SC - Culinary Guild

[Anne-Marie Rousseau]

Hi all from Anne-Marie, Guildmistress for the Madrone Culinary Guild!

we are asked about the forming and running of a guild. Our Guild has been
around for about 20 (since May 1977!) years. It was formed way back when by
a bunch of people who liked to cook and who were interested in doing period
(well, at that time, it was more "perio-oide" due to the total lack of
resources of the time) food.

We have the minutes of the first meeting (and every meeting since then.
Needless to say our archives are rather large!). We carefully set down a
"charter", ie in writing, what the goals of the Guild were to be.
Specifically, in our case, they were:
1. to experiment with medieval recipes
2. Cook for SCA events
3. sponsor culinary contests at events
4. coordinate information and source lists of medieval recipes and
banquetting guides
5. Research recipes and banquetting techniques
6. Prepare presentations for coronations and other events
7. Devise fund raising projects
8. Publish a medieval cookbook
9. PUblish articles in the Crier and other society letters
10. Teach culinary skills at the Univeristy of Ithra and other places.

It was agreed that the Guild meetings would be every two-three weeks and in
keeping with our primary purpose, each  member was to bring an "authentic
medieval dish" to form a potluck meal for each meeting.

Now almost 20 years later, we still meet every other week or so, for a
potluck meeting where we discuss business, like our cookbook series,
culinary stuff for public demos, upcoming banquets, charity banquets (we
sometimes auction off our services for real world philanthropic
organizations), etc. In addition, we've added monthly (give or take)
reconstruction meetings where we play with primary source recipeis and eat
our results. Once a year we put on Peasants revel, a goofy fun event where
we all wear our grubbiest clothes and run around playing peasant games.

We have no guild structure except that we have a Guild Head who's in charge
of running the meetings, etc. This turns over every couple years or so, and
new GUild Heads are chosen by consensus. Anyone is welcome to work in our
kitchens, come to meetings or do anything else they like, though often
Kitchen Heads (the person in charge of a given banquet) is often someone
who helped on at least one other banquet.

All in all, this works well for us! We have our own bank account, a large
garage filled with cooking and serving equipment and a reputation for doing
amazing things with food. Oh, and we have fun too!

Hope this helps,
- --AM
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