SC - BOUNCE scAccomodating Vegetarians at Period Feasts

[Michael F. Gunter]

Saluti!
		Call me Curious in California queried:
		How do people cope with feeding vegetarians? Do Feast Cooks
ever make some of the main courses without meat, but substituting
non-European (but period) food such as tofu and seitan?

I don't generally do meatless courses, but I always make certain there is
enough food for non-carnivores. Not just because of vegetarians, but also
some people can't or won't eat certain meats - a couple of our Shire are
Jewish for instance, and I personally am violently allergic to cooked fish
(small amounts of raw is fine, I don't know why). So whilst I don't directly
cater for vegetarians, I do make sure they get up from the table as well fed
as the omnivores. Mainly I just plan my menus very carefully, and there are
certainly enough vegetable/Lenten dishes that are "vegetarian-friendly". 

I tend to give vegans short shrift however, I must admit. We have one vegan
in our Shire currently, and I'm perfectly happy to accommodate her at
cooking workshops if I know she's coming, but when I'm catering for a group,
she's out of luck. Although having said that there is any number of period
dishes vegans can consume. Using tofu or seitan (what's that?) would also
totally negate my reason for cooking a feast - which is to try and reproduce
medieval or renaissance recipes as authentically as I am capable of. My
reasoning is that medieval food accommodates meatlessness and diarylessness
due to religious or economic reasons, but not due to moral reasons
(disregarding the religious aspect), so as I am attempting to follow in
authentic style, my practice is the same. Allergies are the same - if a Lord
was violently allergic to mushrooms or apples (wasn't the Emperor Claudius
supposedly allergic to the latter?), then there is no way their cook would
feed it to them (not unless they wanted to be charged with trying to poison
him!), but this is usually got around with good kitchen hygiene and posting
the ingredients. 

Although I like my stuff to be authentic, the one trick which I do use is to
employ vegetarian stock for the soup, despite the fact most of the time the
recipe specifies a chicken stock. 

The feast I went to at the weekend had someone coming around with a separate
vegetarian course, which I had never seen done before. I ate one course of
it to avoid the (for me) inedible, if admirably large, cooked salmon, but I
thought it rather odd - as well as a pain in the butt for the Head Cook. But
if you have large numbers of vegetarians (it was a College group so they
did), I think it would be a viable option.

Al Vostro e al Servizio del Sogno
Lucretzia

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Lady Lucrezia-Isabella di Freccia   |  mka Tina Nevin
Thamesreach Shire, The Isles, Drachenwald | London, UK
thorngrove at geocities.com | http://www.geocities.com/~thorngrove  
"There is no doubt that great leaders prefer hard drinkers to good
versifiers" - Aretino, 1536 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 

- ------------- End Forwarded Message -------------


============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================