A.A. Gill on Dinner by Heston Blumenthal

We began with meat fruit. This, I suspect, will be the most requested and talked-about dish. A perfect mandarin orange that smells like mandarin, even minutely examined it looks like a mandarin, but, cut open, it is immensely fine chicken liver parfait - like the old Jewish joke: what am I? Chopped liver.

Then I had rice and flesh, a Chinese yellow saffron risotto with that characteristic flavour of dust and closed jewellery boxes and nuggets of calf tail. Salamagundy is an old English pickled salad that can contain any number of ingredients. This one was chicken oysters, the little muscle behind the wing, bone marrow and horseradish. A broth of lamb was so intense, it was like supping melted amber. Roast bone marrow came in a split leg with anchovy, mace and pickled vegetables. Jeremy [Clarkson] had this and his eyes bulged. Hoarsely, he spluttered: "This is the best thing I have ever eaten."

Gill, A.A. (2011) Table Talk: Dinners by Heston Blumenthal. Style. The Sunday Times. 13 Feb. 54-55.