The Queen's son, Tom Parker Bowles, has revealed what she has for breakfast - and it depends on the time of year. The food critic and writer, 49, was speaking about his new cookbook, Cooking and the Crown, which details the history of food within the royal family.
It covers from the reign of Queen Victoria beginning in 1837 and Edward VII at the turn of the century, to Charles and Camilla.
While lunch and dinner in Queen Victoria's time would be 10 to 12 courses, things have changed somewhat. Unlike aristocratic breakfasts of Victorian and Edwardian times - where the spreads were "full-on gastronomic assaults. Gut-busting epics that set one up for a good old fashioned day's hunting, shooting and roistering", as Mr Parker Bowles writes - the current reigning royalty eat much more simply, and healthily in the morning. "Tastes have changed."
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 Mr 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. Afternoon tea has always been a spectacle - and an important, and substantial meal in itself - for the royals, although Mr Parker Bowles insists he's never been invited for tea at Buckingham Palace.
"Everyone congregates for tea," he said. "And it's not just cakes and biscuits and crumpets and sandwiches, but you might even get poached eggs. It really is a hearty mid-afternoon meal. If you are staying in Scotland, it's quite dangerous, because you have a cooked breakfast, you have lunch, you have tea and you have dinner."
With Charles and Camilla, "it's still a 5pm ritual, where we all gather together around a round table in the drawing room at Birkhall, after an afternoon spent outside, mushroom hunting, or in my case, buying second-hand cookbooks," Mr Parker Bowles writes in the book - indeed, he has a cookbook collection of 4,000.
Extracted from Cooking And The Crown by Tom Parker Bowles, published in hardback by Aster, priced £30. Available September 26.
