What Guests Actually Ate At Queen Elizabeth II's Wedding Dinner

When Princess Elizabeth (who would later become Queen Elizabeth II) married Philip Mountbatten (the future Prince Philip) in November 1947, the reception meal was, perhaps surprisingly, called a "wedding breakfast." Yet no eggs or toast were to be seen on the menu — it's just a naming quirk in the United Kingdom where the post-wedding-ceremony meal is called breakfast, regardless of what time it starts.

The 146 guests at Buckingham Palace worked through five different dishes. First up was filet de sole Mountbatten, which (as the name implies) centered around filets of sole. Good luck trying to recreate it, though: Even well-researched accounts of the wedding are unable to name the ingredients in the dish beyond the fish.

Next up was perdreau en casserole, a braised partridge dish, served with green beans and pommes noisette (small balls of potato that are fried and buttered). The exact details of the casserole are hard to confirm, but French recipes typically suggest the birds get braised in a mix of stock, butter, wine, and brandy, with aromatics like onion. Alongside that was a "salade royale" (royal salad): It would appear record-keeping of the wedding was poor, as there's also relatively little clear detail about what went into it.

Finally, dessert. This was a bombe glacée Princesse Elizabeth: An ice-cream bombe with strawberries. The meal was then wrapped up with fresh fruit (technically this was "dessert" and the bombe was "pudding", in British dining parlance) and coffee.

For a royal wedding, this menu may seem rather simple, but there's a valid reason for that. Although it was over two years after the end of World War II, Britain was still subject to food rationing with firm restrictions on many ingredients, including meat, eggs, butter, cheese, and sugar. While you might think the royal family would be able to skirt such restrictions, they apparently couldn't or chose not to: Even Elizabeth's wedding dress had to be purchased with ration coupons.

Notably, game didn't have the same restrictions as other meats, so that's why partridge ended up as the main dish. To make the menu luxurious without leaning on fancy meats or cheeses, the chefs seem to have gotten creative — with a November wedding, strawberries were well out of season, so they sourced them from a greenhouse to offer a summery treat in the depths of late fall. Thanks to the rationing, the wedding menu was also shorter than most other royal weddings of the 20th century, including Diana and Charles'.

Finally, there are the dish names: "Filet de sole Mountbatten" and "bombe glacée Princesse Elizabeth" weren't exactly dishes in the culinary canon prior to the wedding. That's because the royal family has traditionally integrated the married couple's names into the dishes. So, if you try Googling around for these dishes, you won't find clear recipes for them, as they really only technically existed for this one special occasion.