite place for entertaining. This is the drink's reception before the Queen's Royal Jubilee Garter lunch. On occasions like this, the guests are often served a stalwart of royal cuisine, the canapé. Canapés are something that royal chefs know a great deal about. There's one particular reception during the year where a team of some 20 chefs have to produce 15,000 of these. 15,000 canapés take three days to make, and they're all consumed within two hours. Nobody else in the land really has so many servants waiting on the table, or such large dinners. I mean, for instance, it's not uncommon for 140 people to sit down to dinner in St George's Hall at Windsor. The footmen actually walk along the table with cloth dusters on their feet, measuring out the distance between each place. Every knife and fork is placed in a specific manner, and what is nice is, even at the grandest occasion, however busy she is, the Queen, maybe 20 minutes before the first guests arrive, she will go in and she will check that everything is just right. It does look magnificent. It must be a tremendous temptation for some people to remove a gold spoon. When the guests sit down to eat, it means things must be hotting up in the kitchen. It takes an awful lot of planning, time, effort, hard work. Preparation starts the day before, and all 20 chefs get involved. It gets a little bit busy, but not quite as hectic as what a restaurant kitchen would get. It's all very well organised, so on the day, everything runs like clockwork. And this particular main course is called Duck Biggerard. Biggerard means with orange and lemon sauce. It's a particular favourite of the Queen and the Royal Family. The Queen's wine collection is extensive, and kept in perfect condition by the yeoman of the Royal Wine Cellar. But among the vintage labels are a few surprises. Astonishingly, one of her favourites is Matus Rose, which a lot of people sneer at as a nothing wine from Portugal. It's a very good champagne. It used to be Verve Clicquot, which really is a major treat in itself, but now with all the economies, it comes from Tesco's. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the choice of Matus Rose. Buckingham Palace is known as BP to the staff. To the Royal Family, it's the head office, and where all royal catering is organised. Anything to do with food is taken care of by F Branch. From the ordering, to the stores, to the cooking of it, and all the administration, all belongs to F Branch. A full state visit like this for the French President involves a banquet cooked by all twenty royal chefs. Fifty butlers are on hand to tend the table. The food is served on solid gold platters, and eaten off the finest china. The washing up is done, very gingerly, by hand. But what happens when the Queen is home alone? Well when the Queen's on her own, she will actually eat in her dining room, on a card table, possibly in front of the television, and she'll serve herself from a sideboard. And if she's not going out to lunch, she does the same at lunchtime. For lunch I'm making the royal version of fish and chips, which is called haric-san-jamun. King George VI used to send out for fish and chips, and he and the Queen Mother, and the Queen and Princess Margaret used to sit and eat fish and chips and listen to the radio. Look at those chips, are those the smallest chips in the world, or what? And they thought that was an absolute gas, I mean that was a wonderful sort of bohemian thing to do. The portion size of the fish is really small, and it's done in breadcrumbs, and you could have salt and vinegar or tartar sauce or something like that, but beurre sauce is equally as nice. It's made with egg yolks, butter, a vinegar and white wine reduction, and some freshly chopped tarragon. There you go, fish and chips fit for a queen. Royal cooking and catering and the way they eat meals hasn't altered that much in the last hundred years. I know it seems incredible, but the way the royal family lived in Victorian times is not that different to now. It wasn't just the senior royals Graham had to cook for. First of all you need some cabbage. Next you need some freshly boiled lamb's liver, finely chopped. The final ingredient is some well cooked long grain rice. It just needs a really good stir, and that's it, it's ready to serve. For half a century, Her Majesty's yacht Britannia was the royal family's floating palace. Above decks, the Queen played host to the most powerful people in the world. The most important were invited for dinner, served in the ship's state dining room, and in a style every bit as grand as at Windsor or Balmoral. Here I've got a few mementos of a trip I did with the Queen and the Duke