Contemporary canapés for discerning palates tick all the right boxes, with hearty local fare as a centrepiece
If anyone was expecting to see boring, inoffensive canapés served at the wedding reception, they got it completely wrong. Out with vol-au-vents and smoked salmon pinwheels. In with wild mushroom and celeriac chausson, and smoked haddock fishcake with pea guacamole.
Okay, there was conventional stuff as well: you have to please a wide range of palates when there are 650 of them in the room. But on the whole, this enticing selection suggests that Royal Chef Martin Flanagan got his brief from people with contemporary and discerning palates. And he knew what boxes needed ticking.
Box one: modishly rustic ingredients such as pork belly and shoulder of lamb, the latter served with bubble and squeak. Box two: localism, with ingredients from England, Scotland and Wales. Box three: seasonality, including asparagus in two different guises (though seasonal and local purists will wonder why Raspberry Financier and Passion fruit Praline feature among the sweet canapés).
Box four, provenance, could have been ticked more emphatically; restaurant menus have taken increasingly to acknowledging the source of their produce, right down to the farm. The royal list does a little of that, but there's too much vagueness. 'English asparagus' and 'Pork from the Cotswolds'? Why not name the farms? Ah well, small steps.
The cake was clearly a marvel of engineering: 17 individual fruit cakes, 8 tiers. But it's engineering and artistry allied. Designed by Fiona Cairns, one of the country's leading cake designers, it used the technical demanding Joseph Lambeth technique to create 900 individually iced flowers and 17 varieties of leaf in cream and icing.
But some guests may have found just as much pleasure in the other cake, a chocolate biscuit cake from McVitie's 'using a Royal Family recipe at the special request of Prince William.' The new groom sounds like someone with the confidence to acknowledge his inner child, even on the day he put away childish things.
Richard Ehrlich has written books on food as well as for publications including the Guardian He is vice chairman of the Guild of Food Writers