SC - fancy feasts vs. simple feasts

[Stefan li Rous]

> TerryD at Health.State.OK.US writes:
> << Back to the cheap and filling foods for feasts, maybe? >>

And Ras replies in part:
> Hopefully not. The feasts we seek to recreate are for the most part fine
> dining at it's best. Years of work has been done to educate the typical SCA
> person regarding actual period feasts. The documentation of cheap and filling
> food does not necessarily mean that those foods were ever served at feasts.

I disagree here. Just as we often practice various arts that the peasants
and middle class would have done and not the nobility, I feel there is no 
reason that we should limit our SCA "feasts" to those of the nobility. 
In fact, many of our events and sites lend them much better to simpler 
repasts. A single course of a stew and breads may not have been the 
choice of the high nobility, but it can be filling and accurate at a 
site that has poor or no facilities or has bad weather. I think I would 
prefer a simpler but well done feast (such as that that fed 800 people 
at the Ansteorran 20th Year Celebration) to a poorly done, overly ambitious 
feast.

While we assume that our fellow participants are of noble birth until
told otherwise, there is nothing that forces them to have a noble
persona. The same should apply to any of the activities in the Society.

We don't stick to only English and Norse personas even if they can
be more easily documented than many others. The same applies to English
or French food instead of Polish or food of the Nobles vs. food of the
peasants or middle class.

- -- 
Lord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas           stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:
         http://lg_photo.home.texas.net/florilegium/index.html ****
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