Why The Queen Reportedly Always Has A Notepad Nearby While Dining With Guests
Even royal kitchens serve up their fair share of catastrophes. Princess Diana once cooked up some pasta and — when the pasta water boiled over and ignited the gas pilot light – called in firefighters. If you want more deets, royal chef Darren McGrady will give you the longer version on YouTube. Another time, a junior chef illicitly finished off the queen's favorite biscuit cake — one she was expecting at the next day's afternoon tea. "I've never made another chocolate biscuit cake so fast in my life," McGrady remembered via YouTube.
Queen Elizabeth has famously picky eating rules. She won't touch garlic or onions. Too much spice is off the table, too according to BBC. Her sandwich crusts must always be removed — at least as per what a former royal chef told The Telegraph. And, she typically eats armed with a notepad, according to former royal servant Charles Oliver's book "Dinner at Buckingham Palace" (via The Independent). Royal employees better pay attention to the notes she jots down in it.
What Queen Elizabeth wrote when she found a slug in her salad
According to Charles Oliver, Queen Elizabeth keeps a notepad around when dining to remember the culinary preferences of her invitees and thereby ensure smoother meals for future visits (via Independent). Who knows what she wrote when Former President Trump paid a dinnertime visit. He and the queen "had a period where we were talking solid straight," Trump reported afterward (via The New York Times). "I didn't even know who the other people at the table were. I never spoke to them; we just had a great time," Trump claimed. If you choose to believe him, the British monarch may not have had time to jot anything down at all. Three years prior, in 2016, Former First Lady Michelle Obama ordered up a batch of french fries while staying at Buckingham. Barring the fries, however, she wasn't impressed with the food. "American food is just better," she joked in public later (via HuffPost). We're not sure Obama's critiques made it into the queen's mealtime notes, either. They could have.
The time Queen Elizabeth found a slug in her salad most certainly did, though. "Once, on a torn-off top sheet the footmen found the dead body of a slug," Charles Oliver wrote in "Dinner at Buckingham Palace." Apparently, the queen quipped on the notepad: "I found this in the salad — could you eat it?"