Saturday 5th July 2014

So extraordinary! The day before my Royal Dinner, with the menu selected from the new Queen’s Cookbook and to be shown on Dainty Lady TV in due course, Genevieve Suzy of the magazine world and I took tea in Mayfair at an hotel. I thought we were being hosted by a PR person to promote the bees on the roof of the hotel. Which we were, except that PR person turned out to be a grandee of great grandeur. ‘I knew Queen Elizabeth,’ he said, which is how her friends refer to Her Late Majesty the Queen Mother. I couldn’t believe it: Munroe of Munroe is the chief of the Knights Templar and had actually taken Oeufs Drumkilbo with the QM – and been given the recipe by her communist chef.  The very oeufs which were to feature on my menu. Of course I asked him to the dinner and like all powerful people he was free last min. What’s more he is an old friend of Marmion Beaufleasance who is close to the Throne and was already on the list of Royal diners.

Can you see the web of Oeufs Drumkilbo and the Queen Mother drawing us all nearer and nearer the Throne?

Then to make the Royal menu. Essentially take 40 eggs and a ton of butter. At the last minute I switched to blackcurrant sorbet because I thought the cake with lemon egg custard and strawberries after Oeufs Drumkilbo, which is really prawn cocktail but with lobster, and Cotelettes Windsor with Sauce Paloise (a butter and egg creation with mint) could kill. So after battling all morning with three lobsters, gelatine, slithers of eggs, making mayo not to mention wondering where I was going to get a silver-gilt set of ice-cream cups (as shown in the Queen’s Cookbook, costing £278 even in 1824), I set out for Wholefoods in the West End, there being nowhere else with blackcurrant sorbet and not having the strength to make it myself. Who should I meet as I came away from that shop but Rufus Pitman, out shopping in the West End and also a guest at the Royal Dinner ? The web was growing richer and richer. ‘How Muriel Spark,’ he said, mentioning The Bachelors where one queen says to another, ‘You went to the West End for herbs.’ I was thinking also of Tabitha Twitchet who glimpsed Duchess on the other side of the street on the same day as she was coming to tea so ignored her. Complicated etiquette.

At last the Royal Dinner got underway. I must say I rather enjoyed it, say it myself as shouldn’t. As you know, I often have dinner-party-giving breakdown and self-hatred. The Drumkilbo was really quite nice and the egg-and-butter sauce with the lamb cutlets old-fashioned (what would Angus Willis say? Almost as bad as having a flour sauce) but delicious.

My service and styling really did gain a feel of Buckingham Palace. I do believe anyone can get a Buckingham Palace feel with imagination and effort. In fact I really thought at one point: maybe she will come, a black bonnet will heave into view with the Standard flying. Instead Marion Beaufleasance told me that recently the Queen found a safety pin on the floor at Windsor and handed it to him. Also she forgot her specs and couldn’t read the speech he’d written for her. Otherwise guests picked over past adventures of an intimate nature with those later awarded a CBE, one of whom talked in a manner  that must have been learned from porn films.

There’s another coincidence I forgot about: that knitted Queen Mother finally came into her own and was on the table.

Oeufs Drumkilbo, Styled for the Table

The Table Styling: Anyone Can Achieve a Buckingham Palace Look with Imagination

That Knitted Queen Mother Comes into Her Own at Last: the Final Coincidence Which I Suddenly Remembered