Weddings Royal Recipes

'The royal family are steeped in tradition, and throughout history

'the royal tables have showcased culinary excellence.

'In celebration of royal food...'

We know it's the Queen's recipe

because we've got it in her own hand.

'..from the present and the past...'

That is proper regal.

'..we recreate old family favourites...'

Now, the Queen Mother had this really wicked trick with these.

What a mess.

'..we sample royal eating alfresco....'

-Oh, wow!

-That is what you want.

'..and revisit the most extravagant times.'

Pheasant, stag, turkey, salmon,

oysters and turbot dressed in a lobster champagne sauce.

Unbelievable!

'This is Royal Recipes.'

Hello. I'm Michael Buerk, and welcome to Royal Recipes.

This is Audley End, one of Britain's finest stately homes,

built in the style of a royal palace and once owned by a king.

In the splendour of the gardens, halls,

and kitchen of this grandest of country houses,

we'll be recreating the food served at the highest royal tables.

And it all starts here,

with this gem - a royal kitchen maid's cookbook -

the only surviving recipe book of its kind in the Royal Archive.

This is an exact copy of the original,

which is kept at Windsor Castle.

Inside, the recipes of Mildred Nicholls,

who worked at Buckingham Palace in the early 1900s.

And for the first time in over 100 years,

we'll be bringing these recipes back to life.

This time we're cooking for royal weddings,

a day the royal family and all the nation can celebrate

in the most glorious style.

There's pomp, pageantry, tradition.

An event that throughout history has produced

some of the finest royal wedding banquets.

'Today in the royal recipes kitchen...'

You can imagine the royal footman coming in with that.

-Look at that.

-Beautiful.

'..Chef Anna Haugh takes inspiration from a Victorian wedding...'

So, there you have it -

stuffed crown of lamb with salsa verde.

'..the moment baker Fiona Cairns

'was asked to create a royal wedding cake...'

It was the most amazing honour

and I would say the beginning of sleepless nights for me.

'..and Chef Paul Ainsworth showcases a royal wedding favourite.'

I know that Princess Anne had lobster and partridge at her wedding.

Very posh.

In the kitchen wing of this glorious stately home,

we start our celebration of wedding food

with a dish created for Princess Beatrice,

beloved youngest daughter of Queen Victoria.

Hello and welcome to the kitchen wing of the great house,

and with me is top London chef Anna Haugh.

Royal weddings today.

Everybody loves a wedding.

But especially, I think, everybody goes mad for a royal wedding.

Yeah, they're not just great dynastic occasions,

but they're sometimes wild popular celebrations,

and, as far as the royal family is concerned,

something to be marked by an extra special banquet.

I've got the menu card here for the wedding breakfast

for Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria's youngest daughter.

Look at it. 14 courses.

But the one that's interesting us today is this one -

"Les cotelettes d'Agneau a l'Italienne,"

which I suppose is Italian lamb chops.

-Yeah.

-Now, are you going to do that,

or something a bit modern twist to it?

Well, I'm quite inspired by this,

so I've got a few Italian flavours through this

and I'm going to use lamb chops,

but I'm going to do a stuffed crown of lamb with a salsa verde.

Wow. What do you do first?

So, the first thing I'm going to make is the stuffing.

So, in a pan here, cooking kind of slowly, I have some onions

and some garlic.

And to this I'm going to add the Parma ham...

You need to crisp up your Parma ham,

which just smells delicious as it's caramelising now,

and I'm going to add in porcini mushrooms.

-Everything Italian.

-Yeah.

-Everything Italian.

-Give that a little bit of a stir.

OK, so this is pretty much ready to go now.

I would put it into a bowl to cool down,

so that we can mix it with the breadcrumbs.

Essentially, something like this is what you need.

-Yeah.

-So, I'm going to take a little bit of cheese,

Parmesan cheese to go in there.

-Parmesan, of course.

-Yes.

And then I'm going to slowly add some crumbs.

-There's going to be bags of flavour in there.

-Oh, absolutely.

I'm going to add just a little bit of olive oil to this,

just to bring it together.

-What, to give it some sort of...?

