SC - Suggestions for vegetarian "main" dish needed

[Christine A Seelye-King]

>Roast venison with pepper sauce
>
>Apple tart (V)
>
>As you can see, we need a vegetarian dish to complement the roast 
>venison.
>I've had one shire member suggest a gluten roast - which suggestion 
>has been politely refused, explaining that we would like all the dishes
>to be period. 
	Good Choice.  The health food store I work in had a tasting demo
of a vegetarian Thanksgiving, and every single product was absolutely
disgusting.  I would rather use tofu (if I have to) in a stir fry or miso
soup, not try to make it into (shudder) "Tofurky" (I kid you not, that
was the name of the product on the package.) But I digress.
>The vast majority of the rest of the recipes are 14th century English; 
>I'd like a nice solid veggie dish of a similar nature.  Any suggestions?
>
>Brangwayna

	The most obvious choice to me would be a frumenty.  The grains
for the dish varied, but basically it was a dish made of cooked grains
(barley, wheat, oats, etc.).  As an accompaniment to venison, it ususally
had meat chunks and/or fat in it, and sometimes was made with saffron
and/or with eggs and cream to make it rich.  For a vegetarian version, I
would cook your grains in a broth (our store sells a very good vegetarian
broth, chicken and beef flavors!).  I have added onions and mushrooms to
mine  (The "briw" that I made for the Pennsic Cooks Reception was mixed
grains, -cause I had lots of different grains left over and not enough of
any one to make a whole dish,  cooked with chicken soup [with onions], a
bit of salt and pepper, and sliced mushrooms added at the end of the
cooking process.  It was quite tasty.)  I wouldn't try to do without the
meat-flavored broth though, a big part of the richness of the dish comes
from that flavor - otherwise, you've got gruel! (which is what I'm
telling my roommate it is;)

The Bayeaux Tapestry has pictures of the feast for William, and it has
been conjectured tha two of the dishes are Venison and Frumenty.  
	Good luck, 
	Christianna
	think I'll go warm up some gruel for dinner :)

___________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html
or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]
============================================================================

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".

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