The recipe was created by the chef of Buckingham Palace, Mark Flanagan, and was served at the coronation banquet that was set up on the streets throughout the United Kingdom to celebrate the event.
An easy recipe within everyone's reach, a savoury pie made up of a crunchy base of shortcrust pastry and a tasty and delicate filling of spinach, broad beans and fresh tarragon.
A perfect quiche for picnics and buffets, excellent to be enjoyed hot or cold, accompanied by a green salad or potatoes.
I tried this savory pie last week myself and I fell in love with it at the first bite: light, crunchy and very tasty.
I make quiches quite often at home although I have not yet tried making this one.
The original recipe uses fresh tarragon, if you can't find it you can replace it with a sprinkle of freshly ground pepper and a few leaves of fresh basil or thyme.
The English cheese par excellence is cheddar, but it would also be excellent with any other semi-hard cheese I think.
Example of Quiche
The choice of this dish has been controversial.
It seems that Charles and Camilla chose the dish together and that the head chef decided to focus on two of Carlo's most appreciated foods, eggs and cheese, to create this recipe.
The broad beans and spinach were chosen in homage to Camilla's passion for garden produce (the queen consort takes care of a patch of land herself in the gardens of the Royal palace).
The two rulers seem to love quiches, and in the past they dined several times on official occasions with this type of French savoury pie.
Apparently their favorite version would be the one with Scottish salmon.
But back to why it opened a controversy.
First of all, the choice did not please the most patriotic as even the name, so French, seemed inadequate for the occasion.
Wasn't a more classic pie better?
Here is the recipe I have found.
For the dough: 120 grams of flour, a pinch of salt, cold butter, lard and 2 tablespoons of milk.
Or you can buy ready-made Phyllo dough as I normally do.
For the filling: 120 ml of milk, 175 ml of cream, 2 eggs, 1 tablespoon of tarragon, salt and pepper, 100 grams of grated cheddar cheese, 160 grams of boiled spinach cut into small pieces and 50 grams of boiled broad beans.
King Charles's quiche is certainly a dish for these times, vegetarian and therefore sustainable from an environmental point of view, low cost and therefore respectful of people facing an economic crisis.
It has been said that, similarly, the Coronation Chicken prepared for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was the reflection of an England in the decline of its empire.
The Coronation Chicken was a chicken curry which through spices wanted to make the royal recipe palatable to its subjects in the world. Evidently the colonial accent would not be appropriate for the investiture of Charles, who opted instead for a dish that we could almost define as democratic and, unfortunately, aesthetically less attractive than his predecessor.
At the time there were no social media and online media to spread the information, but the recipe had a hold on the British also thanks to a recipe book published in 1956 where, among other things, it was specified how to prepare it and serve it.
The quiche and the Coronation Chicken have in common the characteristic of being served cold, which makes them suitable for being prepared in advance.
