After a five course banquet you’d want coffee and liqueurs wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t suddenly decide to round it all off with a bowl of pap, would you? Just so you could have an extra course?...I’m not saying you need to know when to stop…You need to know when to push away your plate and call for those liqueurs."

These words of wisdom come from the indomitable Armande in Joanne Harris’s Chocolat– don’t worry dear reader, I’m not about to kick the bucket just yet, but I am about to bow out of the Varsity food frontline and this will be my final culinary offering–so let’s go out with a bang.

This week’s feast is based on medieval banquets, where the appearance of food, a visceral display of wealth and pomp, was just as important as what the stuff actually tasted like. Hundreds of chefs would have slaved for weeks to produce such feasts; my particular favourite is a record of a 1465 feast held for the enthronement of the Archbishop of York where the guests troughed through "one hundred and foure oxen, one thousand muttons, three thousand piggs and one hundred and three pasties of venison cold". And that was just the entrée.

Time constraints and the lack of a noblewoman’s purse restricted my choice of dishes, but not my ambition to produce dishes which both looked and tasted quite spectacular. For starters an edible rockpool: fresh shellfish, seaweed, broccoli and bread huddled around around a seawater-mirror as if attending some sort of fishy trade union meet, followed by a crusades-inspired pork, chicken and turkey pie laced with vast amounts of turmeric and decorated with roses, freesias and a lilac rabbit. Dessert would have been individual goldfish bowls: wineglasses containing a mango-fish suspended in prosecco jelly on a bed of gravel made from sour millions. Sadly, blue millions not only end up dying the ‘water’ a very murky green, they also prevent the gelatine from setting the jelly for at least three days. Oh, if only I had an R&D team like Heston Blumenthal…

So, best of luck with the nasties, remember to eat and remember what George Bernard Shaw said: "There is no love sincerer than the love of food."