Dinner at Home

The Vivendier is a collection of 15^th century recipes which contained such delights as fish with flames coming from its mouth and a mock chicken that looks cooked but is in fact alive to be awoken on serving and run amok along the dining table. The original authors remain unknown but the manuscript now resides in a museum in Germany. Heston discovered the text from an English translation he obtained in a book shop and it opened his eyes to the enormously creative talents of the chefs of the past. His interest quickly led him to the food historians, Ivan Day, Marc Meltonville and Richard who worked with him to uncover the original recipe for meat fruit, a dish that had been served at the coronation of Henry IV in 1399.

The Forme of Cury oldest extant cookbook in English. Cury is the Middle English word for cookery. The book was compiled by the court chefs of Richard II of England whose kitchens fed a household of 10,000 people on a daily basis. The book forms the starting point for many of the dishes at Dinner by Heston.

Royal Cooking is a book of compiled by Patrick Lamb and it contained a recipe several pages long for salamagundy. The word is a derivation of the French word ‘salmigondis’ which means ‘hodgepdge’ although Lamb’s version is anything but. It was a salad so fine that Lamb served it as part of the feast prepared for his employer, King James II for his coronation dinner in 1685. The meal contained an incredible 145 dish banquet with a further 30 more brought direct to the table. Heston found several versions of salamagundy in his research and eventually settled on a later one to work from but the version in Royal Cookery remains the earliest known recipe for Salamagundy.