[Sca-cooks] large dayboard feast: need advice from those who have done this before

[Robyn.Hodgkin at affa.gov.au]

At Valhalla one year (250 people) we served chicken legs, and sausages in bread for lunch. Pretty much nothing else, and boy did people love it.  We documented the sausage recipes, found a local sausage making company and handed them a bag of spices; make X kilos of sausages please. It was great, and cheap.

Madhavi's suggestion of quiches is a great one.  You can make them in advance, which is a plus, there are heaps of period recipes for them, and they are inexpensive especially if you either make your own pastry, or go to a food wholesaler and buy a 5kg roll of pastry.

Another very popular thing at any fighting event is frozen oranges; just cut them in 8ths and bung 'em in a bag in the freezer - they are wonderfully refreshing on a hot day.

Jadwiga is right that how you serve the food makes a big difference - small bowls etc.  Put out the bulky filling stuff first, then after they have done the first swoop you can put out the expensive stuff. (depends on how you are planning to serve the food of course)

Something at another event I went to was a big pot of stewy stuff, with breadrolls.  The breadrolls had the top dug out and were filled with the stew, making the stew feasting-gear free.

Basically chunks-o-meat and chunks-o-cheese are popular but the least cost effective way of feeding people; any way that you can put that cheese or meat with bread, pastry or vegetables will reduce your costs. So pies, pasties, and meatrolls are all good. The mushroom pastries in Viandier are just fabulous and use reasonably inexpensive cheese to make - we did ours for Coronation with a mixture of ricotta and feta.

On pastries:

- Triangular pastries tend to have more pastry proportionately to filling.  They are an effective way to utilise sheet pastry.
- Rounds of pastry with filling folded over to make a kind of crescent shaped pastry have next smallest amount of filling compared to pastry. They aren't a very efficient way to use sheet pastry (although you can clump the leftovers together and roll out again), but are great for home-made pastry.
- Squares of pastry with a spoon full of stuffing, that you then fold the corners of the pastry up into the middle (so that the effect is a kind of cross of pinched pastry on the top) have, I think, the tastiest proportion of filling to pastry, as you don't end up having empty corners.  They work well with sheet pastry but are not as good for home made pastry.
- open tarts minimise pastry and maximise filling, again best for home made pastry.

With pastries (except open tarts) you will use a great deal less filling than you might think.  I recall that 1kg of peas will make about 100 peas pies for example.  Now THEY are a cheap dish, and sooooo yummy.

Hope this is of some help.

Kiriel