Queen Camilla’s son, the food critic Tom Parker Bowles, has lifted the lid on what mealtimes are like with his mother and her husband King Charles and revealed the rule that his stepfather insists be followed
Queen Camilla’s son has revealed how the King is a recycling champion who “appalls waste”.
Food critic and author Tom Parker Bowles said his stepfather Charles bans anything to be thrown away after mealtimes, insisting leftovers can be used for other dishes with all packaging recycled. Tom, 49, said: “There is no waste, everything is recycled, everything is used from the table. If anything is leftover from the dinner, that will be made into something else or appear the next day. Nothing’s allowed to be thrown out.”
The King has long been a champion of sustainability – The Coronation Food Project coordinated by his charitable fund launched last year, aiming to reduce food waste and support people living in “food insecurity”. Parker Bowles added: “It’s not the King just paying lip service, he practices what he preaches.”
As the King’s stepson and godson, he says food sustainability is a subject he “can relate to” the monarch on. “He really is a food hero. To talk to him about the strange varieties of plums or pears or anything else is endlessly fascinating”, he added.
Buckingham Palace announced in February that Charles was diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer, but Parker Bowles confirmed his “doctor says the treatment is going well” and shared how his mother Camilla was coping, saying: “She’s tough, my mother”.
His latest cookbook, Cooking and the Crown, details the history of food within the royal family – from the reign of Queen Victoria beginning in 1837 and Edward VII at the turn of the century, to Charles and Camilla.
“They can certainly eat that family!” he said – who regularly appears as a critic on BBC One’s MasterChef.
Lunch and dinner, in Queen Victoria’s time, would be 10 to 12 courses, he says. “They didn’t have to eat it all but there was just a huge amount of food and they did eat a lot more than we do now.” The author also reveals Charles and Camilla are both “deeply competitive” when it comes to foraging for mushrooms during stays at Balmoral.
He said: “They’re both very keen mycologists, and both know their mushrooms very, very well. This time of year, depending on rain, there’s ceps and chanterelles… I go with my mother and there’s a lot of fantastic mushrooming in Scotland. It’s a shared pleasure.” Parker Bowles says the King and Queen are far less wasteful, choosing to eat smaller meals than previous generations of royals.
During the colder months, Camilla eats a bowl of porridge every day, a recipe for which you’ll find in the book, made with Scottish porridge oats, full-fat milk, a pinch of salt and honey – her own honey, that is, from hives at the house she owns in Wiltshire. In summer, it’s yoghurt.
According to Parker Bowles, her lunches are light too; often the chicken broth – another recipe detailed in the book – or smoked salmon, while Charles famously doesn’t eat lunch at all, but eats dried fruit and honey for breakfast, and enjoys mutton very much.
Extracted from Cooking And The Crown by Tom Parker Bowles, published in hardback by Aster, priced £30. Available September 26.