RE [Sca-cooks] MK cooks

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach Christina Nevin:

>Quite apart from my kneejerk reaction to people who complain that "period
>food is icky" (which tends to be along the not-very-PC lines of "Well quit
>whining at me and sod off to the local MacDonalds then.") <ahem cough> I've
>found that a menu somewhat along the following lines mollifies the
>culinarilyadventurous-handicapped at feasts:
>
>First Course:
>     Blanc Desirree: The middle ages' preferred pottage - a subtle mixture of
>chicken, almond milk, wine and ginger.
>     Brewet Of Ayren:    Being a tasty soup of cheese, eggs and saffron.
>     Leek Tart:   Delicious candied leeks, with a quiche-like topping baked
>in a pastry coffin.
>     Salat:  The first fresh greens of Spring lightly dressed with oil
>vinaigrette.
>
>If you equate the dish with something they can think of in modern food
>terms, it helps.

Speaking as someone who has written restaurant menus, I've found that
to be very effective, too. It not only enables the reader to relate
period food to modern foods with which they're familiar, but it also
makes the dishes sound more appetizing than people might otherwise
imagine them to be.

Of course, you do have to strike a good balance between this and
extremes like, "Only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from
Iraq, cleansed in finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and
then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple-smooth treble-cream
chocolate envelope, and lovingly frosted with glucose."

My own personal strike in the advocacy for non-pompous menu-writing
moderation is a total ban on the use of the article "a" immediately
followed by the noun, "sauce", or equivalent. In other words, you
have to commit to deciding what your sauce _is_, even if it is tomato
sauce or tarragon reduction. One cannot soften the blow by adding "a"
before it, so I am morally opposed to "in _a_ light butter-mounted
veal jus". Does it really need to be distinguished from all the
_other_ butter-mounted veal jus??? What is the plural of jus, anyway?

One of the greatest pretensions of an otherwise
mostly-unjustly-maligned nouvelle cuisine.

Noyatin. Signing off, now...

Adamantius