Tom Parker Bowles on Queen Camilla: long walks, toast and bedtime stories
Queen Camilla is a "big walker" who loves toast and makes "amazing" scrambled eggs, her son Tom Parker Bowles has said.
Tom Parker Bowles, Queen Camilla's son from her previous marriage to Andrew Parker Bowles, gave the account in an interview published on 4 October. He had been appearing at the Braemar Literary Festival when he spoke to The Press & Journal about family time at Balmoral, the King's estate in Aberdeenshire Hello Magazine.
He said his catch-ups with his mother happen there during the family's late-summer stay. Balmoral has long served as a private gathering place away from London engagements. It is where the formal diary gives way to walks and simple food.
He traced that taste for home cooking to Wiltshire, where he said he grew up in the country. Queen Camilla cooked as a traditional British cook for her children while his father was away in the army. Toast was a constant on the table, and scrambled eggs became her signature dish.
He said his mother read to him and his sister Laura Lopes every night when they were children. It was a nightly routine, not an occasional treat. That habit, he suggested, shaped the household as much as the cooking did.
Away from royal engagements, he said, Queen Camilla is "very humble" in her downtime and "very different" from the glamour of public duties Express. No ceremony, no schedule. Just walking, reading and unshowy food.
He has spoken about that cooking before. In a 2024 interview about Cooking and the Crown, he told Vanity Fair that his mother scrambles her eggs for 20 to 30 minutes and roasts chicken with "all the ugly fats" Vanity Fair. That conversation was part of a longer discussion of his mother's cooking. Slow, careful and rich.
What makes this stand out is the ordinariness of it. For readers used to state banquets and the Court Circular, the daily record of royal engagements, the picture here is toast, long walks and bedtime stories.
For fans, this means a clearer sense of the private routine behind the public role. The portrait is warm without being grand. It lingers because the details are easy to picture.
