The dish for the coronation Big Lunch is a quiche. Not a showpiece or a banquet course, but a deep pastry shell filled with spinach, broad beans, tarragon and British cheddar. The royal household announced it in April 2023, a few weeks before the coronation of King Charles III on May 6.
Mark Flanagan, head chef of the Royal Household, wrote the recipe. The King and the Queen Consort picked it themselves, for three stated reasons: it adapts easily, it is cheap, and it is simple to share. Served hot or cold with a green salad and boiled potatoes, it needs no fuss at the table. The recipe makes six portions in a 20cm flan tin, with homemade pastry or a 250g block of ready-made shortcrust for anyone short on time.
It is meant for the Big Lunch, a series of community meals across the UK and beyond that raise money for charity. Camilla has been patron of the initiative since 2013 and has gone to lunches as far afield as Barbados and Ghana.
What the critics and the cooks said
Felicity Cloake, who tasted it for The Guardian, found it “so packed full of vegetables it’s more like a spinach pie than a quiche”. Darren McGrady, a former royal chef, was unsurprised by the choice. “His mother, the late Queen, loved chocolate but the King loves anything with eggs and cheese,” he wrote on Twitter. “I made this for him many times, especially with the salmon he caught in the river Dee.”
Others read the menu as a nod to the King’s gardening. His taste for cheesy baked eggs is no secret either, since Clarence House shared one of his favourite recipes during the pandemic.
Chicken, trifle and a hard act to follow
Every royal milestone seems to get its own plate. In 1953, Queen Elizabeth II had coronation chicken, credited to the food writer and florist Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume, who founded the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. Mild curry powder, tomato paste, red wine, mayonnaise and unsweetened whipped cream went into it. It turned into a sandwich filling that Britain never gave up.
Lesser-known examples followed. Golden jubilee diners in 2002 got a citrusy baked chicken with pasta salad, and the platinum jubilee in 2022 produced a lemon and amaretti trifle.
Buckingham Palace also released three more recipes for this occasion: Ken Hom’s roast rack of lamb with an Asian-style marinade, Nadiya Hussain’s coronation aubergine, and a strawberry and ginger trifle from Adam Handling. Coronation chicken appears nowhere on the list.
Sources
- King Charles chooses cost-efficient quiche as his official coronation dish (and here’s how to make it)
- God Save the Quiche: King Charles III has chosen the quiche as his signature coronation dish
