Queen Elizabeth II, Other Royals Refuse to Eat These Finger Foods With Their Hands
The royal family has a set of rules and protocols they go by and that even extends to food as there are things they can and cannot consume. There are also certain foods that the royals eat differently than most people because they don’t use their hands.
Read on to find out exactly what Queen Elizabeth II and her family do not pick up with their hands and the specific way they eat those foods.
Queen Elizabeth has an odd way of eating a banana
Queen Elizabeth has an unusual technique when it comes to eating bananas. This information comes from Darren McGrady who cooked for the sovereign for more than a decade before he became Princess Diana’s personal chef.
He said the queen loves bananas but she eats them differently than most people because she uses cutlery. McGrady’s spokesperson confirmed to Insider that she eats the fruit with a knife and fork in order to avoid looking “like a monkey.”
In his book titled Eating Royally, the chef wrote that monarch cuts off the top and bottom, slices through the skin lengthways, chops the fruit into small pieces, and then eats it with a fork.
More finger foods she and her family won’t eat with their hands
But it’s not just bananas, the royals eat all fruit with silverware. Instead of using their hands, they cut the fruit up with a knife and fork.
“Grapes are the most popular as they are the easiest to eat and cut into smaller bunches of four or five grapes,” McGrady explained. And when it comes to pears, the chef said the royals “slice off the top and eat it with a teaspoon like a boiled egg!”
According to McGrady, it’s the same deal when it comes to burgers and the reason they don’t eat them with buns.
“We would do venison burgers. There’d be gorgeous cranberry and everything stuffed into them, but we never set buns out,” he told Insider. “They would have burgers, but not the buns. So they would eat it with their knife and fork.”
The former royal chef added, “Her Majesty’s Victorian upbringing dictates that the only thing you would pick up and eat with your fingers is afternoon tea.”
Other things they never ever eat
There are also a few foods the queen and the rest of royals will not eat under any circumstances. Some examples of this are garlic and onion so they don’t have bad breath during engagements or meeting with members of the public.
And even though the royal family matriarch is a fan of fruit, she refuses to eat certain kinds when they are not in season.
“You can send strawberries every day to the queen during summer at Balmoral and she’ll never say a word,” McGrady said. “Try including strawberries on the menu in January and she’ll scrub out the line and say don’t dare send me genetically modified strawberries.”
The queen and Prince Philip also steer clear of oysters as neither one of them likes the seafood delicacy.
