Steph's Packed Lunch: Alan Johnson once ate with the Queen

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Chef Owen Hodgson, who helped cook for the Queen at Buckingham Palace in the 1990s, said the 95-year-old is a big fan of Marmite. While most people eat the spread on their toast, the Queen has a different way of doing things. According to Mr Hodgson, the Queen believes “you should always add a smidgen” of the controversial spread to mushrooms.

The chef, who now posts recipes and pictures of food on his Instagram account food4lovers, occasionally shares anecdotes about his time working in the royal household.

A post on his Instagram page from April 2019 revealed the Queen’s controversial food habit.

He said: “I was taught that when cooking mushrooms for the Queen you should always add a smidgen of Marmite.

“30 years later and I still do add a little dollop, it adds a certain Umami.

“Thank you Ma’am and the Chef that gave me the tip.

“I love Food Memories Happy Monday x”.

It has previously been reported that the Queen has 20 chefs in the royal kitchen.

Fellow former chef to the royal household Darren McGrady revealed that the Queen eats four small meals a day – breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, and dinner.

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He said that, for lunch, the monarch normally eats grilled fish with wilted spinach or courgettes or a simple grilled chicken salad.

In the late afternoon, Mr McGrady revealed that the Queen always has afternoon tea, involving scones with jam and clotted cream.

He told the Independent: “She’d always have afternoon tea wherever she was in the world.

“We’d flown out to Australia and were on the Royal Yacht.

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“It was five o’clock in the morning but for the Queen it was five in the afternoon so my first job was making scones.”

Speaking about the royal breakfast, biographer Katie Nicholl said: “HRH typically starts with a simple cup of tea and biscuits, followed by a bowl of cereal.”

Mr McGrady said that if the Queen didn’t like a meal she would leave a message in a notebook for staff.

He said: “She had a little book on her desk and she would just put a note in there saying ‘I don’t want this again’ or something like that.”

McGrady also revealed to Hello! magazine in 2016 that the Queen is “absolutely a chocoholic”.

He said: “Anything we put on the menu that had chocolate on, she would choose, especially chocolate perfection pie [a layered chocolate pie with white and dark chocolate and chocolate shavings].”

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