[Sca-cooks] Convivencia feast postmortem (LONG!!!)

[jenne at fiedlerfamily.net]

Well, before I forget it all...

Last weekend I cooked a feast in the shire of Silver Rylle, for an event
called Convivencia. It was a high authenticity focused event based on the
'Convivencia' period in Iberia, when Muslims, Jews and Christians lived in
a sort of Mexican-standoff truce.

I had been requested to do the feast, in three courses-- one Jewish, one
Christian, and one Moorish. As one of my advisors has pointed out, the
result was not a period feast in the true meaning of the word, as the
three cultures would not have been combined in that way in a feast.

The menu and recipes are here:
http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/SCA/cooking/conviviencia/menu.html
(Yes, there is a misspelling in the name)

However, it was an opportunity to cook a small feast in a site I loved--
Dietz Hall, the refectory of the Lancaster Theological Seminary. When I
was in college at Franklin and Marshall, I had been lodged in the
dormitories at the Seminary and eaten many meals in Dietz Hall. It has 2
working fireplaces, heavy oak tables, stone walls, a cruck-beamed ceiling,
heavy wood panelling and tiles, narrow windows-- in short, a triumph of
American re-creation Gothic. So I jumped at the chance.

This was my first feast as head cook, and it was outside my local group--
but near my Mom's house and with lots of supportive people in Silver
Rylle.

I had a pretty good idea of what would go in the Christian course-- note,
that was supposed to be the first course, but as the menu reflects, it was
served second, after all.

My big challenges were the Jewish course, and meat in general.

East Kingdom residents expect a lot of meat in their feasts. Specifically,
a lot of beef. But there isn't a lot of beef in the Iberian texts I was
looking at: de Nola, and the Anonymous Andalusian manuscript. There isn't
even that much pork. What to do, what to do?

Further, there are a vanishingly small number of _documented_ Jewish
recipes from period. Fortunately, most of them are in the Anonymous
Andalusian manuscript. Unfortunately, they were all for meat dishes,
mostly chicken or partridge. That meant, in order to make it at all
believable, no dairy dishes could be served in that course (with the
kosher division between meat and dairy), and I had to find some vegetarian
dishes for that course.

So, I stared at the meat dishes and dug out _A Drizzle of Honey_ for
veggie dishes. _Drizzle_ is a cookbook based on mentions of food in the
Inquisition testimonies of suspected 'hidden Jews'. As a result, it is
mostly mentions of food, not recipes from period; but it does talk
strongly about what non-Jews considered Jewish food.

I also feel that heavier dishes should be kept for last, with lighter ones
at the beginning- and I like to see some fish on a feast table.

I decided that rather than having one meat dish in each course, which is
what I usually like to see, I would have two, and just work around the
vegetarians.

So, one the 'first' course-- salmon, pork sausage, chopped spinach, was
decided on, and I had settled on the  Jewish recipes-- chicken with
stuffing and eggplant stuffed with lamb, a chard dish whose description in
the Inquisition testimonies was almost a recipe, and chickpeas with
onions, honey and spices, which seemed pretty self-explanatory-- I started
on the Moorish course. One beef dish showed up, a vinegary one, and one
lamb with quince dish-- but the lamb with quinces didn't work out in home
recipe tests.

I was also trying to hit the oft-mentioned parts of each type of Iberian
cuisine, with things like orange juice and figs for Christians, Lentils
and rice for Moors, and chickpeas, chard, eggplant, etc. for Jews. I
wanted a starch in each course, so the barley ended up in the Christian
course as rice was going into the Moorish one.

We came up with a meat dish for the Moors-- garlicky chicken. What could
be bad?

Anyway, I finally came up with a menu that looked ok, but wondered if it
was too heavy and carb-rich-- I had visions of the feast driving people to
give up carbs entirely!

So, on January 1, we did a full test of all the recipes for about 15
people. I paid for most of the supplies though other people in group
picked up some supplies for me. The test was a success-- everyone loved it
but was concerned that the portions were too large. Fortunately, I had not
been testing portions.

So, I began putting together my feast page and feast booklet, arranging
for feast dishes-- I needed to buy some and borrow some from my home
shire, but they were out at someone's house... and making up the shopping
lists and lists of what to do when, and buying supplies...

