Hughes pointed out that Brown Windsor Soup was not included in any of the celebrated Victorian cookbooks – notably Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845) and Isabella Beeton's Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) – nor in any fiction or encyclopaedia of the time.
In his book The Lost Foods of England (2017), Hughes argued that Brown Windsor Soup has no aristocratic pedigree at all, and in the era of Queen Victoria – the soup's alleged and opulent heyday, when its beefy essence was said to be fortified with Madeira wine from Portugal and other gastronomic exotica (such as quality cuts of steak and Andalucian sherry) – it likely never existed at all. It's a colourful riches-to-rags tale, but even minimal research reveals it is likely a tall one, with experts in British culinary history arguing that the origin story of BWS is … well, almost certainly BS.Īccording to the late food historian Glyn Hughes, founder of the Foods of England Project that was established to find "the story behind every single traditional dish", Brown Windsor Soup as the entrée choice of the blue-blooded was always a myth. In the make-do years of rationing after World War Two, as its recipe degenerated with the scarcity of quality ingredients, Brown Windsor Soup came to be seen as an unappetising slop of puréed leftovers and cheap gravy granules – and only fit for seen-better-days boarding houses and penny-pinching minor schools. Or so the story goes.īut then, as with all culinary trends, the once-voguish dish fell out of favour. With the forelock-tugging masses taking their cue from the royals, comforting Brown Windsor Soup had by then become the go-to British soup for the common people, and it wore that crown until at least the 1940s, and possibly into the '80s, ladled out lavishly in loving homes and seaside hotels, and invariably featuring on the menu in richly upholstered British Railways dining cars. One popular recipe-driven website describes the concoction as "the very soup reputed to have built the British Empire and one that was oh-so-fashionable in Victorian and Edwardian times", adding: "Queen Victoria was particularly fond of it, and it regularly appeared on state banquet menus."Ī history blog, meanwhile, claims that in 1918, during World War One, the British royal family dumped their name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha for that of the dun-hued dish – rather than for the Thames-side town that is home to the 11th-Century royal residence of Windsor Castle – in a bid to fend off anti-German sentiment.
#THE UNTOLD ORIGINS OF THE DETECTIVE AGENCY TV#
With the exception of the recently announced " Coronation Quiche", the menu for King Charles III's big-day banquet has yet to be made public, but the smart money says it will not kick off with a steaming bowl of Brown Windsor Soup.Ĭookbooks and TV shows, celebrity chefs and high-table gastronomes say that Brown Windsor Soup – a hearty, meat-based broth, often with added root vegetables, that has long held a peculiar role in the national psyche – was the appetiser of choice for British kings and queens, princes and princesses for a couple of centuries.
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