After turning down the volume on high-end food in his last cookbook for home chefs, celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal swings back to high falutin gastronomy in his latest tome, which pulls old medieval and Victorian recipes out from obscurity.
In its publisher's blurb, Bloomsbury describes “Historic Heston' as being as much a culinary reference guide to British food traditions as a charting of the British identity.
But with just 28 recipes taking up 416 pages, and at $180 USD, the epic culinary odyssey into Britain's past is more likely to grace people's coffee tables than be dog-eared or smeared with egg and flour.
Among the cookery book's recipes are obscure 14th-century recipes like “rice and flesh,' for instance, a less than appetizing name for what was a “regal' dish of rice infused with spices.
In the book Blumenthal also reinvents what's described as the earliest known English cheesecake circa 1390 called Sambocade, and meat fruit, or meat parfait disguised as fruit, from 1430.
Each recipe is accompanied by an in-depth history lesson and given a social context for the dish's culinary importance.
Historic Heston is due out in October in the UK, and November in the US.
Other highly anticipated cookbooks slated for a fall 2013 release include new books from French chef Anne-Sophie Pic, Brazilian chef Alex Atala and Daniel Boulud.