Marriage of fine food for a Royal wedding

Street parties held across Britain featured cheese and pineapple chunks impaled on cocktail sticks, palm tree paper napkins and children wearing Union Jack hats held together clumsily with Sellotape, as the yummy mummy had also yet to rear her perfect head.

TV chef and restaurateur Anthony Worrall Thompson, 59, remembers he was preparing to open his first restaurant, Ménage à Trois, when the Prince and Princess of Wales got hitched on July 29, 1981.

“It was all nouvelle cuisine in those days and I was testing our recipes,” he recalls from his dining pub, The Greyhound, near Henley-on-Thames.

Worrall Thompson believes the food on offer at street parties for this month’s Royal wedding will have moved on considerably since 1981.

“People now want to see the ingredients. You’ll find interesting salads such as nicoise, white bean and roasted red peppers, plus olives and dips,” he says.

“We’ve become more Mediterranean, in the sense that we like food that can be eaten at room temperature, as opposed to the old days of cold poached salmon.”

And he predicts that the rolling-pin-wielding wives of yesteryear will yield to the lure of supermarket convenience.

“We’ll be buying in. While hours would have been spent last time devotedly creating sausage rolls, making fairy cakes and cutting crusts off sandwiches, in 2011, we’ll see a lot more bought in. Shops will have plenty of ready-to-serve platters on offer.”

Worrall Thompson’s own catering company, Windsor Larder, is already getting requests for hand-made sausage rolls, Scotch eggs and British favourites such as Bakewell and treacle tarts, and he thinks there will also be more exotic foods on the trestle tables.”

As far as he’s concerned though, the best way to entertain a crowd is to do a roast – and you couldn’t get more British than that.

“It’s one of my wife, Jay’s, favourite meals. I am a big fan of Middle White pigs. The meat has a lovely flavour and there’s enough fat to produce lovely cracking.

“It’s perfectly possible to cook a roast on a barbecue with the lid down – the secret is to keep it away from direct heat. If it’s a charcoal barbecue, put the coals around the outside so there are none directly under the meat. For gas barbecues, turn off the centre grill and put the meat in the middle.”

When cooking for large numbers of people, Worrall Thompson’s advice is to keep things simple.

“Foods such as dips with fresh vegetables, chicken legs and wings and ribs, score with adults and kids alike, and you can’t go wrong with a few decent sandwiches.

“Prepare so