[Sca-cooks] Article: Feasting with Food Allergies

[Nicolas Steenhout]

This is an interesting article.

It is my experience as both a professional chef and an allergy sufferer that:

a) most cooks tend to disbelieve the importance and potential lethal aspect
of food allergies.

and

b) most allergy sufferer tend to make a "big show" of it and exagerate the
impact.

Now, please don't get in a fluff over what I say.  I am intimately familiar
with how dangerous food can be.  Crustaceans, if ingested, or iodine, if it
gets in my bloodstream, will kill me.

I have always been willing to talk to people coming to me to discuss
dietary needs.  And often, it seems like I know more about allergies than
they do, even the specific one they have.  I have yet to cook a SCA related
feast.  When I do, it will be made abundantly clear that all dietary
requests will be considered, *ahead* of time, and that last minute request
might not be possible.  As suggested, list of ingredients will be
posted.  Seems like a simple thing to do.

Adamantius is correct: "secret recipes don't belong in food
service".  Heck, I defy anyone to follow a recipe I make and come out with
the same dish I do.  It might be close, but it'll never be the dish I
made.  Well, you get the meaning, right? :-)  (on a side note, I think that
people who keep recipes secret are somewhat insecure, and isn't it best to
expand cooking knowledge rather than keep it close?)

>So am I. If you can find any majority of commercial products that do
>contain peanut butter, I'll be amazed at that, too. I'm not saying it's
>in no commercial chilis, but it doesn't appear in the ingredients lists
>in most of the ones I've seen, and if it _is_ there, perhaps it's
>something to take up with the FDA, specifically in regard to their
>Standards of Identity rulings.

Well...  I don't know about commercial, canned chilis.  I do know that many
restaurants will put some peanut butter in their chilis, and also tomato
sauce.  If you scorche the sauce, for some reason, the peanut butter seems
to remove the taste a little bit.  Weird, it works, and I'd *never* use
that "technique" if I were to serve food to the "masses".

In the end, it is the responsibility of the diner to know what they are/can
eat, if they can't get a satisfactory answer, not to eat it.  And it is the
responsibility of the cook to make sure to do all they possibly can to
accomodate folks.

<shrug>

Nicolas
http://www.bmee.net
"You must deal with me as I think of myself" J. Hockenberry