Meats for feasts was Re: [Sca-cooks] first feast: Atlantia's Crown Tourney

[Sue Clemenger]

Hi, Rosine. About the most unusual meat I've ever personally cooked and
served for an SCA feast was goat, and that was in this amazing dish for
a Middle Eastern feast.  It was a stewish thing (I forget the actual
name of it, without going and digging out the cookbook) that had chunks
of meat cooked with meatballs stuffed with almonds, and stuffed dates,
and all sorts of goodies.  Very tasty, if a stone b*tch to get off the
bottom of the pot! And I discovered, when grinding the meat for the
kabobs, that some parts of the goat are pretty fibrous--it kept blocking
up the meat grinder.
We don't tend to do much in the way of unusual meats or fish here,
because of the cost, although I've never thought of using shrimp.
Hmmmm..... And while we don't have (locally) the "period food is nasty"
whining crowd, we do have a fair number of folks who are, well, not very
adventurous.  So I tend to do things that are recognizablely "food" to
non-foodies (roast beast, roast chicken, simpler dishes), and get more
adventurous with the sauces and side-dishes.
All that said, I *do* live in a part of the US that sees a lot of
hunting (both larger game and smaller), so we wouldn't consider venison,
or bunny, or elk or something to be *too* unusual.
I think, if I were planning a feast from scratch, and wanted to include
a more unusual meat, I'd put it in one of the later courses (I commonly
do three, with no separate dessert course).  That way, folks would
already have had something to fill up on, and there would probably be
leftover dishes from the previous course that they could have more of,
if they couldn't (or wouldn't) eat the unusual meat.
--maire

Rosine wrote:
>
>    And this letter is germain to the list only because I may not be unusual
> as a diner. I don't know, but shrimp is the only other "meat" on the menu
> and it's a high-level allergen for many eaters (not me!), so I'm hoping to
> spark a philosophical conversation about how many unusual meats you all
> introduce at a feast compared to "standard" meats.