[Sca-cooks] A Feast Experiment

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Catherine Hartley:
>I had a look in a lot of the Arthurian stuff and found mention of feasting,
>I was hoping to find haslet as it was a traditional presentation after
>killing Boar.

Possibly a later tradition, or not as traditional as one might think?
I ask because again, in the Gawain poem, there's a reference to to
boar's entrails (IIRC) being cooked and fed to the dogs in the field
(IOW, while the rest of the animal is being butchered). I'm
interested in the amount of _bread_ that seems to accompany the
huntsmen on a typical jaunt. It seems (in this poem) to be used as a
sop for blood to lure the dogs away from the kill in the deer hunt
section (I had read of this practice elsewhere), and again, in the
boar hunt section, as an integral part of the dogs' meal of grilled
numbles. Sounds a lot better than Ken-L-Ration to me. Grilled
andouille on toast doesn't sound like a bad dinner, actually.

I wonder if the faux haslet dishes that exist in the Anglo-Norman
recipe corpus are to address the possibility that the actual haslet
would have been fed to the dogs? Think about it. The Norman boar
hunting season (at least according to whassisname, the translator of
my edition of SG&TGK), begins on Christmas Day, which means there
must be some pretty intensive boar hunting beginning early that
morning -- otherwise, how do you present a cooked boar's head for
Christmas dinner? And knowing the general leftover-Saturnalian
attitudes of Christmas celebration in the Middle Ages, I wonder if
the presence of faux haslets was a more prominent aspect of a
medieval Christmas celebration than we might realize.

>At this point Iam not limiting myself to a particular cutlure or cuisine
>until I see what sort of tiems I can find.

Well, given the Norman penchant for hunting as a sport and a military
exercise associated with the equestrian/warrior caste, you're
probably going to find that the entire body of historical hunting
references is rather Norman-sample-intensive, and this will include
both northern France and England up into the 15th century or so.
That's a really good-sized chunk of the SCA's geographical and
historical range.

Adamantius