Former royal chefDarren McGradywhipped up breakfast, lunch and dinner forQueenElizabeth IIat Buckingham Palace for 11 years, treating the monarch to all of her favourite dishes.
SEE:The Queen's brooch in her final portrait has huge sentimental value
In an exclusive interview withHELLO!, Darren revealed that the monarch was not a foodie and preferred traditional British and French cuisine. Her Majesty was like many of us when it came to her favourite dessert though, with a penchant for chocolate.
WATCH: The Queen - what will change
Darren told us: "She is absolutely a chocoholic. Anything we put on the menu that had chocolate on, she would choose, especially chocolate perfection pie."
READ:What will happen to the Queen's precious jewels?
Darren, who also worked atKensington Palace for four years, said of the Queen's savoury choices:"For a main course she loved game, things like Gaelic steak, fillet steak with a mushroom whisky sauce, especially if we did it with venison.
© Photo: Getty Images
The former royal chef revealed the Queen loves chocolate!
"For a first course she loved the Gleneagles pâté, which is smoked salmon, trout and mackerel. She loved using ingredients off the estate and so if we had salmon from Balmoral from the River Dee, she'd have that, it was one of her favourites. We used a repertoire of dishes, mainly British and French food. We cooked a lot of traditional French food like halibut on a bed of spinach with a Morney sauce."
The chefadded: "But the Queen never was a foodie. She always ate to live rather than live to eat. Prince Philip was the foodie. He'd want to try any new dishes all the time and got excited about new ingredients, whereas the Queen, if we had a new recipe, she'd have to look at the whole recipe before saying, 'Yes ok let's try it'. But for the most part she stuck to the same dishes week in week out."
MORE:Prince Philip's most memorable quotes and witty one-linersstr
PHOTOS:Royals' favourite takeaways: from Prince William to Kate Middleton and more
Despite travelling all over the world, the Queenis not an adventurous eater
A red leather-bound book of menus, written in French, would be sent up to the Queen each week, containing a wide variety of recipes.
"We prepared the menus three days ahead so we could get the food in," said Darren. "The chefs would pick the menus and she would put a line through the ones she didn't want. Sometimes she'd put a line through it all and put something different, like if she was having dinner with Prince Andrew, his favourite was crème brulee with Sandringham oranges.
"It's like any mum with a son or grandson coming home. If Prince William was coming for tea it would be a chocolate biscuit cake. He loved those," he said.
MORE:Royal kids' favourite foods revealed! Prince William, Princess Charlotte, more
Darren workedat Buckingham Palace for 11 years andKensington Palace for four
The author of Eating Royallyconcluded: "Cooking at Buckingham Palace was amazing. It was everything I expected it to be. They have the most amazing produce, the best quality food, the best ingredients to work with. Just little things like picking up the phone and calling Harrods and asking for a rack of lamb with a two-inch eye of meat and six bones – you got everything you wanted."
Darren trained in his hometown of Nottingham and worked at The Savoy in London, but he decided to apply for a job at the palace after camping out on the Mall on the eve of Prince Charles and Princess Diana's wedding. It was then that he thought how "amazing" it would be to work in the royal kitchens, and a few weeks later he went in for an interview and secured a job.
Make sure you never miss a ROYAL story! Sign up to our newsletter to get all of our celebrity and royal news delivered directly to your inbox.
Sign up to HELLO Daily! for the best royal, celebrity and lifestyle coverage
By entering your details, you are agreeing to HELLO! Magazine UserData Protection Policy. You can unsubscribe at any time. For more information,please click here.