Chef used to trick Queen into choosing Princess Diana's favourite pudding

Apart from the public, Princess Diana was beloved by the palace staff as well, including her chef Darren McGrady, who used to trick Queen Elizabeth II into choosing the Princess's favourite pudding for dinners.

In a recent video on his YouTube channel, McGrady revealed that he used to coax the Queen into choosing Diana's favorite pudding, a cross between bread pudding and creme brûlée, whenever the Princess of Wales was coming over for dinner. The royal chef was reviewing "Spencer," the latest movie about Diana, when he shared that he would always run the daily menu with two options past the monarch, and if Diana was visiting, he gave the Queen a second dessert choice which he knew she would reject.

"It worked every time, and the Princess got it whenever she visited the Queen," he said.

The chef also revealed that Diana always used to visit the kitchen after dinner for another portion of the dessert. He said, "When the platter came back to the kitchen, I had to fight off the chefs from digging in, and I'd put it into the warmer and wait. I knew the Princess would come down to the kitchen in minutes."

"She was too scared to ask for seconds in front of the Queen. She'd sit down on the kitchen counter and chat and eat," McGrady said.

The chef, who worked in the royal kitchens for 15 years, previously shared that it was usual for Diana to visit the kitchens and casually eat with him. He worked as a chef in Diana's household for four years in the mid-nineties, and found the working system very different from Buckingham Palace. While the Queen would always stick to her planned menu book, Diana would often change her mind at the last minute and made her kitchen a "relaxed place to work."

"If she was eating alone, she'd often come and eat in the kitchen and come in while I was still cooking. It was so relaxed when she was in the kitchen, once she made me a coffee. It was so much more relaxed at Kensington Palace," McGrady said.

He said that the Princess also changed his cooking style from heavy sauces to healthy eating and would ask him to cook her stuffed bell peppers several times a week. "When I joined Princess Diana, she was patron of 119 different charities, working out at the gym three times a week, looking the best she ever did. She had conquered and confronted the bulimia and she said to me, 'Darren, you take care of all the fat, and I'll take care of the carbs at the gym,'" he recalled.

He said that Diana's menu was mostly vegetarian, other than the few occasions where she would eat lamb if she was entertaining. She did not eat beef at all, but loved eating fish like rainbow trout.