SC - Period Menus

[E. Rain]

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