Non-Britans who, like your correspondent, love and spend a lot of time in Britain often find themselves shielded from old and unkind culinary stereotypes. Britain has the best beef, lamb, whiskey, beer, cool season vegetables and summer berries. London is the tastiest and most diverse food city on earth. Yet many people still think of it as a land of over-cooking, under-spiced and inexplicable products such as Marmite, Bisto and Peas (ideally not all at once, though you never know). Tapest Bean and Spinach Quiche king charles And CamillaRani Sangha, unveiled as her special coronation dish, doesn’t make things easy.
Start with its selling points. It’s vegetarian, and the planet would be healthier if people ate less meat. charles has a long interest environmentalism and consistency and, according to a former Royal Family chef, very fond of eggs and cheese. Camilla has been a patron of The Big Lunch, which brings neighbors together “to share friendship, food and fun,” for a decade. She and Charles expect their compatriots across Britain to celebrate the coronation with Big Lunches; A quiche, which sits in the center of a shared table, is a perfect communal-meal centerpiece.
However, this one seems notably bland and mild in flavor. Legumes can be delicious, but they can also be starchy and soggy, like here. Suspending them in an exceptionally rich custard with cooked spinach and just a whisper of tarragon produces a deadly heavy, uninviting dish. A 15-minute blind bake seems too short for a filling of so much milk, cream, eggs and cheese, which raises the risk that the Big Lunch will end up a huge mess.
In fact, quiche appears to be an anagram of the patchouli-scented vegetarianism of the 1970s and ’80s, when vegetarians wanted to make sure everyone knew they avoided meat, not because well-prepared vegetables were delicious. but because they were above such daily, selfish concerns. Food really wants to taste good. There may be no better places for vegetarians to eat than London, with an abundance of South and East Asian restaurants, and socially conscious chefs and diners. This quiche turns its dough back on all of that.
Charles’ mother’s celebratory dish, chicken in curry cream sauce, was much more mundane and more imaginative. In its classical French preparation and name (“Paulette Rhine Elisabeth”; informal “Coronation Chicken“came later”), it nods to Britain’s long Entente camaraderie with its neighbor across the Channel. The use of curry powder and the rice on which the chicken was served alluded to the recently ended Raj. Peas, pimientos, wine and fresh herbs – ingredients either newly available or unavailable under wartime rationing for large parts of the country – signaled a more generous future. Less altruistically, it was passed on to the common people. May be seen as dominating, but that is not who Elizabeth was.
No one wants a return to the opulence of George IV, whose coronation celebrations included over 3,000 kilos of beef and veal, 1,000 kilos of mutton and 160 geese – cooked in 400 kilos of butter and washed down with 1,200 bottles of champagne. The total cost of the event in today’s time was around £27m ($33.6m). But Charles’ drab and throwaway-worthy choices go too far in another direction.
© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at www.economist.com
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