SC - feastware question

[LrdRas@aol.com]

Hi There,
How about a sepaerat feast (possibly lunch or brunch) class.  This will be taught
and served by the teacher and wach student will pay sepaeratly for this class.
When the class is done, such class can serve at that nights feast or something
along this line?!

Page

WOLFMOMSCA at aol.com wrote:

> 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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