How to make chocolate salami

For as long as we’ve been serving food, we’ve been unable to resist a bit of culinary deception. Making one thing look like another thing – especially if it makes a sweet thing look savoury or vice versa – seems to have universal comedic value. There’s something Willy Wonka-ish about the visual wrong-footing, the surprise – we find it delightful.

There’s a long history here. At medieval and Tudor banquets, the food was entertainment as much as it was sustenance: huge pastries made to look like life-size stags and swans stood alongside carefully carved marzipan fruits, both imitating the real thing as closely as possible.

Chefs have long played with this form of trickery. Heston Blumenthal’s famous ‘meat fruit’ – where chicken liver and foie gras parfait are set inside a jelly glaze to make it look exactly like a mandarin – takes its lessons directly from the medieval culinary jape of disguising meat to look like, well, fruit. Ferran Adrià, the king of molecular gastronomy, was known for his ‘liquid olive’, shaped like a solid green olive, but made from olive juice using the reverse spherification technique, so it burst in the mouth of the unsuspecting diner. Pastry chef Cédric Grolet makes exquisite fruit creations – a perfect pomegranate, a blushing peach – that look entirely lifelike, but which have half a dozen different layers of texture, technique and flavour to create the perfect pudding.

The vogue now on social media for ‘Is it cake?’ videos (such a popular idea that it even spawned its own television game show) celebrates this tradition, with an enormous chef’s knife looming over everyday items – a trainer, a burger, a loo roll – ready to cut into it and reveal whether it is the object it appears to be, or a sponge-filled simulacrum.