The Royal Chef At Home: Easy Seasonal Entertaining

INTRODUCTION “When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, nor social harmony.” – Marie-Antoine Carême –

T here are two things I know: To eat well, you must know how to cook. To live well, you must share your life with others. Now, I don’t profess these maxims to be universally true. They are however true for me. The years I spent working in the kitchens of Buckingham Palace, Windsor and Balmoral Castles cooking for the British royal family taught me the fundamentals of cuisine and trained me as a chef. But being a chef is my job; being a cook is who I am. For me it is about beauty, nourishment, friendship and love. While I like to cook for myself, it’s sharing food with family and friends that brings me the greatest satisfaction.

My first book, Eating Royally: Recipes and Remembrances from a Palace Kitchen, was about my experiences as a chef immersed in a world that is almost unrecognizable today. Modern British royal family life straddles the 19th century to the present, and working for them gave me a perspective on food and entertaining that fused the historical with the contemporary and got to the very heart of cuisine’s place within culture. Dinner parties spanned the gamut, fromglittering state affairs in the grand dining halls at Buckingham Palace to shooting parties held in unheated barns with guests passing around their hip flasks to

anyone who wanted a nip. It was a royal display of the richness of home life. In a decidedly more common vein, I grew up with a mother who loved cooking and entertaining, and my parents often hosted dinners. Mum’s parties were so good that all her friends teased and asked, “Can we give you money for the food and you host all the parties?” With their cut glass cocktail pitchers, sparkling glasses of Babycham with glace cherries in the bottom, andwreaths of cigarette smoke in the air, my parents seemed awfully glamorous to me. My mother looked beautiful, chatting with friends, drink in hand with its

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