SC - period feast menus

[S.Albert]

Greetings:

I guess I'll put my 2 centavos into the feast menu discussion. Our barony
does one feast event each year at Michaelmass (in October). Our favorite
trick is to explore the food of a given country. We've done Russian,
Middle-Eastern, German, Italian, Scandinavian and Far Eastern, among
others, and our most successful was discovering Spanish, which we found
wonderful once we got past the mental headset of thinking Spanish was
Mexican -- all that Moorish influence!

We mostly scavenge recipes from a variety of cookbooks, omitting as many
modern ingredients as possible, and modern styles of cooking, and looking
especially for those traditional recipes that cross all the cookbooks,
which we think means they're probably older than others and closer to
period.

We also tend to make a lot of dishes to sample, rather than a few to eat
heartily of. For the Spanish (which we've reprised a number of times, with
some changes to explore more recipes and some always served) we started
with a buffet course of tapas, followed by two more buffet courses that
would have been served had we not been in a private home for that one,
followed by a course of desserts. No entertainment. Most people were
involved in the precooking and cooking that day, and were more than content
to eat until we groaned over good company and a lot of laughter. We started
in the late morning, and were cleaning up by 11 p.m.

For your perusal, here was the menu:

Tapas:
        Rojões Comino (braised pork with cumin, coriander & lemon)
        Tortillitas de Camarones (shrimp pancakes)
        french catalan meatballs
        pork loin with pomegranate sauce
        sauted mushrooms
        variety of olives

First Course:
        garlic soup with Three Kings Sweet Bread
        Orange & Onion Salad
        pork loin in milk
        Catalan Beef Stew with Orange Peel & Black Olives:
        cauliflower fried in garlic and olive oil

Second Course:
        swordfish with raisins
        saffron rice
        Pollo al Ajillo (garlic chicken)
        fried spinach w/pine nuts nd proscuitto
        peasant bread

Dessert:
        Monkey Melon (melon soaked in anisette)
        honey coated fried pastries

THe monkey melon was especially memorable. You cut the very top off the
canteloupe, scoop out the innards, fill the space with home-brewed anisette
and soak for a few hours. Pour out the anisette, cut the canteloupe into
bite-sized pieces and serve. The combination of flavors is wonderful. And
the chief cooks couldn't decide if the canteloupe was better, or the
leftover liqueur, which didn't make it out of the kitchen (G).

There's a few recipes missing from there, but I can't dredge them from
memory and I haven't got them all listed together (yet).

Traditionally, Oerthan coronets also serve large feast for dinner on
Saturday, consisting of several courses/the R word (which we're trying to
root out, but it takes time). But it's one thing to do an elaborate feast
for 30-40 and have it the focus of the day, and yet another thing for a
small group when hosting coronet to do the same for dinner for 100 as part
of a very busy event (tourney on Saturday, final court on Saturday evening,
investiture the next day, peerage meetings, principalty business meeting,
guild meetings, etc. -- it's a very long two days).

There have been attempts to treat it more like West Kingdom 12th Night (no
large feast, some food provided with potluck contributions, or eat out --
totally rejected recently) or to limit the number of feasters, which
creates some bad feelings as tradition is the feed everyone (they already
get Saturday brunch and Sunday breakfast in the ticket price). There are
reasons for late attendees (past a cutoff for feast reservations, anyway),
considering travel from the far regions of the principality is expensive
and often people don't know until close to the date that they can come. It
just makes it  hard on small groups to host them.

How do other coronets do the food thing? Other than making everyone
responsible for their own food for the weekend?

Geez, I wrote a book. I didn't mean to. I've got a heraldry class to plan
tonight! I started out just wanting to share our feast experiences up here
in the hinterlands, where no one told us we shouldn't do things that way...

Later,

Morgana

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Morgana yr Oerfa, Baroness      *     Sharron Albert
Winter's Gate/Oertha/West       *     salbert at polarnet.com
Per saltire gules and sable,    *     Babylon 5/science fiction
in pale two mullets and         *     (astrology/tarot)
in fess an increscent           *     Back up my hard drive? How do I put
and a decrescent argent.        *          it in reverse?
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