to Australia on the royal yacht. That's a picture on board ship with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and all the household staff. I'm right in the middle, at the back in the shade. Every trip that you go on, you're given a group photograph which is a souvenir for yourself to keep. When you go on the royal yacht, you're issued with a booklet of rules and regulations, what you're allowed to do, what you're not allowed to do. This is a typical evening's entertainment. There's always a band of royal marines, so wherever they travel the royal family, they could always have music. These are menus from the royal yacht, they're just the same as any other palace. Well, the royal yacht's a floating palace anyway, and it's similar sort of food which we get at Buckingham Palace. The only difference being there's a picture of the royal yacht on the actual menu card. By the time she left service in 1997, Britannia had sailed more than a million miles and visited 135 countries. On a typical voyage, five chefs from the royal household would travel too. It was fantastic, travelling the world. If I hadn't worked for the royal family, I would never have had that opportunity. This is the cabin where I used to stay. It's cabin number 45. It's not a bad size cabin compared to what some of the naval personnel had to stay in. Dared to stay like three or four people in a room this size. Being household staff, we had our own cabin. Not quite the height of luxury, but it's adequate, I think. He was so tired at night that he could have slept on a clothesline, to tell you the truth. Britannia is now on permanent show in Edinburgh, and the royal galley is still in full working order. Today, I'm going to cook a rack of lamb du Barry. It's one of the main courses off a royal menu. All the royal menus are written in French. This is carré d'agneau, which means rack of lamb, and the garnish du Barry, normally anything du Barry, is with cauliflower. This time, it's with cauliflower cheese, and it's with French beans, barrel-shaped roast potatoes, and it's served with a red wine and rosemary gravy. The first job is to do the rack of lamb, so first of all, just season it with a little bit of salt and pepper. This is English lamb. When the royal family are at Balmoral in Scotland, there's a special type of lamb that they have. It's soy. It's called soy sheep. It's quite a nice flavored lamb. Right, this goes into the hot pan. We want to seal the meat on the outside. We don't want the bones to burn in the oven, so just wrap a little bit of tinfoil around. That'll take between 20 minutes to half an hour. It depends on the size of the rack of lamb. The royal galley, it's not the biggest kitchen in the world. It gets a little bit cramped, and it gets very hot when you're cooking in the tropics. It can be quite difficult when you're at sea cooking. If it's really, really rough, you would be confined to your quarters, and you wouldn't really be able to cook, and then the royal family, they would be airlifted off. Even in the tropics, the royal family insist on familiar favorites to eat, like the humble roast potato. Chateau potatoes, they're classically supposed to have seven sides. They're just quite difficult, because they're quite fiddly. I've had some great times on here. You do feel a bit sad, actually, coming back on here, because I used to like it when I was at sea. So food on board Britannia was just like back home. But when the royals ventured ashore, it was a different story. Well, when the queen's on tour, and she goes to some very exotic places, as you know, she obviously will have to eat the food of the country, and she has been presented with some fairly exotic and strange dishes, as indeed they all have. Take this occasion in Tonga, where his royal hungriness, the king, all 28 stones of him, laid on a huge feast. A day of sumptuous Polynesian hospitality. Watermelons, sweet potatoes, crayfish, and 400 suckling pigs, slaughtered especially for the occasion. The queen was offered her very own suckling pig, which she managed to decline politely. But things got slightly trickier on a trip to Central America. I remember in 1985, she was in Belize, and she was going to be served a rat for dinner. In fact, it was something that the Belizeans called a coniculus pacca, which is a jibnut. But when you actually look at the definition of what that is, that means it's a rat. Great big long thing. She really pushed her food around the plate that night. Back on Britannia and that rack of lamb. The red wine and rosemary sauce is now underway. So this sauce, this has been made with onions, carrots, celery, and leek. You then add tomato puree, sprinkling of