[Sca-cooks] Menus

[kingstaste at mindspring.com]

Da said:
 Alrighty then a remove is course never been advised differently from when I
began. lol  Yup there be differences between our speech.  So how many
courses do you serve at typical feast?
 Da

The thing about 'remove' isn't a language variation, it stems from the early
SCA days when everyone was striving to find more 'medievally'-sounding names
for everything, like farspeaker for phone and dragon for automobile.  A
Remove (or a Relevé) is a dish that is replaced with another dish during the
same course, such as serving a seafood-based aspic during the fish course,
and then removing it from the table and replacing or relieving it with a
whole fish.  Still the same course, but the latter half of it.
This is from Victorian and slightly later uses.  Here (in part) is what
Escoffier says about it:
"In the menus of old-fashioned dinners à la Française, the line of
demarcation between Relevés and Entrées was far more clearly defined, the
latter being generally twice, if not three times, as numerous as the former.
The first service of a dinner for twenty people, for instance, comprised
eight or twelve Entrées and four soups, all of which were set on the
dining-table before the admission of the diners.  As soon as the soups were
served, the Relevés, to the number of four, two of which consisted of fish,
took the place of the soups on the table; they relieved the soups, hence
their name, which now, of course, is quite meaningless."
It is a usage that has stuck within the SCA, stubbornly holding on even
despite our best efforts to squash it out :)
3 Courses is a normal feast length here in Meridies, with 3-5 dishes per
course.
Christianna