SC - Horror story (was Guilty Conscience)
Chris Adler
Chris.Adler at westgroup.com
Fri Jun 5 10:06:00 PDT 1998
>Does anyone else have similar horror stories?
Greetings, Master Huen!
BTW, I really appreciated your comments at War Practice on the
honey-ginger candies I made.
I've been head cook of about a half dozen events since I started
feastocratting two years ago. There have been minor inconveniences or
problems at all of them, but none due to the autocrat... until my last
one in February.
The ironic thing is that my best friend in the SCA was the autocrat of
this event and had asked me to be head cook. Everything went very
smoothly during the planning process (she even convinced the king to
have court AFTER feast instead of before - which was his preference -
because I requested it).
The night *before* the event, I was bringing my equipment and the
dishes that were already finished to the site so that I could lessen
the work for the next morning. I noticed my friend's crew putting out
18 tables in the hall. Hmm. We'd agreed on 16 tables, hadn't we? I
thought. I asked the crew if the extra two tables were for off-board.
No, there's no off-board for this feast, I was told.
I called her at home and found out that she thought I was cooking for
150 people. Uh, sweetie, we'd agreed on 125, remember? Remember?
Please remember...
Okay, so at 11 p.m., I'm figuring out how to stretch the soups, stews,
and roasts (not a big problem, really). My only concern was that I had
made only 16 loaves of bread, 16 tarts, and 16 flans. No problem: I
hurriedly called the laurel who agreed to make the flans and tarts for
me and asked her to make a few extras. My mom, who had driven 400
miles to help me for the weekend (yes, she's demented) immediately
began measuring the yeast to start another two loaves of bread. So,
we're under control. Hey, it was just miscommunication.
The next day, lunch went really well, and then we're prepping for
feast. My butler comes in at 5 p.m. and wants to start staging the
dishes. Honey, you don't need to be here for another half hour, feast
will be at 6 p.m., I tell her. That's not what the program says, she
replies. I check the program: feast at 5:30. I go and find my
autocrat: uh, sweetie? Didn't we agree *weeks* ago that feast would be
at 6? (A stunned look came over her face.) Ooooooh... Uh, sorry...
Luckily, I'm one of those anal twits who makes up a schedule of when
everything has to get done, by half hours, (including starting the
water boiling), and I post it on the wall so that everyone can follow
it. We'd gotten everything done ahead of time, so we were able to push
everything up a half hour without much trouble. Feast was served only
a few minutes later than the program had stated. It certainly wasn't
the calmly organized procedure that I had planned or wanted, but hey,
people ate hot food and they seemed happy with the meal!
The autocrat called me the next day to apologize profusely. I remarked
that I knew it wasn't intentional, and that it was probably good for
me to experience how to handle such typical feastocratting problems in
a friendly atmosphere, so that I now know how to handle such things.
However, I reminded her, I *have* been studying medieval poisons a lot
lately... Just a thought. ;)
In Service, Katja
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