[Sca-cooks] first feast: Atlantia's Crown Tourney

[Darren Gasser]

Rosine wrote:
> I'm hoping to spark a philosophical conversation about how many
> unusual meats you all introduce at a feast compared to "standard"
> meats.

OK, as another who recently planned his first real feast menu, I made the
following assumptions about meat going in based on past cooking experience:

- A significant minority won't touch seafood of any sort
- A smaller, but still significant, minority won't touch shellfish (true
allergies are rare, but enough people have had bad shellfish experiences
that they will avoid it).
- Another significant minority is the meat 'n potatoes crowd who won't stray
too far from the tried and true, and will generally avoid anything 'exotic'
like game meats, lamb, or anything with an unusual sauce or that is heavily
spiced.
- Many people get bored with poultry being the least common denominator
meat.

With these in mind, I wanted to make sure there were a selection of choices
at each remove so that nearly everyone could find something they'd really
like.

Here are the meat dishes we served (just the meat dishes -- there were also
veggies and a sweet in each remove), with comments on each grouping:

Remove 1

Scotch broth with lamb
Grill-roasted salmon
Chicken Pojarski
Smoked pork roast

The theory here is that the pork dish would be a near-universal one.  The
additional flavors in the Pojarski and the dill-cream sauce that went with
it kept it from being Yet Another Boring Chicken Dish.  The salmon was
intentionally very straightforward, and was carefully selected and handled
to eliminate any of the oily, "fishy" odor or taste and was therefore more
attractive to people on the fence about fish in general or salmon in
particular.  Likewise, the scotch broth was kept fairly simple and was a
gentle introduction into the wonders of lamb (see remove 3).

Remove 2

Mouclade (mussels on the half shell with saffron cream sauce)
Roulade of turkey and venison-port wine sausage
Zweibelkuchen (bacon, onion, and cheese tart)

The tart was the basic meat 'n potatoes dish with no especially challenging
flavors for the conservatives, and once again the poultry dish was made with
a twist to keep people interested and to try and get them to go out on a
limb a bit with the game sausage.  The mussels were an all or nothing
proposition; a huge hit with those who know and like mussels and generally
avoided by those who don't want or like shellfish since they had two other
meat dishes on the table (quantity was planned with this in mind).

Remove 3

Lamb Tagine with hand-made pasta
Kefta Hoot (Tunisian-style fish balls with orange sauce)
Arroz con linguica

I figured many people would be slowing down at this point, so this was the
lighter, veggie-heavy remove.  The earlier, more innocuous Scotch Broth got
some of the more conservative folks thinking lamb was maybe worth a try
after all, so they were more accepting of lamb with Moroccan spices at this
stage of the game (it all disappeared).   Again, the dedicated landlubbers
could avoid the fish balls in the presence of more palatable alternatives.
We added a sautee of spicy sausage and onions to saffron rice to make it
more interesting and wake people up for the rest of this remove, but not
enough to offend the people hesitant about spicy foods.

In general, I tried to always offer an alternative to the more challenging
meats or use just a small quantity in an otherwise widely-accepted dish as
in the roulade.  I think this allowed people to experiment and push their
culinary boundaries some without panicking them into thinking there's
nothing safe to eat and ordering a pizza instead.  Judging by the post-feast
comments, this worked quite well.

-Lorenz