HERB - Midrealm Coronation Feast: Some Herbal Notes

Gaylin Walli gwalli at infoengine.com
Tue May 2 14:24:10 PDT 2000


I toyed with the idea of posting to everyone a blow-by-blow of
the Midrealm Coronation Feast that happened this past weekend,
but I figure most of you on the Herb List here would be more
interested in just the herbal related stuff.

When I picked and revised the recipes last year, I'd resolved
to use fresh herbs where it might be appropriate for the time
of year and the dishes we redacted (all from Platina's _De
Honesta Voluptate_). This was a little harder than I expected.
Some plants simply don't grow large enough in metro-Detroit's
gardening/planting zones during the early spring. Most of them
certainly didn't grow large enough to get what we needed
quantity-wise for the feast.

In the end, we bought all but the rosemary, the chives, and the
flowers we used for garnish on the dishes. Not including the
garnishes for the dishes, the herbal/plant purchases were
relatively few: parsley in great quantities, basil, green
coriander (which most people in our audience will call cilantro),
peppermint (why is it I have so much trouble growing this
darned plant? perhaps I pay too much attention to it and should
just ignore the silly thing), celery, garlic, and onions. I'm
certain to be forgetting at least a few things. :)

Neither my garlic nor my parsley was worthy of using in
the feast. Similarly, the woman who planted the basil for
our feast had considerable difficulty getting the plants to
grow beyond two inches. In general, all of our spring plants
in metro Detroit this year seemed extremely stunted. None
of these plants were terribly hard to get at any of our
local stores, fortunately, as we have a rather rich ethic
heritage. Celery isn't a spring plant and is very commonly
available year-round. Onions and garlic as well.

Oddly, the hardest thing for me to purchase for the feast
was the mushrooms. Perhaps the suppliers to our areas
also had troubles and simply shipped inferior product.
The mushrooms we looked for during the entire week
prior to the feast were quite honestly disgusting, with
few fresh ones worth even considering. Perhaps they
could have been used in stews or soups, but I neither
liked the smell, nor the coloring. It turned out that the
mushrooms got purchased at 1 am Saturday the morning
of the feast. The woman ringing them up on the cash
register didn't even know what a Portabella was, much
less a Crimini, and actually had to ask. I didn't know it
until I looked at the receipt later on, but she ended up
ringing them in at the regular mushroom price instead
of the gourmet mushroom price.

The dried plant items were much less troublesome. We didn't
require using any of the SCAdian popular spices like
long pepper or cubebs or nigella. I went through a considerable
amount of pepper, though, and actually ran out of it,
to my surprise. Pepper, like salt, is one of those things you
seem to buy in such large quantities that you'll have no
hope of running out of it in your lifetime. Why is it that
we're always so surprised when we do run out, then? :)
Clove use was minimal, mostly because the dishes didn't
require it, but also because the now-King, then-Prince
requested "meat flavored meat." We ended up spicing our
self-butchered veal with a combination of olive oil, pepper,
dried coriander, thyme, and sage, if I am recalling the
recipe correctly (it's all still rather a haze at this point).

Perhaps the most interesting item we used in the feast,
next to the fresh flower garnishes, was the elder flowers.
The pie in the first main course was an elder flower white
pie. Very lovely and quite tasty. Just different enough that
people wondered what the flavor was without being too
worried about the "strange" thing they were eating.

I hope to have the last of my post-mortem notes put together
by this weekend in my recipe files. When that happens, I'll
be figuring out where the booklet will be placed online (most
likely multiple places, including Stefan's Flori-thingy if we
can managed the information transfer). Once it's located
where it's going to live, I'll be sure to post a note here and
to the SCA Cook's list (and the Middle Kingdom Cook's list,
of course) so that anyone who wants to see the recipes can
do so.

Cheers,

Jasmine
Iasmin de Cordoba
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