[Sca-cooks] Re: food handling info

[Edouard de Bruyerecourt]

The FDA website is:

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/oa/pubs/cfg/cfg.htm

I happen to have it bookmarked, strangely. :)  It's written for
_volunteer_ groups that serve food. You can either download the
publication (Colour, B&W, English, Spanish) as a .pdf file or order a
printed copy.

Are you talking about 'general feast-cooking guidelines' along the
direction of five gallons of soup take a long longer to cook than two
quarts, as in to increase cooking time, not heat intensity (I broke the
long tradition of my shire by not serving burned soup for my first shire
feast)? I think we're back to an old thread, that the dynamics of
cooking for 100, for 500, is nothing like cooking for four, or eight, or
a dozen, which is as most as many lay cooks cook for. And with that, my
suspicion that the opinion of medieval food being unpalatable is heavily
fueled by the inadvertant serving of _badly cooked_ medieval food.
Modern food would just be as unpalatable if prepared by the same people,
except the cooks might have a better idea of how it's supposed to be.

I was actually thinking, after my last feast, of using one of the
shire's A&S nights to teach basic kitchen skills, like sharpening and
using _real_ knives, sanitation, what different types of knifes are used
for, how to cut different types of vegetables, how to saute' (the
'jumping' not the frying) food in a pan without tossing it behind the
stove, etc. Do that a month or so before our next feast, then use the
pre-cook session as a refresher.

Edouard

Sue Clemenger wrote:

>I wasn't thinking about general food handling guidelines (at least not
>in such detail as to take 40 pages), so much as I was looking for
>general feast-cooking guidelines, in an accessible format, which would
>included some food handling practices.
>