ANST - to serve or not to serve...

[Mark.S Harris]

Dottie Elliott wrote:
> Knowing the horror I will cause (by suggesting an out of kingdom idea), I
> will mention how we served feasts in our small shire in the East Kingdom.
> We simply had one person from each table come up and get the food for
> each course. It was quick, simple and didn't impact anyone greatly. Its
> not as nice as having servers but we only had 10 people in the shire and
> just couldn't get enough servers.
> 
> Clarissa

I don't seem to have gotten the original message yet, so I'll have to
hope I'm not missing any questions here.

Buffet serving, when there is a trained staff serving them, seem to work
ok, although there is no evidence of any medieval feasts being served
this way.

Simply buffet serving with more than say thirty people usually ends up
with the first third getting plenty to eat of many wonderful dishes,
the middle third getting a little of the best dishes and a fair amount
of the average dishes and the last third getting some of the average
dishes and a fair amount of the least appetizing food. At least that
is my experience in eight years in the SCA.

I have seen one possible solution to this given, but have never seen
it done, so I don't know if would really work. It does require more
room than is often available though. In this method, feasters sit on
only one side of the table (this part is quite medieval - look at
the illuminations of medieval feasts). The pot luck dishes brought
by that table are placed on the other side of the table from the
feasters. At a certain time everyone starts serving at their table
and works their way around the room. No waiting in line. As the food
gets depleted it can be moved to a few centralized tables. If the
site is too crowded for this, then one or two places at each table
can be left for the food.

The original messages explaining this method and other comments and
suggestions on serving feasts can be found in this file in the FEASTS
section of my Stefan's Florilegium:

feast-serving-msg (45K)  3/18/98    Ideas for serving feasts. How to organise.

Which can be found at this site on the web:
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/rialto/rialto.html

Lord Stefan li Rous
Barony of Bryn Gwlad
Ansteorra
stefan at texas.net
============================================================================
Go to http://lists.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.