[Sca-cooks] What I Did Last Weekend

[Christine Seelye-King]

What I Did Last Weekend, by Mistress Christianna MacGrain
My Barony did a demo this weekend (June 2nd, 2001) for a group of campers
inside Stone Mountain Park, just outside of Atlanta.  (For those of you who
watched the Olympics, this is where the cycling, archery and rowing venues
were held. Big piece of granite sticking up out of the ground, with a
carving of the Confederate Generals on it's side.  Cool laser shows and
fireworks, too.)  The group worked very hard to set up a lovely field with
all-period pavillions; held a heavy-weapons tourney, a fencing tourney, and
a Pas d'Armes; a puppet show (many thanks to the Black Lantern Puppet
Theatre, especially for the repeat performance of the late-night "South
Downs vs. Gamera"!); I sang with both the South Downs Chorusters Guild and
the Band of Peach Curry (middle eastern musicians); we had Assorted Kindling
(recorder consort); Fiddler John and Lady Magdalena (Garlandia Consort); a
fashion show; a live Nine-Man Morris game; demos of stained glass making,
leatherwork, and textile arts; and I'm not sure what all else!  My lord,
Baron Damon Fox - he of Pennsic Party fame - and several compatriots spent
the weekend cooking meats over a smoker, and then cutting them into 1" cubes
and spearing them on toothpicks.  From there they came to my table, where we
had 5 period sauces for them to try out.  Lord Borgar the Bright (one of the
cooking team) prepared a flavored vinegar which was absolutely wonderful for
dipping the pork into.  He gave me a long list of flavorings such as garlic,
thyme, rosemary, etc. and said it had been steeping for over 4 months.  I
was loathe to give the rest of the bottle back to him!  fra niccolo made
Platina's Red Mustard (? I think this was the recipe he used, it was quite
yellow and he looked put out at the amount of tumeric he had added, and it
was much hotter than the other times I have tried his Red Mustard - he and
others also worked a wonderful looking spit all day on saturday, cooking
large chunks o' beef).  I had prepared 3 sauces, Sauce Robert, Cameline, and
Garlic Jance. Many thanks to Adamantius for so quickly coming through with
the wording for the Garlic Jance, I was able to get that in time and add it
to my other info sheets.  I had the original, source, translation, and
ingredients listed on individual pages which I cleverly thought to slip into
plastic page protectors, they were wiped off numerous times during the day.
We also had chunks of bread rolls handy for folks to try various sauces
with.  I made 3 gallons of Sekanjabin syrup and had pitchers of the drink
made up as well with the recipes and Cariadoc's comments from the
Miscellany.  Just about everyone liked it, although the staff at the park
were coming up saying "Ok, they told me to come try this stuff, but to hold
my breath for the first sip!".  Getting over the idea that you are about to
drink vinegar is a challenge for most people, but they were suprised to
learn that it was worth it.  I did have vinegar in every sauce, and wondered
about that. But, it was not a complete feast, and everything sat out without
refrigeration all day, (the sekanjabin was iced and the meat came off the
cookers in small portions that were eaten within a safe time period), so I
decided vinegar was ok!
	We ended the evening with a pot-luck feast.  We were unsure whether we
would have meat left over from the day or not - it was a rainy Friday and
Sunday and threatened on Saturday, so while we had nice weather, many
campers decided to stay home.  As it turned out, we had plenty left over,
and used that as the main dish of the meal.  I had brought two packages of
white fish, sole and catfish.  We put those on the grill and finished them
with the Barbe Robert, they were wonderful.  Our Barony supplied the rest of
our normal "Groaning Board", in this case, two groaning picnic tables (we
had both table tops and all four benches covered with food and drink) along
with two other tables and the grill top - the vidalia onions in foil of
course, along with the best grilled zucchini I have ever had!  Chunked up
watermelon for the clean-up portion of the evening finished things out.
Wow.  Wonderous spread, and I am especially proud of my Lord for handling
the many crisis that came up during the weekend.  As his first time out
being in charge of an event's food prep, he had a difficult situation and
managed to turn everything out in a timely fashion (not to mention tasty),
and only got really pissed off once.  (Ok, twice, but that was at home where
no one could see it but me ;)   We really did not know what to expect out of
this situation, and it was different from a normal event for us in many
ways.  I know we all learned a lot about how to go about this sort of thing
in the future.
	All in all, I think we successfully introduced the idea of period or just
simply historical cooking to many people this weekend.  It was a very
non-threatening way of doing it, with the harmless-looking sekanjabin,
readily recognizable meat chunks, bread chunks, and mustard, alongside some
other more exotic looking sauces such as the cameline and jance.  I didn't
see anyone go away from the table with a "Gawd, that was awful" look on
their faces anyway!
	As always, thanks to the folks on this list for helping out with many
ideas, resources, and general moral support that makes this kind of thing so
much easier.
	Hope everyone else's weekends were good,
	Christianna