-Just to bring it together

because we want to be able to kind of squeeze it

into the centre of the lamb.

You want to be careful when you add things like that,

any wet ingredients to stuffing, you know,

-stuff your stuffing...

-MICHAEL LAUGHS

-OK...

-We wouldn't want that.

Next, I'm going to tie the lamb.

I'm interested in how you do this

-because you're going to make it into a crown, aren't you?

-I am.

But, first of all, I'm going to season it.

What we need to do is turn this around.

I promise you, Michael, I know what I'm doing.

You do, you do, you do.

Just about.

-Yeah.

-So if I hold it like that...

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-Perfect.

And then I will...

Because this is the tricky bit, isn't it?

Yeah, this is the tricky bit.

-Trussing.

-Yeah.

The old crown of lamb.

So you just need to kind of try to hook it underneath the bone,

so that it kind of holds in place as it's cooking.

It's quite easy, it's not too hard.

I think even you could manage this, Michael.

I'd be all fingers and thumbs.

Just give it a little bit of a tie.

It's very grand, though, isn't it?

-Yes.

-It makes a wonderful impression when you wheel it on.

-It's quite royal, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-A crown of lamb.

Now you're going to sort that out.

I am. And now I'm going to stuff the centre

with this fabulous Italian stuffing.

-That looks good. It smells wonderful, doesn't it?

-Yeah.

And you don't want the stuffing to be too wet.

You kind of want it to be fairly dry

because you want it to be able to absorb,

to have the spare kind of dryness

to absorb all the meat juices from this.

So I'm going to give this to you,

pop into the oven at 200 degrees for about 25 minutes.

And when you go out to the oven, will you grab one there,

I've already got it resting.

OK. Right, chef.

You can imagine the royal footman coming in with that.

Look at that.

-Shall I pop it here?

-Look at that. Beautiful.

-Terrific.

So, that looks absolutely perfect.

Perfect. So, next I'm going to make our salsa verde.

So salsa verde means, essentially, green sauce.

In here, we have some chopped parsley, basil and mint.

So, really quite aromatic summer, kind of, feeling herbs.

So we're going to chop our anchovies and our capers to add in there.

What a mixture of flavours it's going to be.

Yeah. Anchovies, I always think,

is like a little secret weapon that you can add to things.

But they're little explosions of taste, aren't they?

Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah.

Terrific.

And then I'm going to slice a little bit of garlic because, I mean,

we can't have salsa verde without some nice little slivers of garlic.

I didn't think Queen Victoria had travelled abroad much at all,

but I think she went to Italy a couple of times. Florence, I think.

Oh, I would imagine she went to Florence.

-Yes.

-Beautiful Florence.

And then last I'm going to add a little spoon of Dijon.

-Anna, why?

-Dijon's got a nice little kind of kick to it, acidity,

which I think is quite important here.

But also a bit of pepperiness in there, you know.

And now all we need to do is place our lamb...

-Oh, be careful.

-..onto its serving platter.

-Well done.

-Here we are.

Carefully does it, Anna.

-A crown for the crowned heads, I suppose.

-Yeah.

I'm just going to put a little bit of the salsa verde

-all around here.

-You're actually putting it on the...

Well, because that means you get a bit of flavour

on each kind of lamb chop.

So there you have it -

stuffed crown of lamb with salsa verde.

-How do you attack this?

-Well, I'm going to carve it.

-You're not just going to rip all of them out?

-No.

Oh, look at that.

Look at that! That looks beautiful.

Now, do you want to grab yourself some tools there to be able to...

-Oh, I will, I will.

-..cut into this.

-There you go. I'm just going to pick it up.

-Go on.

Oh, yes, please do.

Mm! Oh.

The meat's wonderful. The stuffing...

And the salsa verde, I think that's...

That's a real flavour of the Mediterranean, but...

the lamb is terrific.

Mm! You know, Princess Beatrice...

Excuse me a second. ANNA LAUGHS

Princess Beatrice had 14 dishes at her wedding breakfast...

..but this must have been the winner of all of them.

'Not just a winning dish, but a crowning glory.

