Royal chef shares the dish Queen Elizabeth II ate every day

A former royal chef has shared the one thing that Queen Elizabeth II insisted on eating every day. The monarch reportedly enjoyed the food no matter where she was in the world.

Chef Darren McGrady said that the late Queen would enjoy an afternoon tea of scones, jam and clotted cream. He revealed in his book Eating Royally: Recipes and Remembrances from a Palace Kitchen that Elizabeth II would "always have afternoon tea wherever she was in the world".

"We’d flown out to Australia and were on the Royal Yacht," he wrote. "It was five o’clock in the morning but for the Queen it was five in the afternoon so my first job was making scones."

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It is believed the late Queen liked to alternate between plain scones and fruit scones and would always add jam first when dining on the plain variety. Elizabeth II preferred Earl Grey tea and besides scones is said to have enjoyed chocolate eclairs, fruit cake, banana bread, Victoria sponge cake and chocolate.

A British tradition dating back hundreds of years, afternoon tea usually includes finger sandwiches, cakes, pastries and scones with jam and cream. Afternoon tea is often served on fine china between the hours of 3pm and 5pm, The Express reports.

One of the late Queen's last appearances on TV was when Her Late Majesty shared afternoon tea with a hapless Paddington Bear in a sketch aired at the Platinum Jubilee concert. The video showed the monarch pulling a marmalade sandwich from her handbag.

During the Covid pandemic the Royal Family shared the Palace's recipe for fruit scones, which would regularly be served at Buckingham Palace garden parties. The recipe was posted on the Royal Family Instagram page which said every year at garden parties across the royal residences more than 27,000 cups of tea, 20,000 sandwiches and 20,000 slices of cake are eaten.

In a series of YouTube vidoes, Mr McGrady revealed the late Queen would eat four meals a day, but would only have small portions at breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner. The chef, who served as the late monarch's personal chef from 1982 to 1993, said Elizabeth II would never say if she didn't enjoy a meal, but would note down in a book if she didn't want a dish again.

Elizabeth II also had a sweet tooth, with Mr McGrady describing the late Queen as a chocoholic in a 2016 interview with Hello! magazine. He said: "Anything we put on the menu that had chocolate on, she would choose, especially chocolate perfection pie."

This is a chocolate flan which includes white chocolate, dark chocolate, cream, sugar and cinnamon.