SC - Kitchens

[Anne-Marie Rousseau]

HIya all from Anne-Marie
Boy, interkingdom anthropology time!

Here in Madrone, we have a huge guild, and often will have 20-40 live,
warm, experienced cook bodies champing at the proverbial bit. It is very
unusual for us to do any pre-cooking, and we all spend happily all day
making food the day of the feast. But then when we are asked to do a feast,
our first question is "whats the kitchen?", and we rarely cook for over 150
or so.

Excpetions for this include situations at tourneys without real kitchens,
or things like the banquet I did Elizabethan food for...there was no way to
do all the biscuits, cakes and cookies in the oven space available (we
needed it for the meat, pies, etc for the non-banquetting remove stuff), so
had several cookie parties ahead of time and froze them.

The Kitchen Heads job is to vet all the recipies, with guild members help,
do the expansions, do a kitchen schedule, line up the crew, do the grocery
lists and budgets, and then do a massive grocery shopping saga usually the
night before, or that morning. The emphasis is in sharing the fun in the
kitchen...we all like to cook and so it wouldn't be fair to bogart all the
work, you see. The day of the feast, the kitchen head doesnt get to cook
anything (poor kitchen head!), but flits from station to station, making
sure everything is on track and that everyone has all the ingredients they
need.

We are fortunate here in Seattle in that the Pike Place Market is just
downtown...we call ahead with our lists, and the nice produce vendors,
bakers, butchers, fishmongers (ooo! That boy at the Pike Place Fish market!
but I digress), dairys, cheese makers, spice merchants and import food
stores have things all boxed up and ready for us (at wholesale prices,
usually) so we just need to swing by the the BIG truck and load 'em up! 
Witha little leg work, its one stop shopping.

I know, I know, we're spoiled. I taught a class at Western Collegium a year
or so back, and folks were amazed at how tight it all worked...but then we
have a reputation to uphold. Guild feasts are wonderful, balanced, at least
perioide if not documentably period, well served, hot, on time, etc etc
etc. 

Enjoying hearing how other folks do it...
- --Anne-Marie, spoiled rotton and very glad of it.
============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================