PreCooking was ( Re: [Sca-cooks] This 'n that)

[Kirrily Robert]

Niccolo wrote:
> Does it make your skin crawl to know that some of us don't pre-test
> recipes either in this whole method?

No, but it makes my skin crawl to think of *me* doing it!  I realise
that people work differently... but for me, I wouldn't want to cook
medieval food for more than, say, 20 people without testing the recipes
first.

My upcoming feast has about 20 dishes.  Of those, I've cooked about 15
of them before just at home or for pot-lucks or camping.  The rest, I
will test (or my staff will test) in the lead-up to the event, to get
quantities fairly exact.  Then we'll be having two test dinners, each
consisting of half the eventual feast, to make sure that the dishes go
well together and can be cooked together without painful mix-ups (like,
say, too much stuff in the oven at once, or more than one dish that
needs to be served really quick and fresh and hot from the stove).

My pre-cooking is slated to start about 4 weeks before the event... but
that's mostly sweets and preserves.  There will be quite a large number
of dishes cooked or prepared during the week leading up to the event,
and either frozen or just refrigerated depending on what kind of thing
they are.  Since we only have the site kitchen from 2pm on the day, I'm
hoping to walk in there with most of my "mise en place" already "en
place", so to speak, and be ready to put things in the oven and on the
stove pretty promptly.  The other bonus is that the site is about 100m
from my home, so ferrying stuff to the site will be fairly easy, even if
we just rope in a bunch of volunteers to cart stuff over by hand.

Yours,

Katherine

--
Lady Katherine Rowberd (mka Kirrily "Skud" Robert)
katherine at infotrope.net  http://infotrope.net/sca/
Caldrithig, Skraeling Althing, Ealdormere
"The rose is red, the leaves are grene, God save Elizabeth our Queene"