SC - serving whole chickens

[Bonne of Traquair]

> >  I think part of the problem may simply be that a lot of people never
> > learned to carve
> >
> > Or perhaps the lack of proper carving equipment at the feast table?
>
>One of the dishes was a whole chicken, wrapped in some kind of leaves
>and then dough and baked. While good, it arrived at the table as one
>big chunk. And all we had to carve it with were small knives.
>
>Did medieval feasts have carvers for each table? Or just the head table?


I asked this question once before, and the final answer I've filed in my 
head (no documentation) was that the food as sent to the table (the 'mess' 
for each two people) had the meat in pieces small enough for the diners to 
manage with grace and ease.  The diners were not expected to have to carve 
at table, they either received a piece of the bird small enough to manage 
with table utensils, or actual bite-sized peices.
Don't know whether the carving was done in the kitchen or at a station in 
the hall.  Of course, some meats had been ground in the morter and then 
reshaped.  Even a fairly large chunk of the resulting 'meatloaf' is easily 
'carved' with a spoon, if it weren't shaped into bite sized bits in the 
first place.

Overall, I took this advice to mean I could buy chicken thighs at 59-cents a 
pound and use them instead of whole chickens, best price on those being 
99-cents a lb and the time/space to cut them up.   Much easier to send out 
one piece per diner and leave off the carving by the kitchen or the diners.  
  In my experience, there is always a great deal of waste when entire 
chickens are sent out.

Bonne
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