flour, red wine, half a bottle should do it. The next stage is to add some beef stock. You then add the bones from the lamb, which have been browned off. Three spigs of rosemary, and then I need to leave that to simmer. The royals enjoyed lamb cooked on board Britannia, and learned to be wary when apparently offered it elsewhere. Take this feast on a Middle Eastern trip. They were served this exotic Arabian feast with all sorts of strange things, mostly meat. You couldn't quite tell. And of course the great tradition is that you serve the guest of honour sheep's eyes. I didn't see Diana touch any. It was a great joke that would she or wouldn't she. Diana just sort of got out of it beautifully, charmingly by just giggling. I'll now just do the extra fine beans. Top and tail them, just take the bottoms off. And then it will be cut in half. It's quite important for the royal family, because if there's an important dinner, can't be seen with beans hanging out of your mouth. So it's got to be quite delicate. A meeting with the Pope in 2000 was all smiles, but there was outrage in the Italian press when it emerged that the Queen had made it known that she wouldn't eat pasta, tomato sauce or garlic. Oh, no, the Queen doesn't like anything like that. She's very English in her taste. I think it's a fairly obvious reasons that if you're talking to somebody, the last thing you need is sort of swathes of garlic breathed all over you. I quite agree with the Queen. She's got impeccable taste. Garlic and onions should be abolished. The Italians didn't realise that Her Majesty had also said non grazie to the local mineral water. She doesn't trust the local water at all, not even the bottle variety. And she takes crates and crates of Malvern water with her. She likes her tea made with Malvern water, because she can't run risks of getting ill anywhere and ruining the tour. Usually these tours are planned two or three years in advance. So, you know, for that reason, she doesn't eat seafood when she's abroad, because, you know, it's a bit risky. The state visit to China in 1986 brought a worried look from Her Majesty. And it wasn't just the prospect of chopsticks. On her plate was that favourite Chinese delicacy, the slimy sea slug. Things they do for England. Graham is making a cheese sauce for the cauliflower du Barry. No cheddar here, just freshly grated gruyere. The thing that probably sticks out in my mind about cooking on board was the long days. Used to have to be up at six o'clock in the morning, start work for half six, prepare royal breakfast. Then after that, royal lunch, afternoon tea and then dinner. Didn't really get a break until maybe 10 o'clock at night. And when you're on board for maybe a month at a time, it can be really hard work. Royal food is always labour intensive. For example, you couldn't just serve any old cauliflower cheese. There has to be a twist. So now what I've got to do is prepare the du Barry garnish for the lamb. And it's the cauliflower fleurette and you get a nice clean white napkin. Just place it inside and squeeze it. And it takes out most of the moisture. And you also end up with a nice neat like miniature cauliflower. So there's one. It's a lot of effort for a piece of cauliflower, but I think it's worth it in the end presentation wise. At this stage, you have to get everything out on time. Timing has got to be absolutely spot on. You can't have the queen waiting. Now we've got our cheese sauce. So what I need to do now is just nappe the top of the cauliflower. Nappe just means cover them. So they're just like individual miniature cauliflowers. This is cauliflower cheese a la Royale. Sprinkle a little bit of parmesan cheese on top. And that has to go under the grill. The queen mum in Venice, a chance too good to miss for the paparazzi. The gondolier with the red hat band approached. The cornetto was exchanged. He got a handshake. So did his mate. And the object was whisked away by the entourage who didn't think it as funny as everyone else did. The Italians may be good at making ice cream, but the royal chefs know a thing or two as well. There's nothing wrong with ice cream out of a tub, but it's much, much better for you if you can make your own. So now I've got 10 egg yolks. Now I need two pints of thick cream. This cream would normally come from the royal dairy. It's the thickest cream I've ever seen, the Winsor cream. And to that, I will add five ounces of sugar. So what we have to do now is bring this to the boil. So now the cream's come to the boil. Just pour it onto the egg yolks. But you've got to whisk all the time and pour it on slowly. Once it's thoroughly mixed in, you have to pour the mixture back into