SC - Held up feast

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Mary Morman wrote:
> 
> good gentles,
> 
> i'm snide.  i know i'm snide, and i regret it but can't seem to help
> myself...

I think a certain amount of snideness was more or less expected by the
Lady who posted the exercise...I'm snide in my sleep, so don't feel bad.
> 
> ya'see, when i posted a mail on our kingdom listserv about a year ago
> about feasts that had been held up and sometimes destroyed because of long
> courts ( something which as a cook seemed to me self-evident ) i got back
> a lot of flack from many folk, and one ex-king in particular, who stated
> that i must be imagining things because nothing like that had ever
> happened and had specifically -not- happened at the event i was discussing
> (where i had been head cook).

And you are surprised? Overall, the fact is that the feast at an event
(assuming there is one) represents approximately one-fourth of the
general SCA activity at an event, the others being martial activities,
combined garb-admiration, politicking, and generic schmoozing, and
finally, a miscellaneous category that covers everything else, like
dance, music, gaming, etc. It was a major celebratory act to feast in
period. It is usually considered in the SCA as a distant third or fourth
in order of importance. Most people won't leave the fighting if they
hear that the feast has been served early, for example. It'll just have
to wait. Same with court. Affairs of State are more important than
Blancmanger, and a cook who can't keep a meal indefinitely with no loss
of quality isn't a good cook. Not to keep quoting from "The Odd Couple"
all the time, but the attitude often seems to be, "Can't you keep
pouring gravy over it?", and the response is, quite reasonably, "What
the hell am I, the Magic Chef? What gravy?"

It's been pointed out to me (by a costuming Laurel friend) that the East
Kingdom has many, many, more costuming, and C&I Laurels than it has
cooking Laurels. In the past two years or so five or six Laurels for
cooking were made, myself included, but they are still vastly
outnumbered. It does seem as if the cook's art is less essential to the
SCA experience, for many people, than many other SCA pursuits. I don't
know what can be done to change this. On the other hand, forewarned is
forearmed, and it behooves a cook to prepare dishes that CAN be kept
warm without loss of quality.

My usual trick is to do foods that are just about perfectly cooked one
hour before they are wanted. Assume these are items for the second
course. Serve your first course, which can be cold dishes, with a potage
or two, which will keep scaldingly hot for hours in, say, a covered
sixty-quart pot. While that is going out, work on your reserved second
course, which can be flash-reheated quickly (it probably wasn't cold yet
anyway), and the third course, if there is one, can be cooked for the
first and only time, while all this is happening. This is just an
extremely vague guideline, of course. YMMV.

I usually don't have too much problem with courts running over, as I
figure that I occasionally miscalculate the time it will take to prepare
or cook something, so how can I blame a herald or a monarch for doing
the same? I try to plan the feast accordingly.
 
> i just wonder if we, as cooks, really -realize- that the society may not
> see us as we see ourselves.

Probably not, but that will be for us to change.

Adamantius
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
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