With luck and good weather, the forthcoming four-day weekend should be a time of much festivity and feasting. There will be garden parties for those with gardens, and street parties for those with streets. But what are we cooking? Mrs A. O’Shaughnessy, of Limpley Stoke, Bath, wants to recreate the lunch menu that was served at Buckingham Palace after the Queen’s Coronation.

“My Women’s Institute is putting on a special lunch for the village on jubilee day using, as far as possible, this royal menu,” she wrote, “and bring-your-own champagne of course! Can you find out what was served?” The Private Secretary to the Queen has kindly sent me the following Coronation menu from the Buckingham Palace files for June 1952. The meal began with Consommé Royale (chicken consommé garnished with cubes of cooked egg custard) and went on to Filet de Boeuf à la Mascotte, a fillet of beef garnished with sliced artichoke hearts tossed in butter with cocotte potatoes and slices of truffle. This was followed by a salad, before the meal finished with Glace à la Mangue (mango ice-cream). The recipe for Consommé Royale is in The Constance Spry Cookery Book.

The dish most associated with the Coronation, the famous coronation chicken, was one of the dishes served at another, later, luncheon to honour the Commonwealth heads of state. It was considered rather shocking when Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume included such “foreign” ingredients as curry powder and mango in subtle reference to the provenance of the guests, but the nation took the dish to its collective heart, and it has so far borne up well under the strain.

With that invincible British spirit in mind, I offer some new ideas for Jubilee holiday weekend entertaining that should keep us well fed and fuelled for the festivities — if not for the next 50 years.

jill.dupleix@thetimes.co.uk

Ingredients
Makes 16. Takes 10 mins.

This may be blindingly simple as a concept, but it is also endlessly flexible. The cucumber rounds give you the freshness and crunch, and can carry all manner of sympathetic flavours. Here, it is smoked salmon, but they are just as good with lightly poached, flaked fresh salmon; with crab salad or fresh prawns.

1 long cucumber
2 tbsp horseradish sauce
8 slices smoked salmon
Maldon sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
16 flat-leaf parsley sprigs
16 salted capers

Peel the cucumber lengthwise leaving a few thin strips of skin for decorative effect. Cut the cucumber into 1cm slices – you should get about 32 slices — and arrange half the slices on a board.

Dab a little horseradish sauce on each one, just enough to help the salmon stay in place. Cut each slice of salmon in half. Fold each half loosely and arrange on top of the cucumber. Season with salt and pepper and top with another cucumber slice.

Arrange the canapés on a serving platter, and top with another little dab of horseradish. Press a parsley leaf and a salted caper into the horseradish, and serve.

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