'The Victorians knew a thing or two about creating a real spectacle

'at a wedding.'

That's certainly true of the wedding cake.

as historian Dr Annie Gray explains.

It was Queen Victoria who helped to set us on the path

towards wanting show stopper wedding cakes.

So I've come here to rural Leicestershire to meet Fiona Cairns,

so that we can find out together

exactly how influential Queen Victoria's cake

and those of her children were in helping to create what today

we would think of as a right royal masterpiece.

Luxury cake maker Fiona Cairns made

the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's wedding cake in 2011.

-Hello, Annie.

-Fiona.

-Do come in.

And she went back to the history books to begin her design.

When Victoria and Albert married in 1840

the world was fascinated,

and pictures of the wedding circulated across the Empire.

It must have been really interesting from a sort of public point of view

because Queen Victoria was a character in whom

there was so much public interest,

so when she got married and there was this cake and there were

illustrations of it...

Here we have an illustration.

It was huge, wasn't it?

Three yards across.

-Yeah.

-That's huge!

-I don't think this really does it justice, does it?

-No, it doesn't.

The cake reportedly weighed 300 pounds.

While the public couldn't copy the size,

the design helped set trends that continue today.

The use of white icing, or royal icing as it became known,

was unusual at the time.

Victoria's love of extravagant decoration

included very specific flowers,

and Kate Middleton continued the tradition

by choosing 17 varieties of flowers.

Each flower was made by hand.

It should come away... That's it.

And then, using your cocktail stick,

thin the petals out.

-That's it.

-Oops.

In nature, they're always slightly different, so it's not an excuse,

I just think that they actually look better.

-Yeah.

-It's more natural.

It's very fiddly, this, isn't it?

-It really is.

-You've just got to be very precise.

That's beautiful. Your first orange blossom.

Altogether, Fiona made 900 flowers,

each variety adding symbolism.

Myrtle, which was carried in all the royal bouquets

since Queen Victoria.

Lily of the valley, which was so prominent for

Kate and William's wedding,

and was on the top of the wedding cake.

And then we surrounded the entire base of the cake

with the ivy leaves,

which mean fidelity, friendship, marriage.

Fiona has been creating bespoke cakes for over 25 years,

along with design director Rachel Eardley.

But a royal cake commission is something rather special.

I've got to ask,

what happened when you got the call to make William and Catherine's wedding cake?

Sends shivers down my spine now, I must say.

-Yes, it was...

-It was the most amazing honour

and I would say the beginning of sleepless nights for me.

Catherine said, "Could you please go into Buckingham Palace to see where

"the cake will actually sit?"

When they showed us around,

they thought it would be nice on a Queen Anne table,

and we had to explain that it would be

the weight of a good man, really.

And the royal couple cut the eight-tiered cake

at the wedding lunch,

where guests drank champagne

and enjoyed another royal favourite - canapes.

What you really need at a wedding buffet are canapes...

-Yep.

-..of course.

What's the rule of thumb?

Minimum of probably seven per person, for a reception.

Gosh! Well, at the royal wedding breakfast

they have a lot more than that.

17,000 canapes at Charles and Camilla's...

I heard that it was 10,000 at Will and Kate's.

Exactly. I mean, some of them...

You know, eggs and cress sandwiches?

That isn't very imaginative, is it?

-I know. But who doesn't love egg and cress sandwiches?

-All right, all right.

What they did have was miniature Cornish pasties.

He's the Duke of Cornwall, of course.

Miniature Cornish pasties.

Mm. What are these other two?

Well, I believe these are from Will and Kate's wedding.

So we have duck liver pate here with cornichons,

and honey and wholegrain mustard glazed sausages.

Why do they put sausages in goo?

-Oh, everybody loves a bit of honey and mustard.

-Oh, OK.

Now what are you going to do?

You're going to do one from Kate and William's wedding.

Yes, I am. I'm going to do asparagus and watercress mini tartlets.

So these are like mini little quiches.

So the first thing that I'm going to do is make the custard.

So, I take the watercress and put it into a blender with the cream.

-Got to be cream.

-Yes.

And then we're just going to pulse that.

Good British ingredient.

