SC - Confession is good for the soul

[Jenne Heise]

Well, I finally got the time to pull this information together, sent it
out earlier this past week...only to discover that it didn't actually go
anywhere.  So, I'm going
to try again.  I'm attaching a file to this message that contains the
menu.  I will be sending out a second message that will have the
recipes.

It was a real adventure to do this feast...especially as I couldn't be
there when it was actually cooked!  It meant that I had to be much more
precise in my
measurements than usual...and, even so, the good people who actually did
the cooking (one of them, Baron Tirloch, corresponds on this list...)
still had to
make some adjustments.  The Japanese course is not documented in any
fashion.  It is even borderline "periodoid".  At this point, I don't
have a source for
documenting Japanese dishes, but hope to have something in hand in the
near future.  As I understand it, even that won't have recipes, so I'll
still be guessing a
lot.  What I tried to do was to use what I found in many different
sources to be period dishes, or at the very least, dishes that used all
ingredients that were
known and used in Japanese cuisine in period.  I probably had one too
many pickled dishes in the course and should have omitted the cabbage
pickles...they
came out VERY salty!!

The other two courses were fully documented.  I did wind up moving the
spinach dish to the Chinese course.  The sources I used stated that it
was a Persian
dish that was known in Mongolia...when I discussed this with Paul Buell,
he indicated that your basic Mongol would rather be caught dead than
eating
veggies...but said he felt sure it would have been served in China by
the 14th or 15th century, given other dishes that he knew had migrated
from Persia.  But
the recipe did come from the article discussing Mongol foods.

If anyone has any thoughts, suggestions or other commentary, I'd really
be grateful...I hope to be able to do this again, only this time get to
do the cooking
myself!

Kiri