Queen Elizabeth II’s Former Private Chef Reveals The One Thing She Ate Every Day

According to her former private chef, Queen Elizabeth II has eaten jam sandwiches every day since she was a toddler.

On Darren McGrady’s YouTube channel, Darren McGrady claims that the monarch favors a strawberry preserve made from fruits picked in her Balmoral Castle grounds in Scotland.

“The queen was served jam pennies in the nursery as a little girl. She’s had them for afternoon tea ever since,” Darren McGrady says in a recently surfaced video. The sandwiches are made of bread with a bit of butter, and a spread of jam, then cut out into circles the size of an old British penny.

Does Darren McGrady say he was a chef to the queen for 11 years and also revealed the monarch’s solution to a normal difficulty for British scone lovers: jam first or cream?

“The queen was always jam first,” he said in a separate video. “The jam went on followed by that delicious, clotted cream.”

As well to the preserve, Queen Elizabeth II has always been partial to fresh strawberries. “The queen would eat strawberries three or four nights a week in Balmoral if they were in season,” he says.

But woe betides anyone who tried to give her out-of-season berries. A January batch at the supper table would mean “off with your head,” joked McGrady.