The Queen eats jam sandwiches every day

From The Sydney Morning Herald

London: The Queen has eaten jam sandwiches every day since she was a toddler, according to her former private chef.

Darren McGrady claims on his YouTube channel that the monarch favours 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,” he said in a recently surfaced video published in July last year.

The sandwiches are made from bread with a little butter and a spread of jam, then cut out into circles the size of an old British penny.

As part of the genteel tradition of afternoon tea, McGrady, who says he was a chef to the Queen for 11 years, also revealed the monarch’s solution to a familiar quandary for British scone lovers: jam first or cream?

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

As well as the preserve, the 96-year-old monarch 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.

The Palace would not comment on the Queen’s sandwich preferences.

In a skit from her Platinum Jubilee celebrations that went viral in June, the Queen told Paddington Bear that she always keeps spare marmalade sandwiches in her bag.

The Queen has delighted fans with a surprise tea party with none other than Paddington Bear, revealing just what she keeps in her handbag.