the pan and just reheat it slowly, just so it thickens a little and coats the back of the spoon. When that's cooled down, I'm going to add the plum puree that I've made. And I've made this by stewing two pounds of garden plums with a little bit of lemon rind, some sugar and a drop of water just to make a nice thick sauce like that. That's the royal ice cream machine. I've got my plum ice cream in there now. It's freezing it and at the same time, it's whipping it as well. This is how the royals have their ice cream presented all the time, the royal family. Time to finish off the main course. The presentation is very important, so I'll just discard the end couple of pieces of lamb and just get the ones from the middle with the real nice eye of meat. When you're being entertained by the royal family, I think that people have very high expectations, so it's got to be absolutely perfect. That lamb's lovely and pink, lovely and juicy, and now it's ready to serve. These aren't terribly big portions because the royal family quite often eat five meals a day. It's better to eat everything that you've got on your plate and ask for a little more if you want some rather than leave some. That's the etiquette. Just drizzle a little bit of the sauce over and there we have roast saddle of lamb du Barry à la royale. Being on the royal yacht was really hard work. I've never been at sea before, so I liked it. Occasionally, the royal family would go out for lunch, maybe to a government house or something, so you got a break then and got to have a look around. It was an exciting time. Every summer, the queen and her family head north to Scotland. Royal chef Graham Newbold used to join them. More often than not, I would come in mid-July for between six to ten weeks, and that would be to look after and cook for the royal family at Balmoral. Everything would be shipped up from Buckingham Palace. It would be packed up by the kitchen staff, all the kitchen equipment, and then it would be put in army trucks, and the army trucks would travel overnight. Balmoral is a throwback to a culinary age long since gone. Balmoral is full of antlers. They seem to be everywhere, sprouting at you. Whatever the season is, whether it's salmon fishing or stalking or shooting, they will eat what they kill. There's vast vegetable gardens, and the queen has a herd of highland cattle, so they're very self-sufficient. The royal family could choose anywhere in the world to holiday, but since Queen Victoria's time, they've always headed for Deeside. They forged a unique culinary connection with the glen and its people. Take the tiny village of Ballater. It seems every shop here has a warrant to supply the castle. The village bakery is amongst them. Bread from here is sent up to what's called the big house. A loaf, or rather the middle of one, is needed for the first meal of the day. This is a crouton that I'm making. It's to serve the poached eggs on for royal breakfast. Cut it out like that, and then you take a smaller cutter, and cut inside like that, but you don't go right through with the little one. And when it's fried, scoop out the middle, so it looks like an empty vol-au-vent case, and the poached egg will just nestle on top of it. And what goes with the queen's poached egg? Well, this is Michael Sheridan's butcher shop in Ballater. He's a royal warrant holder and supplier of the royal sausages. We do a huge range of sausages. We do a beef and Guinness, we have pork and pineapple, we do pork and apple. Venison's a very popular one as well. So what's the secret of sausages fit for a queen? The finest mincemeat isn't the only thing you need. Special blend of seasonings. A good quality breadcrumb. A little water, make it bind together. It's now sausage meat. The sausages are going to Valmoral exactly the same sausage as you can buy in the shop. Oh, and another thing, the casing. It's a traditional one, not for the faint-hearted. Some people use a synthetic skin, but we like to stick to a natural product, which is from a sheep's finner, which gives you one huge line of sausage, which you then make into links of sausage. These sausages are definitely fit for any king or queen. So even in Scotland, a full English breakfast. But even this choice doesn't satisfy all the royals. Prince Charles, he has a wealthier option. He would have homemade bread, a bowl of fresh fruit, fresh fruit juices. And wherever the prince goes in the world, the breakfast box goes with him. There's six different types of honey, some special muesli, there's dried fruit, and anything that's a bit special that he's quite fussy about. 