"Redaction Parties" (was Re: SC - rare foods at feasts-rant)

[david friedman]

At 7:22 PM -0400 9/27/00, Catherine Deville wrote (concerning 
someone's mention of our cooking workshops):

>ooooooo!!!  That sounds like *great* fun.  Can we do some of those here?
>(speaking of our respective physical locations)   can we please, huh,
>huh?!?
>
>I remain, in service to Meridies,
>Lady Celia des L'archier

Well, we used to, when we lived in Axemoor in Meridies. The procedure 
as we do it is:

1. We announce to all interested people that we are doing a workshop 
on a particular Saturday afternoon and ask people to tell us by the 
Friday if they are coming.

2. We select period recipes, usually one per person plus one or two 
extra just in case. We do the shopping in advance.

3. When people show up, we hand them a stack of printed-out recipes 
and let them pick one each. We remind everyone to time everything, 
measure everything, weigh everything, and write it all down. We 
usually have to make a real point of this with experienced cooks, who 
are used to throwing in what looks like enough without measuring it 
(as indeed the period cooks did)--but we want reproducable results.

Some of the recipes will be new to us, some will be retries, with the 
record of what the last person did as well as the original recipe. We 
make sure anyone who hasn't done this before gets to try a new 
recipe, to get the fun of going from something written down five or 
six hundred years ago to good food to eat. On retries, we have to 
emphasize that people should pay more attention to the original than 
to someone's guess from last time--too often they do the opposite.

4. Everybody cooks something, with us offering advice as needed. If 
we have a lot of people, I don't do a recipe but instead stand in the 
middle of the kitchen saying, "The sugar is in that cupboard. The 
frying pans are over there. I think what that word means is..." When 
something is finished, everyone tastes it and the comments are 
recorded along with the descriptions of what was done.

5. Cariadoc or I type the description into the computer with the help 
of the person who did the recipe, so that if there is something 
unclear in what got written down we can ask about it while it is 
fresh in his mind. Copies are then printed out for anyone who wanted 
one to take home and play with.

We have yet to have to send out for pizza.

Elizabeth of Dendermonde/Betty Cook