The job, she said, isn’t nearly as straightforward, nor as glamorous, as it may sound.

“You are essentially part of the art department,” she explained, “and you need to understand what the requirements are. It’s not just about making the food look nice. You have to fit into the script requirements, choose the right kind of food that is historically accurate and correct for the season. It’s got to be able to stand around while the scene is shot over and over again, and you have to be able to make vast quantities of it, because if someone carves a chicken leg off a whole chicken, they are going to do that over and over again, and you will have to have 60 chickens ready.”

She added that because at Downton there was butler service — the food is on platters and in dishes carried by footmen to each diner, who then serves him- or herself — it also had to be user-friendly.

“We’ve made sure that the dining room is the ballet that a dining room has always been in an aristocratic house,” said Alastair Bruce, the historical adviser on the series. “The servants must silently and effortlessly offer food; you have to teach each of those actors how to place the fork or spoon on the dish, and to serve. Each person at the table could decide whether they wanted a dish or not, and how much, but once you’ve put it on your plate, you had to eat it. That’s how these people were brought up.”

The food, Mr. Bruce said, couldn’t be overly fancy or ornate, or it would be too difficult to help oneself. “The rule is that if Violet can’t put a fork and spoon on the item on the plate and serve herself, it can’t be in the dining room,” he said, referring to Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, played with much verve by Maggie Smith.