Yeah, that was the thing, isn't it?

All of these royal things these days,

they've got to be British ingredients.

And watercress is quintessentially British, isn't it?

It is, yeah. But that's what people want to see.

That's what people want to eat.

-Yeah.

-OK, so I'm going to take this off and pour this into our bowl.

Add the blade, you know, for extra flavour.

Yeah, yeah. A bit of iron.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-Scrape this down.

So, next what I'm going to do is add my eggs.

-How many eggs?

-It's one whole egg and one yolk.

Then I'm going to add Gruyere cheese.

That's Gruyere for the flavour, for the bite.

Yes. There's a lovely kind of a saltiness off the cheese,

which is, I think, quite important.

-A pinch of salt.

-Yeah.

I'm going to give that a little mix.

-OK.

-So I'm just going to slice some asparagus now.

This is, for me, so simple.

There's nothing complicated here.

I mean, the hardest thing is just cutting a bit of asparagus.

Everything else is just...

Yeah, but it wouldn't be a bit of asparagus.

I mean, if you were doing,

even with some other chefs, 17,000...

-(I know.)

-How long does that take?

It takes a long time, and it's all about logistics.

It's all about organisation.

Because you've got...

If you're the chef in charge of a canape party like that,

you've got to have eyes in the back of your head.

So, we're going to spoon these into our tartlets now.

So this is just a nice, crisp short pastry.

Just spooning a nice amount of your mix in here.

I mean, all the work is just done.

It's just so easy.

We're going to pop it into the oven now

for probably about 12 minutes.

That looks really nice, doesn't it?

Now, I'm going to finish these off

with a little bit of asparagus tips to go on top.

So, you'd bake these in the oven,

150 degrees for about 12 minutes.

-So, not too long.

-Not too long.

No, super-quick. They don't take any length of time.

But we already have these ready to go...

-Ah!

-..for the final stage.

-I'm rather glad about that. Final stage? Aren't they finished?

-Final stage. No.

So, on top I'm just going to crumble

just a little bit of feta on top.

And I think it just goes really well with asparagus and watercress.

Now, are these designed to be eaten hot or cold?

Both. That's a very good question, actually.

You can totally eat them hot or cold.

-And there you have it.

-Are you just putting them out for me, or...?

Yes, they're just for you, Michael.

-That looks rather nice.

-Yeah.

Oh, yes. Very nice.

HE CLEARS THROAT

Seven, come on.

-You said seven.

-There's your daily allowance of canapes.

MICHAEL LAUGHS OK. Right.

Go on, have one. Have one. Come on.

Mm!

-You did it the proper way.

-Mm.

-Delicious.

-Really good.

Perfect for a picnic, perfect for a wedding.

Absolutely. What a winner.

Dainty delights for a lunchtime wedding buffet.

And these ingredients really are Britain on a plate -

asparagus and watercress and...

British lobster is another popular choice for a royal wedding breakfast.

Delicious, versatile and what's more,

they're amongst the tastiest in the world,

as Paul Ainsworth has been finding out.

Padstow in Cornwall has a long tradition of lobster potting.

It's home to a small fleet of fishing boats

and to chef Paul.

British lobster is world-class and it tastes delicious.

And I am so lucky in Cornwall I've got it right here on my doorstep.

Paul knows Prince Charles, Prince Andrew and Princess Anne.

Each chose an exquisite lobster dish for their weddings.

But he's got a slightly simpler recipe.

Today, we're going to cook Cornish lobster on top of

a toasted English muffin,

caper butter, delicious poached egg,

and some beautiful dressed watercress.

Right, let's get cracking.

Now, our lobster is out the shell,

I've got a pan on warming.

Meanwhile, I'm just quickly going to make this delicious butter,

and in it we're going to add some capers, some gherkin...

..some shallot,

a spoonful of mustard.

We're just going to take some parsley...

..seasoning...

..and now, very gently,

we're just going to mix all those ingredients together.

We've made our butter, now we're going to roast our lobster.

Butter in the pan...

..straight in...like that.

We're just going to baste that lovely nut-brown butter

and just cook nice and slowly, not too fast.

