One presumes the late Queen’s permission was sought as to whether it was OK for Tom Parker Bowles to write a recipe book themed around the history of royal food. Though the man himself – author, cook, son, father, brother, stepbrother, godson, general family man, now at the heart of the family – can’t entirely recall how the process worked, but, yes, he definitely did ask, he says with a near-imperceptible eye roll. “Thanks for checking.”
“It was about when the late Queen’s jubilee was,” he recalls, of “running it up the flagpole” with the royal household in early 2022, and getting the official go-ahead to detail the eating habits of monarchs from Queen Victoria onwards (reader tip: get the aspic ready). “It was her final [jubilee]. I can’t remember which,” he recalls. “Diamond, maybe?” Platinum, Tom. “Platinum! That’s right.” He smiles, hyper-nonchalant, always respectful. Classic TPB.
We’re sat at the corner table (of course) of 45 Jermyn St (of course) at 11am, a sodden St James’s looking untouched by time behind him. Two years on from getting the all-clear to pen Cooking & The Crown and now he is the son of a Queen himself (a scattering of Her Majesty’s recipes even appear – one is for porridge). It’s a turn of events that feels as soothing in its narrative arc as it does unimaginable when you compare it to his explosion into public life in the ’90s, back when King Charles III was his godfather (His Majesty married Camilla, Tom’s mother, in 2005) and being a rave-loving late teen who got recreationally high guaranteed a front page fever for the tabloids.
Oh, what a difference a decade or three makes. Now 49, a touch of the eternal partier remains. “I still look back on those raving days as some of the happiest of my life. It was ten thousand people in a warehouse, or a field, dancing together. I still love dance music, I still love Ibiza, but things are very different. I think DC10 has got a VIP area now.” He looks absolutely disgusted. “It’s appalling.”
Trips to the island – as he made this past summer – tend to involve one too many rosés at the villa now. Co-parenting (he has a teenage daughter and son with Sara Buys, a former fashion editor, who worked at Vogue early in her career), writing (he is restaurant critic for the Mail on Sunday, among other gigs), television work (he pops up on Masterchef, and has filmed food shows in the US and Australia), to say nothing of the general slog of keeping one’s midlife going, don’t conspire for letting loose. Fifty looming, predictably he recently found himself on a health kick, though less relatably his began in the run-up to the Coronation last year (global television audience: 400 million).
“I was like: ‘Right, I’m getting too fat.’” He fretted, cameras looming. A restaurant dweller by profession and proclivity, he cut out drinking entirely, then kept it to four days a week and started exercising. “It’s called reformer Pilates,” he emphasises earnestly into my recorder of his routine. He feels lots better, even if he was hoping for more dramatic results. “Listen,” he says, leaning in conspiratorially, “I’m far too old to care about this sort of thing, but I went to my doctor the other day, who I love, and I said, ‘Can I have some Ozempic please?’” He just went, ‘Fuck off.’” Parker Bowles honks with laughter. Why? “‘You’re a food writer. All these excess calories are coming from booze.’” I said, “But I don’t drink three days a week!” “It’s the other four days I’m worried about,” came the reply. “He worked out that the [weekly] rosé in summer is equivalent to, like, 18 cheeseburgers.”
Yet another reason why Parker Bowles was well placed to write a book that breaks the day’s dining down into monarchal preferences for breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner and puddings, darting Britishly between excess and frugality. Anyone for turtle soup, a trilogy of mutton or oeufs suzette? They’re all here. Yet we also get Queen Camilla’s chicken broth. And simply: kippers.
A self-described “geek”, he adored the research – chancing upon 100-year-old biscuit recipes kept at Windsor – and was granted access to the kitchens and libraries of some of the royal archives (go figure). It’s a family affair at this point. “Yeah, I know full well: nepotism, blah, blah, blah. Fair game,” he says, meaning it. “But I thought, ‘You know what? In my defence, I can say that I’ve had 25 years of keeping away from it. If I’d come in and said, ‘Hey, guys. This is going to be the exclusive royal family cookbook’, I think that would be a bit of a sellout. But I approached it as I approach every other book.”
He’s super close with his mother: they speak all the time; she adores her grandchildren. It has not, he says with no little understatement, been the easiest of years for her. They worried for her in the run up to the Coronation – all those eyes, all that unkind history. He was so proud of her that day, his son, Freddy, a page on the balcony at Buck Pal.
“She’s tough,” he says. But then came genuine woe. “Cancer, it really is a bastard,” he says of King Charles’s diagnosis in February with an undisclosed variety. “The King’s having the best treatment. He’s a great man and a tough man, and you’ve just got to get on with it. Of course, anyone who has someone they love with cancer is going to worry.” He checks in with the Waleses, of course – “I absolutely adore both of them” – and of the Duke of Sussex remains similarly fond: “I keep out of it,” he says, of the disparate, adult lives of stepsiblings. “You just want everyone to be happy.”
He hasn’t had the easiest of times himself. Cancer came for his world too when, in 2021, his then partner Alice Procope died aged 42, a mother of three. “Brutal,” he says, shaking his head, an “A” tattoo visible on his wrist. He’s in a new relationship now but, beyond saying she has a whippet, isn’t up for talking about it, other than to confirm a little happiness has crept back into his day-to-day.
“Everyone just gets on with it,” is his take on the circus of life, even when his big top is looking more unsteady than most. “I’ll say this. A good lunch is usually a pretty good place to start.”
Cooking & The Crown: Royal Recipes From Queen Victoria to King Charles III by Tom Parker Bowles (Aster, £30) will be published on 26 September.
Sittings editor: Honey Sweet Elias. Grooming: Louise Lerego. Production: Matthew Riley. With thanks to Mount St Restaurant
