[Sca-cooks] pennsic iron chef competition

[El Hermoso Dormido]

On Saturday 04 January 2003 11:01 pm, Olwen the Odd wrote:
> [...]but what if you
> have planned all these vegetable dishes and desserts and the suprize
> ingredient is a fish?[...]

ARGH!

If you PLANNED the dishes before the competition, you did it wrong! :-)

The very essence of "Iron Chef" is improvisational cooking!  In the context
of the SCA, we have the added challenge of "authentic, medieval"
improvisational cooking (which, in my opinion, makes it even more fun).

In the show, the "home team" is a stable of 4 chefs, each with their
own specialty.  A visiting chef shows up and challenges one of them to
a cook-off.  On the day of the competition, with no warning, the person
running the competition unveils the ingredient, and the two competing chefs
have 1 hour to put together a collection of dishes that exemplify whatever
the secret ingredient is.  Judges then taste and score the dishes as to
how tasty they are AND how well the reflect the character of the secret
ingredient.

I am reminded of the time a chef showed up and challenged "Iron Chef Chinese"
(Chen Kenichi, the "home team's" master Chinese-food chef)...and the secret
ingredient turned out to be yogurt.  Not exactly a common ingredient in
Chinese cooking.  Mr. Kenichi has a rather expressive face, and the "deer in
the headlights" look was wonderful.

He won anyway, as I recall.

In the SCA context, a big part of the test of skill and knowledge is having a
good idea of, when presented with the surprise ingredient, which medieval
cultures made use of it, and what cooking techniques were used in period for
the ingredient, and what other ingredients were combined with them.  The rest
is a matter of "how well can you and your team cook?" (NOT "how well can you
and your team follow a recipe"...)

I don't recall EVER seeing the Iron Chefs (on the show) pulling out cookbooks
when the ingredient was announced...

In MY (admittedly narrow and possibly minority) opinion, there should be NO
advance planning, and the "test" of the contest should NOT be "who has the
biggest collection of cookbooks with the best indices to look up the
ingredient in and copy recipes out of" but RATHER "who can best represent
authentically medieval creative cooking with the ingredient".  This is a good
thing, otherwise you'd end up with every team having nearly the same
collection of dishes (after all, there are only so many primary-source
recipes for each ingredient available) and it'd be rather dull...

I like to imagine that one is a medieval cook, just hired on by a lord, and
the very moment you walk in the door on the first day, before you've even had
a chance to look at the lord's pantry, he plunks down a pile of (ingredient)
in front of you and says "I've invited a bunch of important people to a feast
tonight, and want to impress them with a feast themed around THIS.  Hop to
it!".  What, as a medieval cook, would you do? ...

signed,
El Hermoso Dormido, who greatly enjoys improvisational cooking, and convinced
"authentic" and "creative" are NOT always exclusive...