Britain's Queen Elizabeth II is “definitely a chocoholic”, her former chef Darren McGrady has revealed.
Mr McGrady also said that Gordon Ramsay could never be a chef at Buckingham Palace “because of his ego”.
He spent more than a decade cooking for the queen at Buckingham Palace and Balmoral before moving to Kensington, where he cooked for Princes William and Harry, and Diana, Princess of Wales, before her death in 1997.
“The Queen was definitely a chocoholic, she loves dark chocolate," Mr McGrady said.
"I used to make a mousse au chocolate et cafe, a dark chocolate mousse, and I added in some real espresso coffee to intensify the flavour. So that was on the menu quite a bit at Buckingham Palace.
“We also used to make a coffee mousse. At banquets when the queen was entertaining, the most popular dessert on the menu often was an ice cream bombe.
"We did a bombe glacee coppelia, which was coffee ice cream filled with praline and decorated with whipped cream and liquor coffee beans.”
He revealed that there were no food tasters during his time in serving the monarch, so other security measures were relied on instead.
“With the queen, we would prepare 150 plates and the queen’s page would come in and pick one at random," Mr McGrady said.
"That way, if you were to tamper with the food you would have to tamper with all of them.
“From our perspective, it also meant we had to get the same standard across every plate, not knowing which one the queen would be eating.
“There was quite a regimented process and the queen stuck with a lot of the same dishes throughout the week.
"If we had a new recipe for a dish, we would have to send the whole recipe up to the queen and she would look through it."
Mr McGrady, who is based in Dallas, Texas, and has cooked for five US presidents, was adamant that Ramsay would never have been fit to work at Buckingham Palace, “not because he couldn’t cook — he is an amazing chef — but because of his ego.
“Yelling and shouting as William and Harry walked in the room would have been a big no-no and wouldn’t have lasted long.”
His career had a humble start. One of his first jobs in the royal kitchen in 1982 was “making food for the royal corgis and when I got to Balmoral, peeling carrots for the queen’s horse. You really start at the bottom."
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This article is part of a guide on where to live in the UAE. Our reporters will profile some of the country’s most desirable districts, provide an estimate of rental prices and introduce you to some of the residents who call each area home.
