People sometimes ask me where I get my ideas from. The answer is, 'All over the place' - sometimes where I might least expect to find them. I've recently become involved in the work a group of historians is carrying out at Hampton Court. The kitchens at the palace are open to the public, but every so often they also play host to these historians, who immerse themselves in the kitchen environment and cook, taking questions along the way. And when I say immerse, I mean immerse.
The kitchens are unique in this country and can be adapted to exactly the conditions that would have characterised them in Tudor, Elizabethan or Jacobean periods. Depending on what period the historians are intent on exploring, everything - the equipment they use, the clothes they wear, the recipes they follow, the methods they employ - is as authentic as they can make it. To show just how precise they are, the last time I saw them they were wearing brown waistcoats and brown trousers that had been dyed with onion skins, which, apparently, used to be the practice.
If they have a recipe from, say, 1570, which calls for the mixture of whatever is being cooked to be passed through a colander, they find out what a colander looked like in 1570 - how big it was, what it was made of, whether it had any special features - then they have it made to those specifications. They even went to the Canary Islands to find the right kind of cochineal beetle for food colouring for an Elizabethan recipe.
And people think I'm a stickler for detail.
Our working relationship is still at an early stage, but I find this kind of investigation really inspirational, and I will be returning to the kitchens of Hampton Court for further columns.