The Monarch Dines by Ned Beauman

The memories of Theodor Hierneis, one-time cook at the court of King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1954)

The memoirs of Ludwig II’s chef offered Ned Beauman food for thought when he came to write his latest novel.

These days chef’s memoirs are as common as sautéed kale, but the only chefs I really want to hear from are chefs who worked for famous demented autocrats. In 2003 the Japanese sushi chef Kenji Fujimoto published I Was Kim Jong-il’s Cook, in which he recounts his time with the former supreme leader of North Korea. Fujimoto would travel the world buying Czech beer, Uzbek caviar, Thai papayas, Danish pork and, on one occasion, hamburgers from a McDonald’s in Beijing. His book is, as far as I know, only the second example of this select genre, the first being The Monarch Dines: The Memories of Theodor Hierneis, One-Time Cook at the Court of King Ludwig II of Bavaria (transl. Martin Cooper, 1954).

Hierneis was born in 1868 and entered Ludwig’s service as a kitchen-boy at the age of 14. He worked for Ludwig for 4 years until the king’s mysterious death aged 41, and was one of the group that discovered Ludwig’s body in the lake at Schloss Berg, his summer residence. From the beginning, Hierneis was warned that if he ever made eye contact with the king he would be sacked; later, ‘when the king’s nervous terror of people increased … orders were given that no one was to be seen at a door, in the courtyard, or even at a window. In the case of the king suddenly appearing and all escape being impossible, the only hope of avoiding his displeasure was to stand bent double, with finger-tips touching the shoes … I soon learned that the king always ate alone, and in spite of this, every dish had to be prepared for four people. At first I accepted this as one of the many inexplicable prescriptions of court etiquette; but I later learned that the king imagined himself to be entertaining guests.’ Yet, Hierneis adds, ‘I never for a moment dreamed that the king was ill or mentally deranged. Such a thing would not have entered any of our heads. ’

I discovered Hierneis’s slim volume in The London Library prior to a visit I made a few years ago to Neuschwanstein, the palace of medieval kitsch that Ludwig built for himself as a kind of Wagner theme park. As a young man, Ludwig was famous for his svelte beauty, but in the picture at the front of this book, he’s so fat that the back of his neck brims over the collar of his coat. ‘Ludwig II of Bavaria, ’ reads the caption, ‘from a photograph taken in 1884, at the time when Hierneis was in his service’ . This, evidently, is what Heirneis’s cooking did to him. It’s rather like a riding coach beginning his memoirs with a picture of his most famous client being trampled by a horse. A typically leaden menu printed in the book begins with a casserole of ham dumplings, followed by salmon en coquilles, beef with stuffed mushrooms, green beans with veal, roasted hare and stewed tripe, along with two rounds of sorbets. Still, it must be admitted that Ludwig’s diet, like Kim Jongil’s, was at least enviably cosmopolitan: he relished Volga sterlets, Whitstable oysters, Courland reindeer, Indian bird’s-nests and

Hierneis’s memoir made my tour of Neuschwanstein’s kitchens all the more enjoyable. But I still had it at the back of my mind later on, when I began work on my latest novel, Madness Is Better Than Defeat (2017). In a modern democracy, the most respectable way to behave like an eccentric tyrant is to become a film director. In Notes: The Making of Apocalypse Now (1979), Eleanor Coppola writes that her husband Francis ‘was setting up his own Vietnam with his supply lines of wine and steaks and air conditioners. With his staff of hundreds of people carrying out his every request, he was turning into Kurtz. ’

My own book follows a film crew setting off to shoot a screwball comedy on location at a Mayan ruin in Honduras, and Ludwig was as much my inspiration as Coppola when one of the chefs is ordered to contrive a breakfast of Eggs Benedict and Bloody Marys using nothing but ingredients he can forage in the rainforest. When we think of the millions of North Koreans who starved as Kim Jong-il indulged his whims, we feel only revulsion; but Hierneis seems to have respected Ludwig for his excesses. ‘We all accepted such eccentricities as a kind of luxury, ’ he says – but then admits at last that ‘perhaps I was even then aware of the breath they brought of another, unintelligible world, and one whose explanation could not be sought merely in the difference between royalty and ordinary humanity’ .

Ludwig II, 1884, from The Monarch Dines: The Memories of Theodor Hierneis (1954). © Bayr. Verwaltung der Staatl. Schlösser, Garten und Seen, Munich, and the Kunstverlag Martin Herpich & Sohn, Munich.