In a time before coronation quiches, a new monarch might diligently work through dozens of courses.
They might slurp through a turtle soup or pheasant consommé or brave a maupygernon – which one UK MP described as a grim recipe “based on hogs’ kidneys and flavoured with ingredients suggesting the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth”.
When King Charles III and Camilla, the Queen Consort, picked a quiche as the signature meal for Saturday’s coronation, the reaction was as mixed as an egg and cream filling.
The Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg declared it “disgusting”, while others tried the recipe and found it delicious. It was hailed as something Brits could cook at home or for the coronation Big Lunch, however, the historian Rachel Rich questioned why a French staple was featuring in a celebration of Britishness and the French declared the quiche was actually a tart.
In the past, rather more complicated dishes have been served up for the crowning of kings, as is clear from a vast collection of original menus from courts around the world assembled by an Australian, Jake Smith, a culinary enthusiast and author of Eating with Emperors.
His collection from a variety of royal houses, some of which is showcased on Royal Menus, includes an 1845 menu for the king of Hanover. It also features the Buckingham Palace spread laid on for the 1937 coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, which also featured a quiche (lorraine), and some dishes that definitely will not be served on Saturday.
Cailles rôties sur Canapés à la Royale called for beheaded quails, whose heads were then reattached to the bodies with wooden toothpicks.
“By now the quail carcass had been boned; roasted; stuffed with pate de foie-gras; coated in a chaud-froid sauce; decorated with truffle slices; and glazed in aspic jelly,” Smith writes.
To top it off, the birds were given googly eyes made from a little circle of cooked egg white with a “minute round of truffle in the centre”.
That extravagance paled into insignificance compared with King George IV’s 1821 banquet, the most expensive in history for a coronation, which cost the equivalent of £27m (A$51m) in today’s money.
More than 2,000 people dined in Westminster Hall, while thousands more watched on.
Rich, a reader in modern European history at Leeds Beckett University, wrote in the Conversation: “The first course was made up of 20 dishes including les filets de poulards, sautés aux champignons (chicken sautéed with mushrooms), les cotelles d’agneau, panées, grillées, sauce poivrade (breaded, grilled lamb chops in a pepper sauce), and le paté chaud de caille à l’espagnole (a quail pie, served hot).
“Two courses followed, with even more dishes: 22 and 31, respectively. The meal included sole cooked in champagne, turtle soup, a spun sugar vase filled with meringues and a pastry temple. And it was topped off with ices, biscuits and fresh fruit – melons, grapefruits, plums and nectarines.”
Despite such elaborate preparations, even royal banquets do not always go according to plan. Edward VII fell ill just before his planned 1902 festivities; the pleasant-sounding pheasant consommé and other delicacies were given to charity.
Britain’s postwar austerity meant culinary sights were set a good deal lower when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953. She served her guests coronation chicken, a sort of curry, served cold, made with cream of curry sauce, pepper, salt, water and “a little wine”, and a bouquet garni.
And now King Charles, with a history of loving plants, cheese and eggs, is serving up his vegetable quiche.
Smith says the king has long been a champion of modernising British cooking, and “trying to make it fashionable”.
“It’s had a fairly bad rap for quite a few centuries,” he says. “But the nightly menus of King Charles and Camilla do sound like things Australians would readily enjoy at a nice restaurant.
“I’ll be making the quiche for my coronation night.”
