SC - Portion Control (was Trenchers Oh my!)

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Olwen wrote:
>This bit reminded me of an event feast from several years back.  The 
>cooks for that event sent out everything in portion control.  What a 
>mess.  There were six of us at our table; we got six meatballs on 
>one platter, six sausages on one platter, six of everything came out 
>on seperate platters at seperate times.  The feast (or "snack" as it 
>came to be known) took hours!  And I know for certain that all the 
>food that had been prepared did not even make it out to the hall. (I 
>know, cuz I helped in the kitchen for awhile, nothing I worked on 
>came out).

Sheesh!

Well, i'm still fairly new to the SCA - almost a year and a half now 
- - and have attended a limited number of feasts here in the Kingdom of 
the West. Never gone away hungry.

At feasts i've attended, each table is set up to have pretty much 
equal numbers of diners. What i see come out of the kitchen is a 
platter of each dish for each table. So portion control means that 
each table gets an equal amount of food and all the food gets served.

If one table eats all of theirs and wants more, and there's a table 
where everyone has had enough and there's still food left on their 
platter, it gets passed to the "hungry" table.

Definitely reduces leftovers, since nothing's left sitting around the 
kitchen, unless they cooked some insanely massive amount of some 
dish, too much to serve. And what comes back to the kitchen gets 
given to the helpers to take home or possibly to other diners if they 
request some.

Anahita al-shazhiyya