Venison from the Queen’s Balmoral estate formed the main course at a banquet hosted by the Queen for the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, at Buckingham Palace, washed down with a choice of wines headed by a sparkling English variety.
The Chinese president, who has been known to burnish his populist credentials at home during simple dumpling meals at communal tables in Beijing workers’ restaurants, sat down to something entirely different during the palace meal hosted by the Queen.
Guests, including David Cameron, George Osborne and senior royals such as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the Duke of York and the Princess Royal, dined on a menu that started with West Coast turbot and lobster mousse before tucking into a roasted loin of Balmoral venison in a madeira and truffle sauce.
On the side were braised red cabbage, cocotte potatoes and timbale of celeriac and butternut squash.
Pudding came in the form of delice of dark chocolate, mango and lime according to details of the menu, which was released by the palace.
The wine list featured French and South African choices, as well as 1977 Warre’s Vintage Port.
However, nurturers of Britain’s nascent wine industry with an eye on an emerging market, where appreciation of wine is a status symbol, might hope that senior communist party palettes will have been tickled by the Ridgeview Grosvenor 2009, a sparking English wine originating in West Sussex.
The palace also provided details of an eclectic music programme, courtesy of the Countess of Wessex’s String Orchestra, which ranged from Robert Farnon’s The Westminster Waltz, through to Irish and Chinese folk songs and the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby. The programme ended on Nobody Does It Better, the theme from the 1977 Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, in which a number of ballistic-missile submarines mysteriously disappear.
Dinner behind them, Xi and the Queen would have had time to properly examine the gifts they exchanged earlier on Tuesday. The Queen would have had an opportunity to listen to two albums of Chinese folk music recorded by the president’s wife Peng Liyuan, formerly a pop star.
Xi also presented the Queen with a 1.18m work of embroidery, a large porcelain dish, a woodcarving and a stamp booklet.
The Queen’s gifts to Xi included a pair of silver-framed photographs of herself and Duke of Edinburgh, a gift she has presented to other world leaders. However, he also came away with a pair of Royal Crown Derby candlesticks and a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets contained in a specially commissioned leather and gilt box, made by the Royal Bindery.
