SC - Re:Marrow recipe, oop but barely

[Phil & Susan Troy]

In a message dated 98-10-20 16:42:29 EDT, Helen wrote:

<< If you have the space, what is wrong with servers bringing the food to
 the guests and placeing it on the plates?  I am getting mixed signals
 about it being period.  I know that this type service got popular by a
 Russian introducing it to "Tend Setters". (in victorian times?)  But
 would, a say a Royal Wedding Feast, be served to the guests or home
 style platters on the tables? >>

Documentably, from about the mid-14th century on, in England, meals in large
households were served in messes, with a mess being food for four people.  The
steward had a book with a list of household officers and the number of messes
they received for each meal.  Each household officer then had a subordinate
mess officer who doled out the food to the individual members of the staff who
were entitled to receive food for that meal.  The steward also had a guest
list, and these individuals were usually served in pairs.  

The major difference between the way we need to serve feast, and the way it
was usually done in period, is this:  In period, the cooks made lots of
different dishes, and not everyone was entitled to, nor received, the same
dish.  In the CMA, we usually cook the same meal for a set number of persons.
Portion control is essential if the feast is going to be enjoyed by all
feasters.  The need for tight portion control is what drives most of us to
insist on servers taking food directly to individual feasters, this need for
portion control is driven by our budgetary constraints.  Therefore, since we
have to live with the budgetary constraints, and we need to use portion
control to do it, we may have to sacrifice a touch of periodicity in order to
stay within our budgets.  

As to your second question, about royal weddings and such, I haven't got an
answer for that.  I tend to believe that smaller households would have fewer
servant-types, and the special meals which took place might be served as
homestyle as a regular meal.  But I also tend to conclude that budgetary
restraints happened in the Middle Ages, as they do now (a money economy being
a creature of habit), and it was possible that there were meals portioned out
in individual servings by servers, just as we do it today.  Most historians
tend to agree on the tendency in the Middle Ages for meals to be served for
two, under separate cover, for diners to share.  There's a lot of literature
out there concerning mealtime manners, and this sharing of the platter seems
to be pretty consistent throughtout the corpus.  

Like I said before, a lot of the trouble which comes from serving feast in the
CMA comes not from the servers, but from the feasters themselves, who are
often totally ignorant of the way meals were served in the Middle Ages.  And
unfortunately, most of them don't want a history lecture before the meal, they
just want to be fed, so the instructions for feasting are often left off the
list of things to do for the Hall Steward.  We also have to contend with
modern ideas concerning health, and for some, the very thought of sharing a
platter of food with the person sitting next to them is enough to give them
gastritis.  ;-)  

Anyone got any suggestions about how to educate the populace about feasting
particulars?  I've done "feast practices" in the past, but the Society is so
large now, it's often prohibitively expensive for a group to do this.

Walk in peace,
Wolfmother
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