40 miles from Valmoral in Aberdeen, the morning's catch is being unloaded. Fish suppliers from across Britain bid for the fish, but among the crowd is a man who is less concerned with the price. What I'm looking for in the market is top quality, real fresh fish. Quality is not there, I will not buy the fish. Ken Wartmow is a fishmonger to the royals. What we've got here is whiting. It's a lovely fish, and it's one of the fish I send up royal b-side. What I'm looking for is firm flesh, and also the very bright eyes that the fish should have. Also, the other feature should be bright red gills, rather than a greyish colour. These are excellent condition fish. From his small shop in Aberdeen, Ken has supplied fish to Valmoral for 16 years. On the wall inside hang royal warrants for the Prince of Wales. And the late Queen Mother, who had her own house on Deeside, called Burke Hall. One of the favourite dishes of Her Majesty the Queen Mother was Merlin on Calais. It was based on this fish, which is whiting. Take the fish and remove its back fins, its lower fins on the underside, and clean the inside out and take out the gills. The next step is then to do a little incision up the back of the head. We then remove the skin totally down one side, and then down the other side like such. And we then land up with the finished product, which we then curl the tail of the fish into its mouth, and the dish becomes Merlin, meaning French for whiting, en colère, meaning in anger. It's a dish that's either baked in the oven or can be poached and then served up with a drizzle of white sauce around the fish. But there's one fish that's really synonymous with Royal Deeside, and particularly Prince Charles, and that's the salmon. Prince Charles used to go fishing around five o'clock in the evening for a couple of hours, maybe till about seven o'clock. Although he's a fantastic fisherman, there were times when he never used to catch a fish, so I would always have him sparing the larder just in case. If Prince Charles was successful in catching a salmon, he used to bring it into the kitchen and we would discuss the method of cooking. With a salmon of such quality straight out of the river, I think it's best not to spoil it. Just plain poached with a nice sauce hollandaise, and that's fantastic. The Queen maintains a royal tradition of having a piper to play her into dinner whenever she's at Balmoral. Graham is cooking at Faske House, the country seat of the Gladstone family nearby. So first of all, you have to take off the head by going behind the fin. Then lift up the belly, and you have to press your knife against the backbone. And with the sewing action, just take one side of the fillet off. It's very important to get these small pin bones out because you don't want anyone to get a bone stuck in the throat. The Queen Mother once had a problem with that. The next stage is to take the skin off. Just slide in your sharp knife underneath the flesh and press it all the way down against the skin. So it comes away nice and clean, just like that. I'll now portion it up. There we are. And now the best thing is, we've got to go and cook it. They have such an abundance of it that they restrict the amount of times they eat it each week. It used to be like the staff in the old days, they'd have it written into their contract that you'd only have to eat oysters and salmon twice a week because it was considered peasant food then. And now, of course, it's immensely expensive, particularly wild salmon. A little bit of salt, a couple of grinds of pepper. You have to make sure that the salmon's completely covered with the cooking liquor and that will poach for between seven and ten minutes. The poaching liquor is dry white wine, water, and white wine vinegar with celery, leeks, carrots, and shallots. A bay leaf and peppercorns add flavour. I'm now going to make the hollandaise sauce. What I've done here is separate four eggs. I don't need the whites, I just need the yolks. What I've got in this small pan is a drop of white wine vinegar, some white wine, some sliced shallots, four peppercorns, and a bay leaf. I reduce it down until there's only a spoonful of liquid left and we add that to the egg yolks. And that's the flavouring for the hollandaise sauce. Why we do it over boiling water is to cook the egg through and to make it nice and fluffy. It's what we call a sabayon in the trade. And then once the sabayon's nice and fluffy, then I'll add some clarified butter. Clarified butter is butter that's been melted slowly and it's just the fat that you want from the top. A squeeze of lemon juice. Beat that in and that's the hollandaise sauce done. I'll show you how the royal family like the carrots. Take the carrots and lightly scrape them. Most of the vegetables