[Sca-cooks] food as art

[sjk3 at cornell.edu]

> Being a bit new to doing feasts for the SCA, having only done a handful, I
> have only had one feast with bad coments that I took to heart.  I had
> someone helping me in the kitchen who had several years resturant
> experience, and I got less complaints about a couple of chickens I
> partially undercooked, than I did because he put parsley on more than half
> the dishes.
>
> Ligessac De La Ombrage Bocage, Midrealm
> 'Lord Chocolate'

    Sounds like lack of imagination on the helper's part, not that he's
alone in imagining parsley is required on just about everything.  Another
one of my food-tasting adventures at Cornell was as part of a study
funded by NASA on "spacefood" - - what sort of foods could be prepared
and enjoyed by long-term space travellers (Cornell also used it to see if
omnivores could be induced to eat a vegan diet).  An awful lot of the
food was "made pretty" by adding a sprig of parsley, though there was
also a fair bit of red and green bell pepper in some dishes.  But we
survived.  :-)

Sandra Kisner
sjk3 at cornell.edu