What will the royal wedding menu look like?

In food circles they talk of nothing else. It is a better kept secret than was once the identity of Deep Throat in the Watergate scandal, the name of the person at ITV responsible for putting Simon Cowell on telly, and what McDonald's does to their chips to make them go floppy within 30 seconds of being served. Yes, what everybody is dying to know, what they NEED to know is: what exactly will the guests at the royal wedding be eating tomorrow?

A moment's silence please while we brood on this question.

In truth, it's probably not worth investing with too much emotional energy, for two reasons. Firstly a) we can (and I will) have a good stab at what will be on that menu. Have patience; I'll get there. And b) it doesn't really matter, for almost all wedding food is the same: awful. Wedding feasts are where ingredients go to die. Apart from mine. That was terrific. What can I tell you? I may have faults but I do have good taste.

Often, and for understandable reasons, good taste goes out the window when the wedding bells chime. The reality is that feeding lots of people at the same time is hideously difficult. This is why the hotel banqueting business is one of this country's great rackets, with venues charging shocking amounts - easily akin to the cost of a Michelin two or three star meal – for food that the top flight kitchens would hesitate to serve their staff. Because it's for a special occasion, and everyone knows getting two, three or four hundred people fed at the same time is a big ask, normal standards drop and people rarely complain. Nobody wants to admit that the reception was anything other than fairy tale perfect.

At the one end there is the cheap wedding buffet, full of desiccated halved pork pies and Day-Glo orange scotch eggs, which could be regarded as a concealed weapon, if carried in a built-up area after dark. There will be cold cocktail sausages of the sort made from piggy eyebrows and nipples, and coronation chicken (though not of the perfect variety) a sickly shade of Dale Winton.

But at least that has the virtue of honesty, an acceptance of what the budget will allow. Far worse than that is the menu of vaulting ambition that can never be achieved: the timbale of crab – mmm, smell the ammonia – with slushy tomatoes and shards of unripened avocado, the fillets of beef, all cooked to a shade of grey that recalls a day-old bruise. And to finish, meringue nests which shatter on first spoon contact, and take out granny's last good eye.

Finally above those are the really expensive versions: the striped black bass with a tangle of leeks, the beef wellingtons and the croque en bouches that look like something built for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The best you ever get with this kind of stuff is 'fine'. Certainly if you spent the amount for that sort of thing charged to the hosts a head, in a restaurant, you'd get something far better.

Which is what my wife and I decided to do. It's a very long time ago now, back in the decade before last, in the century before this one, but save for the friends who did a hog roast round a camp fire, I can't recall better food at a wedding. A rather nice pub called the Eagle had recently opened near the offices of the Guardian in Farringdon. Back then it was just a plucky little restaurant idea rather than the godfather of the entire global gastro movement it is now. They didn't then open on Saturdays, so we got them to do so, and asked them to serve a pared down menu of their usual dishes: lots of sticky seared chorizo, grilled polenta with roasted vegetables and a few whole roasted salmon which you could help yourself to.

Our honeymoon was in Tuscany, and the Eagle food was still some of the best in that style that we eat during that period. It was also extraordinary cheap at £12.50 a head, compared to the £30 or £40 a head most of our contemporaries were paying then. In case you think I'm being insufferably smug (I am) you should know it rained for most of our time in Italy.

But enough about me. What will Kate and Wills' wedding feast cost a head? Ooh, somewhere between a whore's ransom and a Middle Eastern dictator's Swiss bank account, I should imagine. Despite reports of Mossiman's hand at work the food is apparently being prepared in-house (it was also rumoured that Jamie Oliver offered to help, but was merely thanked for his interest).

So what exactly will be on the menu?

It will, I imagine, big up British and seasonal. It has to. So, how about: salmon in a sorrel sauce with asparagus. Perhaps they'll throw a few Jersey Royals in there too. That will be followed by beef from Charlie's Highgrove Estate (and Scottish morels: why not?) I'm predicting that the Mail's report of lemon tart for pudding is wrong, and to finish there will be strawberries of some kind. Sure, it will be sold better than that. There will be flourishes and twirls, a bit of French, a bit of labelling, and perhaps name checks for a few sauces Escoffier would recognise – but that will be it.

Have I called it right, or am I being sadly predictable? I'm sure you won't hold back your thoughts. And while you're at it please tell us your stories of weddings 'feasts' full of recrimination, loathing, bad cookery and regret.