SC - Re: sca-cooks kingdom feast differences

[Philip W. Troy]

Aonghas MacLeoid (B.G. Morris) wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
> Just my two cents worth about portion control.  Up here we have a group who
> gather up all the left overs and donate them to the local soup kitchen.
> It's much nicer to see the food eaten than go to waste.  I have never been
> able to get my portion control to the point where there are no
> leftovers(close but not quite).  This is a simple solution to leftovers and
> gives you a warm fuzzy as well (we all do what we can)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Ealasaid

Unfortunately, my mundane local government prevents makes this virtually
impossible. There is an organization called City Harvest that will pick
up our leftovers, recycle them as needed, and distribute them as needed.
The only problem is that  they are never too sure of when they will
arrive, so it is difficult to arrange a pickup from a rented site on a
Saturday evening.

So, I have found that the best solution is to plan on having few or no
leftovers. One way to do this is to use one of the Dreaded Reference
Books, the ones with charts suggesting portion sizes of various foods.
The standard argument against such references in the SCA is that the
authors have never encountered hungry fighters, and who in blazes eats a
quarter pound of meat anyway? The answer is, truthfully, that many
people do. Some eat more, and some eat less or none. (I generally allow
for shrinkage in a roast, so I allow about 3 pounds for a table of
eight, but otherwise I follow the charts pretty religiously.)

Even if the argument about fighters eating more of certain foods holds,
there is the added variety factor found in the typical SCA feast: for
instance, I often serve three or even four different meat, bird, or fish
dishes. Allowing for a half pound of meat per person, per entree, is
insanity.

Probably the best such reference is "Food for Fifty" by Shugart, Molt,
and Wilson. Publisher is Wiley. Don't have the other info at hand just
now. It contains charts showing portion sizes of various foods, both as
edible portion and food as purchased (showing, for example, weight of
shrimp in the shell vs. out) and the amounts needed to serve fifty. It
also contains numerous recipes, which at first seem a bit on the
industrial side (read "dreadful") but are still quite useful for
comparing to the recipes you have redacted, to check the ingredient
quantities for dishes similar in some way to what you are cooking. So,
for example, a recipe for fifty servings of pastry cream might be quite
handy for constructing a recipe for large amounts of rampaunt perry or
applemoy.

Adamantius Bob says check it out...