come from Royal Palace's kitchen gardens. The ones at Balmoral are obviously bigger than the ones at Highgrove. Having said that, the Prince of Wales has probably got a better variety of vegetable. I'm now going to finish the salmon off by sprinkling some sand fire around. It's also known as sea asparagus. All you do with that is drop it in water for about one minute and then take it out and add a little bit of butter to it. So there we have a poached fillet of salmon with hollandaise sauce. Cook this dish many times for the royal family. I think they enjoy it especially when they're in Scotland. Scottish salmon, it's the best you can get. For Prince Charles, it's not just salmon that he's particular about. Even when he's in Scotland, for goodness sake, he won't eat the vegetables. He will actually have them brought in from Highgrove. I mean, about 600 miles away daily. Same when he's abroad. Highgrove is the Prince's country estate in Gloucestershire. It's not only his house, it's the place where he puts his most controversial ideas on food into practice. It's true, he does get a lot of pleasure in telling people that the food they're eating has come from the estate. It gives them a lot of pleasure. What happens at Home Farm on the Highgrove estate has made the Prince of Wales Britain's foremost ambassador for organic produce. Home Farm was set up in 1985. The farm is something that he feels passionate about. The more you find out about organic farming systems, the more you realise it's just common sense and good husbandry. He was a very early advocate of this movement, and I can see why. I mean, he thinks it's healthier and he thinks it's much tastier. Large black pigs that we've got on the farm are a rare breed. The Prince of Wales is patron of the Rare Breeds Trust, so we're really doing our bit by keeping a small gene pool of purebred pigs. They are very, very fat, which is why they've become unfashionable. But the bacon that you get from them is absolutely fantastic. It's different to anything you could buy today. Prince of Wales really likes that bacon, I have to say. The Prince has now taken his organic campaign and the produce from Home Farm into the High Street. He donates the profits to his own charitable trust. He is a very rich man, and he gets all his income from the Duchy of Cornwall, and the latest figures show that that was very nearly £8 million last year. So he can afford to have these sort of expensive, fancy ideas which others can't afford. When Graham was asked to be the personal chef to the Prince and Princess of Wales, Highgrove became his weekend home. With so much organic produce on hand, it was an exhilarating job, and the atmosphere was much less formal. If the Prince or Princess, with it being a smaller setup, if they wanted anything different or anything special, they would normally come into the kitchen and speak to you. Diana brought new ideas to the royal kitchens. Soon the talk was of BJPs, or baked jacket potatoes, as they're better known. In this pan I have some Greenland prawns in a cheese sauce. Some of this goes in the bottom. On top of the prawns goes a soft poached egg. You would then take your mashed potato and just pipe it around carefully. The Princess of Wales was a great fan of this type of thing. The Prince of Wales not so much, but he would try them on occasions. Drizzle a little bit of cheese sauce over the egg. Like so. And sprinkle on top a little parmesan cheese. And then these go in the hot oven for 10 minutes. The best way probably is just to have it with a nice avocado salad, with a nice vinaigrette dressing. Even really simple food can be made quite special. Until Diana came along and took her boys to McDonald's, you never, never saw members of the royal family going to fast food joints. Never. But, you know, that's part of normal life, and she wanted to keep her boys in touch with reality. Today, young royals like Prince Harry are often spotted at polo, tucking into the same things as other youngsters. He obviously was looking for something more substantial to eat than the dainty little cucumber sandwiches that his grandma was serving at the pavilion. It's not just any old cucumber sandwich. You have to peel the cucumber. You never serve anything with seeds into the royal family. They've probably never even seen a cucumber seed. The best way to cut the bread for the sandwiches is to just put it in the freezer for about 15 minutes, just so it chills and it's much easier to slice. They particularly like the bread really, really thin. Just a turn of pepper and stack them up so they're perfect. The royal family, when they're having square sandwiches, they always have the corners