[Sca-cooks] Adamantius's party

[Heleen Greenwald]

Well, I was going to say.... "oh dear! Poor you in having to endure a
tedious party. (good shot about the SCA and conversations! Vivats your lady
wife!  hehe) ...
But by the time I got down to the end of your post, I was laughing too hard.

Phillipa
----- Original Message ----- 

> :::::major snippage:::

> I think the main reason I was a little uncomfortable, though, was
> that there were just too many people, and nobody could really carry
> on much of a conversation for any period of time, there was a  lot of
> milling around. My ever-tactful spouse said it reminded her of some
> SCA events she remembered ;-). As I type, I'm sitting with some
> thinly-sliced sopressata and mozzarella with herbs, olives and a few
> toasted macadamia nuts.
>
> Well, there was one interesting incident that kind of stood out. I
> was sitting and talking to someone or other, and my lady wife was
> talking to someone else, and I heard, with that cook's radar, the
> words "medieval recipes" emerge from my wife's mouth. I turned and
> looked, to discover that my wife, and the lady to whom she was
> talking, were saying something about my interest in medieval recipes.
> Not knowing what else to say, I nodded, looking authoritative, and
> said, "Yes, medieval recipes!"
>
> The other lady was a woman named Lee, apparently, and she said to me,
> "Well, if you're interested in medieval recipes, you're probably
> familiar with the work of my cousin, who wrote a rather well-known
> book on the subject."
>
> "Please, God," I'm praying silently, "let it be Karen Hess." Chilling
> premonition going up and down my spine, I said, "Are you by any
> chance the cousin of Madeline Pellner Cosman? 'Fabulous Feasts'?"
>
> "Yes," she said, "that's right! Have you seen her book? Yes? What did
> you think of it?"
>
> "I thought it was terr... well, let me put it another way. At the
> time the book was written, there were very few alternatives for those
> interested in adapted, secondary sources. Maybe two or three others
> were commonly available, and she wasn't writing for an audience of
> historical re-creators or Living History types anyway, but the
> unfortunate reality is that while she deserves respect as a
> trailblazer, there are now a _LOT_ more books on this subject than
> there used to be, and for anyone seriously interested in eating
> medieval food as it was in the Middle Ages, in the way it was eaten
> in the Middle Ages, there are a lot of options available, and very
> nearly every last one of them is better than "Fabulous Feasts". I can
> think of one book I would recommend _after_ "Fabulous Feasts". But,
> as I say, when it was written there weren't a lot of options
> available for those who didn't want to go to the manuscripts
> themselves, so that's something, anyway."
>
> "Dear, it's so sweet of you to defend her that way, but you needn't
> on my account. Nobody in the family likes her anyway... she _made_
> her own mother buy copies of her book..."
>
> So we spent a lovely half-hour swapping Madeline Pellner Cosman
> stories, ending with my falsetto impersonation of her speaking of
> medieval people eating with their hands... "The food is conveyed to
> the mouth not with forks, but with those multipurpose extensions to
> the carpal bones of the hand; I refer of course to thah
> _fin-gaaaaaahs_." I said she sounded like a cross between Margaret
> Dumont in a Marx Brothers movie and Natalie Schaeffer as Mrs.
> Thurston Howell.
>
> "Yes," says the cousin, "we all love her accent, too. How she got it
> in a Jewish home in Brooklyn is one of life's great mysteries."
>
> Adamantius
>