[Sca-cooks] food decoration

[Mark.S Harris]

Gorgeous Muiredach said:
> >Few of the feasts i've attended in my 2-1/2 years have been arranged
> >attractively. <SNIP>I'll confess that at the Boar Hunt i
> >was just concerned with getting the food out so it didn't look
> >particularly nice,
>
> Granted, I haven't been to many feasts at all, but none seemed to have had
> an effort made for attractive presentation.
>
> This gives you a little more elbow room at serving time.  Time
> to put in a few branches of fresh herbs here, a tomato skin rose there, and
> other small easy items to enhance presentation.  Just food for thoughts :-)

We have discussed this subject some before, but not in great detail.
You can find a few thoughts on this in this file in the FOOD section
of the Florilegium:
fd-decoratng-msg   (8K) 11/22/00    Decorating and presenting period
foods.
http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD/fd-decoratng-msg.html

I would love to see more ideas listed for those us without the
imagination to do these things on the fly.

I do remember, after our previous discussions, decorating a dish
of snow (to go with some wafers) by sprinkling a handful of fresh
mint leaves on top. These, unexpectedly, also ended up flavoring the
snow quite nicely.

While I would like to see ideas taken from the modern world, such as
the tomato skin rose mentioned above, I'd be even more interested in
details about what they did in period. If we are going to start
introducing such features into our SCA feasts, it would be preferable
to start off with styles from within period, rather than get the
populace used to seeing a type of modern decoration and then
have to change this in a few years, when it is discovered that they
never did this and that that particular style originated with the
Victorians.

Stefan li Rous
stefan at texas.net