[Sca-cooks] serving schedule

[Stefan li Rous]

Bonne said:
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> One way to deal with this is for a third of the dishes to be entirely prepped in advance and not intended to go out piping hot.  Salads, tarts, cakes, bread, compost all fit these requirements.  Another third of the dishes can be prepped in advance and held warm.  Soups, sauces, and most vegetables are in this category (timing the vegetable so that they aren't overdone when going out).  Meats also can be out of the oven and plattered, covered with lids or foil for 20 or 30 minutes before actually going out. Lastly, there are the dishes that must go from stove to table.  Fried things, things with fussy details and garnish.  With planning and holding space, you can send the servers out a dish at a time every 10 minutes.  But I suspect this must have been the intent at many feasts that have a single dish wandering out every 15 to 20 minutes.  Sauces cooling in the hall before the meat comes out, vegetables that might have benefitted from the sauce also coming out after the me!
at and after the hungry diners have sopped the sauce with bread leftover from their own lunches.  Special needs diners wondering when something they can eat will show up (let's assume they are not troublesome, have called in advance and know they should be able to eat, sooner or later). The servers are running in circles to get food out, water re-filled and empty dishes back with nary a pause. One server entirely misses some dish, another server then thinks it is extra and proudly presents it to his table of hungry diners--who bless him with tokens.
>
> IMO, better to send dishes out in pairs and trios (plus bread) every 20 to 25 minutes. Relatively speaking, you have the same amount of time to get three dishes out, though the workflow for kitchen staff, hall staff and the diners themselves is less hectic. Just enough serving dishes to fit on a tray a single server can carry.  Two or 3 serving dishes plus bread basket won't overwhelm what little extra space is on the standard banquet tables after 8 people arrange their feast gear.  Just enough food variety that no special needs diner is left watching their neighbors eat.  Enough time for the scullery, the servers, the cooks and you to catch a breath between assignments and maintain a calm attitude.  Also, more time built in to deal with the omigoshes that inevitably come up.
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Thank you! This is exactly the kind of information that I think is
useful to those folks moving from cooking for their family or small
groups such as Royalty luncheons to cooking larger event feasts.

You list the problems with other methods, but give a set of rules that
can be used in planning the dishes for a feast. This breakdown of
which foods can be kept the longest and which can not be is very
useful.

Some of these comments also reinforce my opinions on why trained
servers are good, while draftees from the tables don't work as well.
Unfortunately, due to problems at getting servers, my barony seems
to be gravitating to the view that the use of draftees from each
table is the way to go. Afterall, its a lot easier to set an edict
that each table will provide a server than to put in the effort to
encourage and round up additional volunteers and train them.
--
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
   Mark S. Harris            Austin, Texas          stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****