About the Show

Heston Blumenthal is the chef and owner of The Fat Duck, a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in the village of Bray in Berkshire (one of only 3 restaurants in the United Kingdom and Ireland to achieve such an honour) and voted Best Restaurant in the UK by the Good Food Guide 2007 and 2009.

The future of cooking, Heston tells us, lies in the secret recipes of the past.   Heston becomes a gastronomic timelord as travels back in time to culinary worlds that have gone untasted for centuries to find out if the future of food lies in the gastronomy of our past.  He is on a mission to recreate famous period dishes for the ultimate contemporary banquets.

Heston’s mission is to surprise jaded 21st century palates by scientifically reconstructing an inventive back-to-the-future banquet consisting of forgotten flavours, textures and taste sensations,  In each episode, Heston explores a period of extraordinary gastronomic innovation; recreating ‘lost’ recipes, discovering forgotten flavours and ingredients and travelling to remote areas to source unusual foods. His culinary quest takes him through Victorian Britain and Tudor England to the Medieval era and Ancient Rome and includes a special Christmas episode.

Through each program, he will create a spectacular mouthwatering historical feast complete with all the sumptuous, orgiastic, excessive mayhem our ancestors took for granted.  Chomping his way through key moments in culinary history our gastronaut recreates feasts including Henry VIII’s Feast of Beasts, the Roman shagging-food orgy of Caligula and Alice’s Banquet in Wonderland for a room stuffed full of demanding celebrities, hard-nosed critics and hungry revelers, all bracing themselves for the feast of their lives.

Heston uses the different dishes on the menu for the feast to map out a fascinating timeline of how our tastes and techniques have developed into the food habits we share.  Sharing dishes on the menu include an entirely edible garden with insects, 24 blackbirds baked in a pie, a Trojan Hog with edible intestines and an unusual ‘ejaculating’ cake.

This isn’t cooking for amateurs – so throw away your cookbooks and definitely don't try this at home.