cut off. It's tradition. It goes back a long time. In the olden days, if you served anything to the monarch that had a point on it, it meant that you was trying to overthrow the throne. So they still do it with the sandwiches. Graham Newbold was personal chef to the Prince and Princess of Wales for four and a half years. He went to work for them after helping cook at one of the most famous royal occasions of all. Probably the best souvenir that I have, because it was like the pinnacle of my career working on the royal wedding, is an actual piece of royal wedding cake. There's the actual cake at the bottom and there's the lid for the box. All the world loves a wedding and nothing beats a royal one. The wedding breakfast consisted of quenelles of brill with a lobster sauce. That was the first course. That was followed by breast of chicken, which was stuffed with the lamb mousse, with brioche breadcrumbs, a minted cream sauce and sand fire. While the royal family were leaving Buckingham Palace for St Paul's Cathedral, Graham and the rest of the kitchen crew had their minds firmly focused on the lobster sauce for the starter. There's no need to be scared of lobster. It's dead easy to do. Take the claws off first and then take the head off. The meat's in the tail and also in the claws. It might seem a lot of hassle, but if you want a proper taste in lobster sauce, this is the only way to do it. Lobster sauce is the essence of luxury. Along with the lobster shell go wine, brandy, stock and cream to simmer down before being sieved. The meat from the lobster tail is to be used as a garnish. But first, Graham has a small but vital job to do. In the tail, it's an intestine and you need to get that out with a cocktail stick. You really, really don't want to send on some of the most famous people in the world and you don't want to give them a bad tummy or anything. Outside, the groom was on his way. In the kitchens, they had no time to wave him off. We didn't really have time to think about all the festivities that were going on. It was get knuckled down and you had a job to do. The individual brill mousses are a delicate operation. The fish is blended with egg white and cream and it mustn't separate before being sieved. This is the brill mousse, which I'm now forming into what's known as quenelles. I've still got to prepare the chicken and prepare the lamb mousse and the chicken sauce as well, so it's quite hectic. At most weddings, it's the bride and her mother who make all the decisions. But Lady Diana Spencer had little or no say in the menu for her wedding breakfast. It was a state occasion and the food was chosen by the Queen. This is the lamb mousse that will be used as a filling for the chicken. When this is finished, it will look something like a chicken Kiev but without the garlic, it'll have lamb mousse inside. The bride may not have chosen the menu but she did have the main course named after her. Suprême de volaille, Princesse de Galles. It's not a traditional dish. This particular dish was made especially for the day in honour of the Princess of Wales. It's breast of chicken princess. All I've got here is the lamb mousse that's been put in a piping bag and it's just piped into the envelope. You then place the flattened fillet on top and then fold the ends over so the mousse is totally encased all the way around. Hundreds of millions watch the service on television. Two and a half thousand crammed into the cathedral but only a lucky 120 would sit down to enjoy the wedding breakfast. The royal family use brioche for breadcrumbs which is a fermented bun dough. It's very light. Then just cut the crust off and slice it thin. You can smell the sweetness of the brioche crumbs. I, Diana Francis. Take thee Charles Philip Arthur George. Take thee Philip Charles Arthur George. To my wedded husband. When the blushing bride got the groom's name in a muddle, she won the hearts of a nation. A mistake in the royal kitchens would only place added pressure on the chefs. If anything had been wrong, we would have had some more fish in reserve to start again. We would just have to panic a little bit and work a little bit faster. Here is the stuff of which fairy tales are made. So there we have it. Quenelles of Brill with lobster sauce followed by chicken stuffed with a lamb mousse, a minted white wine sauce and sound fire, buttered new potatoes, sweet corn, broad beans, organic strawberries and wonderful clotted cream from the Duchy of Cornwall. I spent six years with the royal family, two years with the queen and four and a half years with the prince and princess. It's probably one of the best times of my life. It's a real honour to have served them.