[Sca-cooks] competition with the regular feast

[Stefan li Rous]

Johnnae llyn Lewis replied to me with:
> I'll respond to this part of Stefan's comments.
>
> Generally in all the feasts that I have worked over
> the years, we tend to serve dishes to a set table of
> a certain size. You send a dish out to the table. It
> serves 8. We don't normally dish out 225 individual
> plates or small dishes of any one item that could then
> be served individually to people here and there across
> the feast hall. For the feast this coming weekend, it's
> set up on tables of twelve. The desserts are being set
> up for 12 portions for serving on one platter.

However, in my 12 years in Ansteorra, I can remember few times
when there was an onboard/offboard division. Non-eating and
eating folks are often intermixed at a feast. So it can
be done. Yes, it can complicate portion control.

> It's a
> question of fairness (making sure that people get what
> they paid for) time, efficiency, enough help, enough room
> in the kitchen, etc. Since we are serving more than one
> course, it's not quite the same set-up as a catered banquet
> where they serve the salad on a plate, then bring the
> dinner plate and lastly the dessert plate. Diners with
> various flags might work in restaurants, but if you are
> serving a number of people at an SCA feast at one time
> it could be chaos in very short order.

If you can't handle multiple feasts served in the same area,
then one half of the hall gets one feast and the other area
gets the other.

Several folks here have talked about field kitchens, on trailers
or whatever, that could be utilized to create a seperate kitchen
area or add facilities to one kitchen.

As far as help goes, will if half the site participants have to
leave the site to seek out mundane food, that is a lot of manpower.
Figure out how to keep some of that onsite and that may be the
extra manpower you need for the second kitchen crew.

> Stefan li Rous wrote:
> > If the site permits, then maybe you could still sit with your friends,
> > but you and they could actually get different feasts. You would use
> > different colored flags or something so servers could serve the
> > appropriate feasters.
> > The main restraint on multiple, simulatanious feast is the available
> > kitchen space and facilities. Obviously, in this case, the tavern
> > has already worked around this.

--
THLord  Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas         stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****