[Sca-cooks] My first Aten event

[Peter Ryan]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Katheline van Weye" <kat_weye at yahoo.com>
To: <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 8:47 AM
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] My first Aten event


>
> However, with all of that said, I can come up with one
> possible reason that period food might be more
> uncommon here (not that I'm saying it's uncommon).
> Our weather.  The main concentration of the members of
> the Kingdom are in the hotter areas.  In areas that
> for about half the year have temperatures over 90
> degrees.  So no one wants to deal with any hot food at
> that time and refrigeration is a must.  Unfortunately,
> a lot of the recipes in the more common period
> cookbooks that people use (Take a Thousand Eggs, Early
> French Cookery) are for hot food.  Stews, soups,
> meats, etc.  It's too hot to cook over a fire, it's
> too hot to be slaving over a stove in a poorly
> air-conditioned kitchen, and it's easier to use some
> modern, colder food recipes.  So I suppose it's
> possible for people to get out of the habit of making
> period food.  If only our ancestors had found
> refrigeration earlier. ;)

Much of Lochac also suffers from a surfeit of heat for much of the year.
However, the vast majority of feasts here entirely consist of period,
documentable and redacted recipes. With online resources, and excellent
printed editions of period cookbooks available it is actually very easy to
find recipes to suit nearly any climate or time of year that meets with the
approval of the modern palate. Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern cooking
takes place in a hot climate, after all. Most of the problem is in educating
folks that it is just as easy to cook period food as it is to serve
modernities.

My advice is to start small. Do a sumptious, period feast for 40 first up.
Fill the kitchen with as many people as you can to train them all. Have
cooking workshops to trial dishes in people's homes (we always do this for
every new dish before a feast). Start up a Cooks' Guild. Our local Barony
(Stormhold) holds monthly Cooks Guild meetings where everyone prepares a
dish, and we have a potluck/commentary session.

I've appended the url for the Lochac Twelth Night Feast (Principality
event). The cooking was all done on on site, on the day in 102F heat.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Bridge/7900/twelth.htm

Gwynfor Lwyd OP, OLM, AA, PsC, OST etc
Canton of Krae Glas, Barony of Stormhold,
Principality of Lochac, West Kingdom