A lot has been said about the Queen's favourite food, and the ingredients she has reportedly banned from the palace. But now, royal chef Mark Flanagan has opened up about a recent favourite dish of hers, and it is very exotic. It seems the monarch, 92, has acquired a liking to a popular vegetable soup from the Caribbean – callaloo.
Mark, who has been working at Buckingham Palace since 2002, spoke about the Queen's new favourite dish in Queen of the World, an ITV documentary which airs on Tuesday. After the kitchens were briefly transformed into a centre of Caribbean gastronomy earlier this year, when a group of hospitality workers from the region cooked up a range of new dishes for Her Majesty to try, he said: "A number of Caribbean dishes were particularly well received. The callaloo soup was an absolute sensation. I had email after email telling me that it must now feature more regularly".
© Photo: Getty ImagesMark Flanagan has revealed the Queen's latest favourite dish
The callaloo will be a nice change from her usual favourite dishes. Speaking exclusively to HELLO! in 2016, her former chef Darren McGrady revealed that the Queen usually opts for traditional British and French cuisine, and that she has a soft spot for chocolate.
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She is absolutely a chocoholic," said Darren. "Anything we put on the menu that had chocolate on, she would choose, especially chocolate perfection pie."
"For a main course she loved game, things like Gaelic steak, fillet steak with a mushroom whisky sauce, especially if we did it with venison.
© Photo: Getty ImagesHer Majesty loves chocolate
"For a first course she loved the Gleneagles pâté, which is smoked salmon, trout and mackerel. She loved using ingredients off the estate and so if we had salmon from Balmoral from the River Dee, she'd have that, it was one of her favourites."
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Darren, who worked at Buckingham Palace for 11 years followed by Kensington Palace for four, added: "We used a repertoire of dishes, mainly British and French food. We cooked a lot of traditional French food like halibut on a bed of spinach with a Morney sauce.
"But the Queen never was a foodie. She always ate to live rather than live to eat. Prince Philip was the foodie. He'd want to try any new dishes all the time and got excited about new ingredients whereas the Queen, if we had a new recipe, she'd have to look at the whole recipe before saying, 'Yes ok let's try it'. But for the most part she stuck to the same dishes week in week out."
