Or so the story goes.īut then, as with all culinary trends, the once-voguish dish fell out of favour. With the forelock-tugging masses taking their cue from the royals, comforting Brown Windsor Soup had by then become the go-to British soup for the common people, and it wore that crown until at least the 1940s, and possibly into the '80s, ladled out lavishly in loving homes and seaside hotels, and invariably featuring on the menu in richly upholstered British Railways dining cars.

One popular recipe-driven website describes the concoction as 'the very soup reputed to have built the British Empire and one that was oh-so-fashionable in Victorian and Edwardian times', adding: 'Queen Victoria was particularly fond of it, and it regularly appeared on state banquet menus.'Ī history blog, meanwhile, claims that in 1918, during World War One, the British royal family dumped their name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha for that of the dun-hued dish – rather than for the Thames-side town that is home to the 11th-Century royal residence of Windsor Castle – in a bid to fend off anti-German sentiment. With the exception of the recently announced ' Coronation Quiche', the menu for King Charles III's big-day banquet has yet to be made public, but the smart money says it will not kick off with a steaming bowl of Brown Windsor Soup.Ĭookbooks and TV shows, celebrity chefs and high-table gastronomes say that Brown Windsor Soup – a hearty, meat-based broth, often with added root vegetables, that has long held a peculiar role in the national psyche – was the appetiser of choice for British kings and queens, princes and princesses for a couple of centuries.

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