SC - Re: dream kitchens OOP

[Aelfwyn@aol.com]

Jadwiga wrote:
I have a question that has bugged me for a while.
In the SCA, we concentrate on re-creating specific document period
recipes, but don't really pay much attention to period _menus_. Why is
that?


I think the answer to this question is three-fold. First, most of the menus
of most of the period we focus on list mainly protein. We know they ate
other things. We have the recipes to prove it. But a great many of the menus
list the meat dishes, and leave out the satelite dishes. So in a modern
sense they aren't really menus, but rather lists of what someone considered
the most important or memorable parts of the feast, and in some cases these
lists have been compiled with an eye to impressing the reader with the
wealth and generosity of the host. There might have been 3 ounces of roast
thrush in porre served. But it looks good on paper.

Second, Think of the amount of food it would entail. Taking into
consideration that not every dish would go to every diner, we are still
talking about a huge meal. Very likely we simply could not afford to eat a
meal with as many costly ingredients as we are likely to want to serve. I
don't know about where you folks live, but around here we don't just attempt
to recreate the upper calsses, around here we tend to pretend we are the
Uppitiest class (so to speak). So the menus that would go along with this
pretense are the costliest. Being somehwat poorer than our ambitions, we
make do. It's a champagne taste, root-beer pocketbook kinda thing. Current
SCA policy gets in the way here as well. In Aethelmearc it is against policy
to serve special foods to the royalty that the rest of us folk don't also
get, if spending SCA money to do so. That's a clear cut case of a policy
developed intending to guide us in our recreations while remaining fair to
everyone who pays money (the consumer). The problem is, History wasn't fair,
and throughout history the upper-crust royalty typically had most of the
money. I could concievably get into trouble for trying to be MORE
historically accurate, provided that folks could afford the on-board cost of
such an event. It's the cost of reconciling our two cultures: modern life
versus the REAL life of the middle ages.

Thirdly, you'd have to re-train your diners so that they understand they
they cannot eat by simply eating a pre-arranged plate set in front of them,
then leave, as might happen in a restaurant.  We currently, in my neck of
the woods, have a slighlty altered version of this. They fill their own
plates (most of the food served at the same time for each course, family
style), and then consume everything at once. They wait a half hour or so for
the second course, and then do it again. Then they leave. Experiments have
been underway with the never-ending buffet concept, but I am not convinced
that this is a viable or necessarily historically correct solution for any
event larger than 100 or so.

That's all my own opinion. But I believe it to be true. I've actually done
some surveys on a related  subject and am hppy to see others are now doing
the same. We've learned some valuable lessons. Among them: People don't like
to eat late. People like to eat meals as closely historical (and from as
single source) as possible. And no one appreciated dinner being held for
court. Not even the Royalty who cause dinner to be held for...... you get
the idea.

Aoife