SC - cutlery photos

[Cindy M. Renfrow]

I'll have to look up the source, but if memory serves, it was Santich, in the
Mediterranean cookbook who, though I don't recall any actual menus, indicated
that the custom was to work your way up from the simpler, boiled meats to the
more imposing and impressive roasts and reconstructed "critturs" like peacocks.
I believe that the meal started with things like veggies and appetizer-type
things.

Kiri

"E. Rain" wrote:

> Hi all,
> on the topic of period Menus, here's a bit of DeNola's Libre de Guisados as
> translated by Marianne Perdomo Machin:
>
> "It is also customary to give table cloth with each potagge, and to give the
> victuals from degree to degree, that is: first the fruit, and after it a
> pottage; and then roast, then another pottage and then cooked [things, like
> stews]; unless its is manjar blanco, for this pottage is usually given at
> the beginning, after the fruit. Some lords eat at first all that is stewed,
> and then all that is roasted. If there are frying pan fruits [*] it must be
> given afterwards, as it were, and then the other fruit."
>
> * frying pan fruits: basically cheese or fruit in dough, deep-fried or
> something
> along those lines
>
> Eden’s summation:
>
> Fruit
> Pottages (blancmanges)
> Roasts
> Pottages
> Stews
> Fritters
> fruit
>
> So far I haven't found a menu from the Spanish sources that's been
> translated into English, but at least with this as a guide I can start to
> construct something *like* a period meal.  Hopefully by the time we're done
> with the recipe reconstructions stage we're currently working on I will have
> found some actual menus to look at as well, if not I'll probably work with
> the menus from the Neapolitan collection to supplement this.
>
> one of the Neapolitan menus calls for only 18 dishes, which is quite
> feasible.  Interestingly it's broken out into 7 courses (some with only 1
> dish) and we were just talking at a recent Madrone Culinary Guild mtg about
> breaking our banquets up into a larger number of courses with fewer dishes
> in each of them so as to make serving up each course easier & help guarantee
> that delicate foods went out to the hall at the right time etc... (we're
> extremely fussy about this "hot food goes to the table hot" being one of our
> mantras)
>
> Eden - who wants about 200 of those lovely covered serving dishes you see in
> the period illustrations of feasts :->
>
> ____________________________________________________
> WARNING: Dates on the calendar are closer than they appear!
>
> Eden Rain
> raghead at liripipe.com
>
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