Now, lobster in the royal household is very popular

and in a lot of recipes

and been served at a lot of banquets and weddings.

In particular in 1973,

I know that Princess Anne had lobster and partridge at her wedding.

Very posh.

We're just going to pull that off to the side now

and just let it rest in the pan.

So, poached eggs.

We've got our eggs ready in the bowl.

Beautiful. Good stir.

Paul poaches the eggs and toasts an English muffin.

OK, we're moments away from plating up.

Muffins are lovely and crispy out the toaster.

Our shallot butter that we made earlier,

just over those lovely hot crispy muffins.

Let it melt right in.

Now our lobster.

Claw, just in half,

this lovely tail.

And you can see in the middle it's just slightly transparent,

which means it's beautifully cooked, resting it on the muffin...

just like that.

Out with our eggs,

just on top of that lovely lobster.

Next, add more of the lobster.

Watercress.

Just look at this.

We just finish it with this lovely butter.

And that right there...

that's what Great Britain is all about.

It doesn't get any better than that.

When it came to the cake ceremony at the most recent royal wedding,

there were two to choose from.

Not only the official cake,

but an alternative chosen by Prince William

because it brought back such happy childhood memories.

It was the chocolate biscuit cake.

And the woman who knows how to make the cake is former chef

to Charles and Diana, Carolyn Robb.

Prince William was seven and his brother Harry four

when Carolyn started working for the royal family.

The biscuit cake was such a hit with the young princes,

William decided he had to have it at his wedding.

When I cooked for Prince William and Prince Harry

when they were small,

I really enjoyed making it with them.

And today, I'm going to have fun doing it with Mandy, my daughter.

This version isn't quite on the scale of the one made for William's wedding.

The first step is melting butter, chocolate drops, cocoa powder,

golden syrup and vanilla.

Now comes the fun bit.

This is the bit Mandy's been waiting for, isn't it?

You get to help me break the biscuits.

Really simple, we have some big chunky bits,

you can have some broken quite finely.

It'll work however you do it.

The royal wedding version contained a staggering 1,700 biscuits.

Just a bit larger than the one William liked to help make.

When Prince William and Prince Harry were small,

they used to enjoy coming into the kitchen and we'd bake things together.

They loved breaking the biscuits and we always used to think of

different things we could mix into the biscuits as well.

Next, Carolyn adds chopped apricots, marshmallows and chocolate chunks.

This recipe is so simple,

anyone and everyone really can make it.

All I'm going to do is neatly cover over the top like that,

and that now goes in the fridge.

As the cake is left to set, Carolyn starts the glaze,

which is made of chocolate and butter.

All I have done here is melt some dark chocolate

and I have some softened butter here,

which I'm going to pop in with the chocolate

and just mix the two together.

Try not to leave any gaps.

And once you've done that, really, the world's your oyster

as to what you do next.

Mandy and I are going to do this together.

Mum, are we doing a castle?

It's a bit like a castle, isn't it?

And this is where children can let their imaginations run free as well.

I think that's enough.

This is a real chocolate extravaganza.

Hey, Anna, look at this. This is Mildred Nicholls' recipe book.

She was a kitchen maid, pastry chef,

in Buckingham Palace in the early years of the 1900s.

But this recipe is a particularly poignant one.

It goes back to the days of Queen Victoria,

who you will remember was married to Prince Albert.

Yeah, and they were very much in love.

Very much in love, but he died at the age of 42, very early.

But every year after that,

Queen Victoria insisted on marking their wedding anniversary

with a big dinner.

And this recipe in Mildred's book comes from

the 57th anniversary dinner of their wedding.

He'd been dead a long time.

And it's called Pouding Sax Weimar.

And you are going to do...

-I'm going to do...

-Mildred's...

-Recipe.

-..recipe out of the book.

-Exactly.

I've never seen a pudding like this before.

So, first of all,

what I'm going to do is the first step

is going to be to whisk my egg whites.

I'm going to put in my sugar and bring them to

nice kind of stiff peaks.

Right.

OK.

Stiff peaks is what you're looking for, is it?

-That's it.

-So, this is ahead of its time, you reckon, this dish?

