SC - Gyric's Feast Blues was First Feasts

[Lee-Gwen]

Hi Gyric and welcome to the list,

One suggestion I would give you, as a very new "period cook" and one who has
never done a feast in her life (and isn't planning on starting any time
soon), is to try familiarising yourself with period food in your day-to-day
menus.  This way you can try out recipes which look interesting (and I admit
that I _do not_ redact and am quite happy using other people's work!) and
get a feel for what works and how it comes together.

I, for example, now make regularly a kidney (liver/heart ...) stew for my
Lady which she loves.  For Christmas, I did 2 meat dishes both of which were
from my slowly growing collection of medieval cookbooks.  They were both
wonderful and earned rave reviews.  As well, cooking them for a small,
comparatively undemanding bunch gave me a lot of freedom to choose things
which were "unusual" to the modern palate - chicken cooked in almond milk
and served with a second bread-based sauce, for example.  I also learned
where I thought the redaction could be bettered.  I found, for instance,
that there was no-here near enough  of the second sauce for the dish and
that it could happily have been doubled.

Anyway, the point of this ramble is that if you start to cook this food for
yourself at home it will become as familiar to you as the dishes you now
cook.  Who knows, you may even find you like the stuff (*smile*).

Oh, a small piece of advice on cookbooks:  since tastes vary and so do the
motives behind the creation of books of redacted recipes, I would strongly
suggest getting books which present both the redaction and the original
recipes.  That way you can look the original and see where the redaction
deviates from it and you can learn that many things in the original aren't
measured and so allow quite a bit of scope for your tastes (so, you hate
ginger in great measure?  Check the original and see if perhaps the amount
in the redaction could happily be reduced.  That will change the dish and
you may find it more palatable.  I think that this causes quite a few
problems for beginner cooks - they simply don't realise that, just because
the redaction says 1 tb ginger, ground doesn't mean that it is what the
original would have used, where it is likely to say "add ginger, cinnamon,
pepper until it is right".

Gwynydd