When the chef Heston Blumenthal acquired the Hinds Head Hotel in Bray, England, in 2004, he really just wanted the attached offices and parking for his three-Michelin-star restaurant, the Fat Duck, next door. What he got instead was an 18th-century pub. Rather than serve his trademark better-eating-through-chemistry fare (sardine-on-toast sorbet, etc.), Blumenthal realized that he was going to have to stick to traditional English dishes like steak and kidney pudding, Lancashire hot pot and the like to avoid being run out of town by angry old men.

One day, while looking for inspiration in his collection of medieval and Tudor cookbooks, he recalled a conversation he had at an Oxford symposium two years before with Marc Meltonville, a ceramic historian turned food archaeologist who was restoring the 55-room kitchens of Hampton Court Palace, which reopened to the public this month. In order to learn how things were done in the time of Henry VIII, Meltonville's team recreates not only period dishes like spinach-and-date fritters and spit-roasted meat but also all of the utensils used to prepare them. In that first conversation, Blumenthal regaled Meltonville with a fantasy recipe, one he discovered in a translation of an old French cookbook. To give you a sense of Blumenthal's devilish enthusiasm and curiosity, listen to how he recounted the recipe to me (my highly professional responses are in italics):

"I had came across a manuscript of Le Viander de Taillevent. He was the chef to the Palais Royal in Paris. I think it was the 14th century.. . .And in there was this wonderful  wonderful? fascinating as opposed to wonderful; it's not the right word  recipe for how to roast a chicken. You take the chicken, and you pluck the chicken while it's still alive, and you baste the skin with a mixture of soya, wheat germ and dripping, I think it was. And apparently this makes it look like the skin's been roasted. You then put the head of this live chicken under its tummy and rock it to sleep. Then you get two other chickens and you roast them. And you bring these three chickens out on a tray to the table. You start carving one of the roasted chickens. And. . .the one that is still alive but sleeping goes sort of 'Wha!'  head pops up  and it runs off down the table."

Oh, my God.

"And that's Part 1. Then you take this poor chicken, and you kill it, and you stuff its neck with a mixture of quicksilver, which is mercury, and sulfur, and then stitch it up. And apparently  obviously I haven't tried this at home, or at work  the expanding air in the neck cavity as you roast causes the mercury and the sulfur to react and somehow creates a clucking noise."

Oh, my God.

"And then you bring this clucking chicken back to the table. So you've taken a live chicken and made it appear dead, and then you've brought it back to life again."