How Prue Leith Totally Failed Serving Tea To Queen Elizabeth

It may feel like chef, host, and entrepreneur Prue Leith is fairly infallible — she's elegant, knowledgeable, and certainly capable of making a good cup of tea — but as it turns out, we all have our embarrassing moments. Leith's slip-up just happened to be in front of the late Queen of England. In a video recently posted on Instagram by Leith and @britishbakeoff, she regaled the world with the awkward tale of when she was tasked with serving Queen Elizabeth a cup of tea, and accidentally got everything mixed up.

It all began several years ago, when Leith was the caterer at a building that the Queen was opening. Leith stood at the end of a long line of dignitaries holding a silver tray, and when the Queen approached, she asked whether the royal would like her tea black or white. "Poor woman must have been gasping for a cup of tea ... she'd just toured around this building for two hours," Leith said in the video. When she requested black tea, Leith poured her a cup of weak black tea with a lemon slice in the bottom — only for it to turn out that the Queen preferred neither of those things. "She got weak lemony tea, when what she wanted was strong black tea," Leith lamented. "I've felt bad ever since."

Leith notes that she did try to be better prepared for the situation. In fact, she called the palace ahead of time to ask how the queen took her tea, but the equerry (officer who attends to the queen) refused to tell her, saying only that she should serve the tea on a silver tray with slices of lemon and that she should ask how the Queen would like her tea in the moment. "You'd think it was a state secret!" Leith said in the Instagram video.

So when the Queen requested black tea, Leith poured a hot cup and placed one of the lemon slices that the equerry had recommended having on her tray at the bottom of the cup — only for the Queen to ask that there be no lemon in her tea a moment later. Leith pulled it out and set it on the tray cloth, which promptly soaked through with a brown stain. She then topped off the tea with a little more water, going by her experience that people who drank tea black typically liked it weaker. However the Queen then told her that she preferred her tea strong. Alas, no one is immune to making mistakes when brewing tea, especially when the Queen had strict opinions and rules about which drinks and foods royals can or can't eat and drink.