[Sca-cooks] EK12N, or, I am a Cook and a Captain Bold and the Crew of the Nancy Brig...

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Ola, all!

This is by no means my full account of the goings-on for EK12N; I'm
still sort of narcoleptic at the moment, and this is due not only to
12th Night, but to attending Curia Regis the next day with about four
hours of sleep in between. So this'll probably be a shortish series of
more or less disjointed comments.

My autocrat (normally my apprentice), Lord Robert Godefelaugh, a.k.a.
Puck of this list, had stated that he wanted and expected an event that
people would remember and talk about for years. It looks like he got his
wish. I had stated (and I was partially joking) that _my_ goal was for a
feast good enough to go beyond the gamut of smiles and happy dances from
everyone, into the unexplored territory of "good enough to make you
cry." I also appear to have got my wish (at least in some cases), which,
considering that I actually cooked, touched, or even looked closely at
very little of the food, for the most part, I think is not only pretty
damned good but also an amazing tribute to all the people that _did_ do
this work.

See, normally I'm very hands-on where running a kitchen is concerned,
and I like to talk a good line about delegating everything, but in
actual fact I like to have the prep done by everybody and then oversee
or do virtually all of the actual cooking myself.

For a kingdom event, even one half the size of Atlantia's, this would be
insanity, particularly one where, due to a recent back injury, there was
some question as to the extent that I'd be able to walk. Consequently I
spent most of the day seated in a chair, calling out orders, trying to
get people to duplicate, for example, my aggressive seasoning style,
without actually being close enough to the person or the food to see
what was going on. It was kind of like a game of telephone at times, and
resulted in more-or-less-shouted conversations like this:

"How much salt do you want in this?"

"Too much."

"What? What the h**l does that mean?!?"

"Start adding salt. Continue adding it until there's enough. Then add
some more, and continue, slowly, until the _exact_ point where you say,
d**n, that's too much salt. Then stop immediately."

    Which process, or close variants thereof, resulted repeatedly in
cutting-edge-seasoned food (bland food being one of my own personal
peeves at SCA events).

There were a lot of little annoyances, from industrial, Vulcan-brand
stove burners that simply would not produce flame or BTU's the equal of
my cheap Sears stove at home, causing virtually everything to take
longer than planned, to some volunteers who simply could not comprehend
that the head kitchener considered their jobs more important than their
fun (as well as an even greater number, thank Heaven, of volunteers who
were unqualified Pearls Beyond Price), to a head kitchener who simply
could not comprehend that a kitchen volunteer might _not_ consider their
job more important than their fun, or that they might even see a
difference between the two.

Yes, I am a very bad man... .

However, these were all exceptions rather than the rule: the meal was
far more complex than the kitchen was designed for, and while it was
well-equipped, we used it so close to its potential and beyond that it
wasn't funny. Well, not much, anyway ;-) Nobody got hurt, cut, burned
(as far as I know, anyway), and the food was adjudged pretty darned good
(translation: me saying something like, "Expletive deleted, this
expletive deleted dish is nowhere near like what I had in mind, but we
all did our best, so I guess we'll just have to serve it this way," and
then hearing a hearty chorus from all around me, "Shut up, Master A...!"

     Suffice it to say that I heard not a single complaint, and even
though we were, in theory, only serving a couple of hundred people, it
seems as if many more than that came up to me or others and presented
very gracious compliments. Including the King, who, I gather, does not
enter kitchens often when on the throne.

This was the event where we had people complaining about the on-board
feast fee, and Puck had offered, publicly, a money-back guarantee that
it would be worth every penny. No takers, and one really abject apology
to both autocrat and self.

Fun moments: describing how to make the rich pepper sauce for venison to
an assistant, who in turn went and found somebody else that I never even
saw, to actually make the sauce, and having it turn out _perfect_...

Same for the perfectly cooked venison medallions, which I saw when they
went on the platters. Hearing the outcry from the kitchen crew when we
determined that one table had not received venison, and we had to give
them _ours_. I think everybody got some anyway...

Playing with the sauce gauncile, a jonquil-colored garlic-flavored white
sauce, one of the few (only?) sauces in the 14th-15th century English
corpus that is thickened with flour. Cheating and making a very blonde
roux, working on the assumption that unskimmed medieval milk might very
_easily_ have that much butterfat in it...

Watching the gold sugar we made out of edible gold dust and granulated
sugar melt across the warm surface of the tourtes parmerienne, gilding
the pies more effectively than I thought they would...

Seeing the look on the face of another assistant, when I told him, yes,
we _can_ cook pork loin roasts in time before service, by splitting them
down the middle the long way, then cooking them halfway like steaks on
the griddle we'd just used for the venison (we did clean it in between),
and finishing them in the oven for about ten minutes...

The entire kitchen singing "Who Let the Dukes Out?"...

Cooking the mussels in an entirely different manner than we had
originally intended, but getting them out more or less on time. Again,
with "too much" salt, butter, white wine and garlic, all things we had
lying around, and which decreased the prep and the cooking time
dramatically, after various small setbacks.

Eating those same mussels, still eminently fresh and very recently
alive, at room temperature during cleanup, since I had not actually
eaten anything during the day, except for the occasional taste of works
in progress. Offering said cold mussels to the local Baroness, a
certified New Englander, being told "I don't eat cold mussels, not even
ones cooked by you...", and shrugging and saying, "Well, 50 million
Frenchmen can't be wrong." and attacking the mussels some more...

  Anyway, the event went extremely well, not without some head and heart
aches, but even those people who came determined to have a bad time
arrived and found they couldn't.

Not too fwiggin' shabby, on all counts...

Perhaps after we get the autocrat's debriefing, I'll be able to provide
more detail.

Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com