Recipe: Soup and scones inspired by The Cook Book: Fortnum & Mason

The announcement of Prince Philip's stepping down from public life came, rather fittingly, two days after the release of a cookbook from grocer-to-royalty Fortnum & Mason. The Duke of Edinburgh's retirement is very much another page turned in the closing chapter of the Britain-rules-the-waves monarchy, and The Cook Book is an account of what they ate through those gleaming days.

The book, by Tom Parker Bowles (yes, Camilla's son), includes the legendary kipper recipe Edward VIII requested flown in daily from Northumberland to the site of his exile, Château de Condé in France. There is a treatise on marmalade, a salmon dressed with a frill of gauzy cucumber slices, calf's liver with bacon bubble and squeak, and a recipe for crumpets glazed with Marmite and crowned with the poached egg of a Burford Brown chicken (the breed is specifically mentioned).

Fortnum & Mason was founded in 1710 by William Fortnum, footman in the household of Queen Anne, and his landlord, Hugh Mason. Casually "Fortnum's," the storied department store is known for its hampers and luxury foods: In 1886, it was the first to stock Heinz tinned baked beans in England.

My maternal grandmother had family in England and regularly spent part of her year there. It is through her that I was raised with a bias for steak and kidney pies, brown sauce and Sunday roast with Yorkshire puddings. Fortnum's cookbook rekindles a nostalgia for the childhood she helped build, one that included an education of strawberries at Wimbledon and Enid Blyton. My fondness for this cook book is both bred and heartfelt.

And yet, the gilded turquoise cover and vermillion endpapers also invoke a nagging sense of the under-glass quality of an era that's passed, despite the simple or "modern" recipes peppered throughout. Plus, the saturated colours and peacock and paisley iconography of the fanciful illustrations in the book have a complex, often uncomfortable provenance – as do some of the recipes themselves.

Take the Coronation Chicken Salad, here featured in tea sandwiches, a recipe based on one served at King George V's Jubilee in 1935. It is studded with raisins, flecked with cilantro, stained with curry powder and savory sweet with mango chutney. The dish is an inarguable classic of British cooking, yet is the product of a colonial past.

Innumerable retrospectives have been weaving a similar romance around the monarchy since Philip's pronouncement, but the threads in all these florid tapestries are showing signs of age. While the food he celebrates is inarguably delicious, the heyday that Parker Bowles writes about with such unvarnished enthusiasm is increasingly distant.

A Fortnum & Mason Inspired Lunch

This meal of soup and scones was inspired by two separate recipes from The Cook Book: Fortnum & Mason, proudly towering Stilton scones with blueberries and one for creamed leeks. For all its visual refinement, the pairing is full of contrast. The soup has a vegetal sweetness from long-cooked leeks and is bolstered by a swathe of cream. Against that, crisp-edged scones have that highly-nasal sharpness of blue cheese, but are touched with honey for balance. Walnuts add waxy crunch.