SC - Sideboard

[Dottie Elliott]

I, too, tend to make a number of vegetarian dishes when serving a feast,
but I do it with bad conscience.  My impression is that if food was
being
served on a meat day - no attempt would be made to avoid meat, butter,
milk, and eggs.  If it were being served on a fast day, then EVERYTHING
would avoid one or more of those ingredients (depending on the degree of
the fast).  I just can't see period cooks -mixing- their feast day and
fast day dishes!


	I agree with you; I've had several off-(Outlands) list
discussions
	with prominent vegetarians about meat-heavy feasts.  The only
possible
	thought justification I could come up with was if you viewed
your
	feast as having some high-level churchmen attending who never
ate
	meat (I recall reading of one Archbishop of Canterbury who did
this--
	I think it might have been Adrian Brakespeare, who became the
only
	English Pope), but that would be a stretch.

	By and large, because the nobility could hunt and others had to
poach
	if they wanted game, and because the nobility had numerous meat
animals
	instead of a few, they could and did have meat on their tables
*a lot*.
	I really do wish that diners could treat an SCA feast as an
ethnic food
	experience and leave their "food pyramid" expectations at the
door.

	I know that I usually have anomalous experiences from others
:-), but I'm
	a natural for the Atkins Diet and variants if ever there was
one:  I crave
	protein all the time, and my one complaint with SCA feasts over
the years
	is that many of them seem to have been very starchy and have
lots of
	"fillers"--probably to save feast budgets, but I really wouldn't
*miss*
	potatoes for the people who have tried to sneak them in; and
whenever
	there's pasta or noodle type things, there is way too much of it
and not
	enough of the flavoring/sauce/protein type things.  My take is
that the
	"average American" is used to way too much stodgy, starchy food
and doesn't
	count himself well fed unless he waddles away, bloated, from the
table.

	Once again, am I totally alone in this experience?  :-)

Berengaria
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