It's the idea that we don't have flour in this,

that we've actually got these finger biscuits

that have been put into a food processor.

So, these are almost done.

It's rather like the start of a souffle, isn't it?

Well, exactly, that's it. It is quite similar to a souffle.

So this is just some butter and sugar creamed together.

OK, so I'm going to add the chocolate in...

..then my eggs.

And, actually, could you crack me one whole egg there?

-I can do that.

-Thank you.

-Here we go.

-Very helpful.

There we go. What am I doing?

-And then straight in.

-In here?

-Yeah.

-Lovely. Perfect.

-I did that rather well, don't you think? You're a natural. Yeah.

This is a really rich pudding...

-Yeah.

-..and when you think what else they had at that dinner.

"Potage a la cressy, potage..."

There's two soups.

"Quenelles, le saumon en tranches sauce persil."

So, they had salmon and sole and ham and lamb...

They must have starved themselves for a week before it.

I think not, somehow.

And then very similar to when you would be making a souffle,

I'm just going to take a spoon of the egg white

and I'm just going to kind of beat that in to kind of

lighten up this mix, because it is kind of heavyish.

And then you finish with the biggest dollop at the end.

-OK.

-Now, this is a professional technique, is it?

So this creates a lovely, light, light, moist pudding.

I'm going to pop this into a piping bag

so that I can pipe it evenly into each one of the pots.

-Fill it all up.

-That's it,

-all of it.

-It looks rich, it looks gooey,

it's wonderfully speckled with chocolate.

That's it.

And then with a little snip of the scissors...

Yeah.

-Then to pipe in.

-Yeah.

So, you don't want to fill it up all the way,

you just want to kind of leave just a quarter of it free.

-Why?

-This way it's got space to rise up.

-Right.

-And it will rise above the mould as well.

Oh, will it? Oh, right.

-That's going to look really impressive, isn't it?

-Yeah.

Yeah, those little pots are lined with something, aren't they?

Yes, they're buttered.

Well spotted there, Michael.

-No flies on you.

-Nothing gets past me. No.

They're brushed with some butter and then some sugar is rolled around them as well.

Cook these in a tray with some hot water in it,

at 180 degrees for 25 minutes.

Now, you are going to take this to the oven...

-I shall.

-..and you will find some that I've already made

from earlier on and bring them back. Thanks.

-They're safe with me.

-OK.

-Here we go.

Oh, Anna, look at these little babies.

-They have risen the way you said they would.

-Yes.

-There we go.

-They look perfect.

-There we go.

-OK, so, I'm going to make the chocolate sauce.

Now, this chocolate sauce is foolproof.

It's so easy. You have your water,

put it onto a nice high heat and all you add is your sugar...

Yeah.

..your cocoa powder...

Yeah.

..and the trickiest bit of all, add your chocolate...

MICHAEL LAUGHS

..and then you just bring it up to the boil,

and then you have a lovely glossy chocolate sauce.

As simple as that?

Simple as that.

Instant. Well, almost instant.

-Almost instant.

-Yeah.

-OK.

OK.

Just pour some of our chocolate sauce in there.

-That chocolate sauce was really quick and easy, wasn't it?

-Mm.

Shiny and glossy and...

-Let's have a sniff.

-..chocolaty.

-OK, come on.

-Let's see what they look like.

This is the part that us chefs often get very nervous about.

I bet. But it's not going to stick, is it?

You've put butter on the inside.

-Isn't that going to make sure...?

-Hopefully not, Michael.

-OK.

-Oh, wow!

-Beautiful.

Look at that.

A bit of chocolate on the top.

-So...

-Here we have it -

-Pouding Sax Weimar.

-Oh, yes.

Now, you do it first,

I don't want to ruin the confection.

OK.

-Is it done, is it just right?

-Yes, it looks beautiful.

-Excellent.

-Mm!

Get some of that lovely chocolate sauce...

I seem to have got a bigger piece than yours.

It really is... I've never tasted anything like it.

-It is very unique.

-Mm!

Oh!

A pudding with a story of love and loss

to end this programme about the food for royal weddings.

See you next time.