The Complicated World Of Court Cuisine

Much of medieval cuisine seems to have been designed only to impress.

- Vir Sanghvi

COURT CUISINES are a complicated business. There has, for instance, never been a court cuisine of note in England. The food at Buckingham Palace is reported to run from dull to disgusting. In medieval times, English monarchs ate like pigs. (And often, they ate pigs too.) Henry VIII’s table manners would put any decent person off dinner and his successors couldn’t come up with a single good dish for several centuries.

Nor, for that matter, could their subjects. When Elizabeth II was coronated, a joyous nation created a dish in her honour. It was Coronation Chicken, made from pre-cooked cold chicken mixed with a bright yellow mayonnaise-based sauce, flavoured with what the British called Curry Powder in memory of the Empire they had just lost.

To understand what a gastronomic wasteland England was in the 1950s, you only have to look at that slimy, congealing dish and wonder: if this is how they honoured their new Queen, then what did the Brits cook normally? (Don’t ask.)

Other kingdoms have had more luck with their courts and their chefs. The French will still tell you, with a strange kind of twisted pride, about François Vatel, who was in charge of a banquet to be hosted in honour of King Louis XIV. When the fish did not arrive on time, he was so distraught that he killed himself with his own sword. This is a French saga, so there is a bittersweet coda. Vatel’s body was only discovered when somebody came to tell him that fish had finally arrived in time for dinner. But by then, my friend, eet waz too late...