Heston Blumenthal on his Medieval Feast

In Heston’s Feasts we see the chef extraordinaire employing gastronomic trickery to entertain and thrill celebrity guests. Here he gives us the goss on what really went on behind the camera of the Medieval episode

On piercing a bull’s bollock for the meat fruit…
The blokes in the crew definitely found it hard to watch – even well-hardened cameramen! It’s certainly not something you see in day-to-day cookery!

The meat fruit were really difficult to get right; there was no point creating something that looked the part but didn’t taste amazing. In the original historic recipe they’re made with minced pork and egg and were too heavy for an amuse bouche, so we re-designed them with lighter pâté-like fillings. The testicle plums (plum plums) seemed to be the most popular of the bunch. In fact, they were so popular we actually had to stop the guests eating them because we were worried they’d have no room left for the rest of the meal.

On if the big, burly Latvian lamprey fisherman were intimidating
Yes! All these guys had been fishing for lamprey all their lives and weren’t too keen on outsiders coming in and cooking their national dish. By the end of the ordeal I think we turned them around though, but for a second I was worried I wasn’t going to escape alive.

On seeing the celebrity guests freak out when so much effort had gone into creating the lamprey dish
At the time it was devastating because we’d put so much time and effort into the dish. But that’s the thing with all of these feasts: we want to push the dining experience as far as we can go to produce something really magical. I think with the lamprey though, we pushed it a little too far.

On the practicalities of making the four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie
Fresh meat was an incredible luxury for our medieval forbearers so you can be sure they didn’t waste a thing! We can certainly learn something from them in this sense – and, for a chef, using things like heart and gizzards in a dish can be really exciting – it gave us a really rich, luxurious result in the final dish.

Making the pastry was more of an engineering challenge than a culinary one. When you’re working with pastry on such a large scale, the weight of the pastry itself becomes the main problem – too big and it just falls apart. To create a free standing pastry pie we had to layer pastry strips on top of each other in various directions to create a self-supporting structure. It was a real headache, but worth it in the end.

On the edible tableware
This was another real headache. We had originally planned to make an entire edible tablecloth and made a few prototypes. It never looked quite right so in the end we opted to downsize it into napkins – which worked really well.

It was hilarious because none of the guests worked out what was going on straight away. Even when they were told that everything was edible it took them a while to suss out that included the cutlery and the candles. We had to coordinate the service very effectively to stop any chocolate melting.

I think they were definitely amazed by it all – and it’s that child-like amazement combined with great food that sums up what I’m trying to achieve in all these feasts.

Make 4Food’s version of the edible chocolate cutlery

More of Heston’s Feasts

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