The Royal Family’s controversial Christmas dinner snub is divisive to say the least as it seems one popular festive item isn’t included.
When it comes to Christmas hosting many of us will already be looking into how to style a guest bedroom for Christmas and pulling out our favourite festive recipes. However, Christmas dinner in the Royal Family’s household looks a little different from many people’s, according to a former royal chef. After walking to church in Norfolk in the morning, the Royal Family are understood to return to enjoy a traditional Christmas lunch.
However, Darren McGrady, who worked for the royals for fifteen years, has previously detailed what’s on their yuletide plates - and one popular side dish doesn't get a single mention.
Opening up to the Mail on Sunday in 2017, Darren shared what Christmas with the royals really looks like. According to him, the Royal Family enjoys a very traditional meal which includes turkeys as the meat centrepiece, with several accompaniments.
He mentioned that the turkey is “traditionally from local butcher Scoles in Dersingham” and that it’s “served with mashed and roast potatoes, chestnut or sage and onion stuffing, cranberry sauce and bread sauce”. The vegetables served alongside this spread apparently include the oh-so-festive brussels sprouts, as well as carrots and roast parsnips.
Darren’s list of dishes appears to omit something and indicates the Royal Family’s controversial Christmas dinner sub of pigs in blankets. Traditionally associated with this time of year in particular, for many people Christmas dinner just wouldn’t be right without sausages wrapped in bacon.
Pigs in blankets alongside the choice of turkey, sprouts, cranberry sauce and bread sauce are arguably what transforms a roast dinner into a specifically festive version. It’s not known exactly where the tradition of having pigs in blankets at Christmas originated from, with Metro suggesting the earliest written record of this delicious side dish can be traced back to 1957.
Others have put forward the idea that when it comes to pigs in blankets being included as part of a British Christmas dinner, food writer Delia Smith popularised this in the 1990s. Whenever and however it began, it’s incredibly popular nowadays and so the idea that they’re not eaten by the royals at Christmas could be seen as quite divisive.
Perhaps in recent years their Christmas dinner has changed or it’s possible that given the Royal Family has so many centuries-old traditions, the popularisation of pigs in blankets came a bit too recently for them to have adopted it yet.
Of course, some members of the Royal Family who’ve sometimes spent Christmas with other sides of their family or friends might well have enjoyed pigs in blankets alongside their turkey. Darren went on to share what the Royal Family have as their festive dessert and this is also very classic too as they enjoy a Christmas pudding “doused in fine brandy and decorated with holly”. There is apparently one way in which the Christmas pudding abandons tradition and it makes total sense.
“There is a lot of alcohol in it, but – perhaps for obvious reasons – no coins or trinkets are added. No one wants to be responsible for a Royal choking,” he claimed.