In the week before the feast, I made the lemon syrup, the hais, the
comfits, and the Mustard. I had made the sausages about a month before,
with the assistance of a family from my shire and their sausage stuffer.

Sarah bas Mordechai made the breads (except for the pitas).

We had originally said a limit of 60 for the event but as the verbal
reservations kept going up, I suggested that I would be glad to cook for
80-- espcially as my money numbers were quite tight because the prices of
meat and eggs had not gone down. A week and a half before the event, the
autocrat and exchequer agreed to go to 70; a week before the event, we
went to 80. That was our absolute max.

The wednesday before the event I more-or-less unintentionally ended up
trading in my Saturn sedan (it was at the end of its lease) for a Saturn
VUE (SUV). That turned out to be a blessing. (On the other hand, in the
process I lost my envelope of reciepts and am still trying to re-create
it.)
I had also taken the Thursday and Friday before the event off from work.

I had taken a load of stuff to my mom's the weekend before, and Silver
Rylle's cooking and serving gear, plus the 8 chickens, were coming with
someone else.

I packed everything from Eisental in the SUV (aka the Car, or Charles C.
Charles), and headed down to Juliana's in NJ. She has a line on very
inexpensive meat and produce places that we had used when I was her deputy
cook, so I was getting most of the supplies there. We did a massive
shopping, including some greens for salad that I added at the last minute
because going to 80 had eased up my budget.

>From Juliana's, I went to my mom's, where I was careful to sleep in in the
morning. We made a quick run out for more eggs, because I had been
insufficiently specific about them and my mom had boiled all 15 dozen she
bought for me! We got a good deal on these from the egg farm.

We also got out the things that needed to be defrosted, including what
turned out to be a 40 pound SLAB of chicken thighs. There was no way to
defrost this in the fridge or even under cold water-- we put it in the
garage instead, hoping that the 40 degree weather would work on it. By 3
am enough pieces had defrosted so we could make the slab small enough to
fit in a cooler. We stored the veggies in the garage also

On friday, we peeled the hardboiled eggs and made the stuffed eggs. We
finished the candied lemon peel I was making from the peels of the 40
lemons I'd used for the syrup. This was a bit tricky because I hadn't read
the recipe carefully enough to find out that after boiling, soaking, etc.,
and spreading them to dry and wetting them in sugar syrup, there were
still 2 more days of steps to go! So I made a sugar syrup, boiled the
peels in it for about 10 minutes, pulled them out, boiled the syrup down
to 250 degrees, cooked the peels in it, pulled them out and dusted them
with ginger-sugar.

Then as our staff showed up, we got down to real work-- slicing the
almost-defrosted beef roasts up into cubes and cutting the meat from the
legs of lamb off the bone. The lamb meat was ground up in the food
processor, bagged and stored. The sausages, premade and frozen, were
popped in the same cooler to defrost and keep the lamb and beef cold.
I had planned to make the lentil dish early friday but had to have someone
else pick up the gourds, so they had to be put together that night, while
we also put the chickpeas to soak.

 We put Juergen to work folding and stapling feast booklets, poor man.

I had hoped to get all the herbs washed and chopped up, but that just
didn't happen. We did cut the ribs out of the chard and par-boil it
though. We ran the dishwasher and tumbled into bed between 1 and 3
am.

The next morning we discovered a problem with one of the crockpots we had
used for the lentils-- it simply hadn't cooked-- they had just gotten to
hot water stage. So we did some lentil-swapping and put that batch in
another crockpot, packed everything up, and headed out.

At the site, we discovered that the dayboard cook was in the kitchen,
using most of the table space and almost all of the stove burners-- we had
6 burners and one oven total in the kitchen. We unpacked around her, and
had someone start the figs and the chickpea dish.

By the time the kitchen was ready for us, we had unpacked and had most of
our staff there. It was a lovely luxury to hand off recipes to my
experienced cooking staff and just say "Make this". We did have some
foul-ups-- I had not made up spice kits for each dish, so there was some
contention over the spices and a few things got misplaced.

The biggest hassle was picking the cilantro for the jewish dish of
chicken, and defrosting things. The chicken thighs went into cold water in
the sink, while we worked on the stuffing-- but I had failed to account
for how long it would take to saute the thighs. I think we may have been a
little too persnickety about saute-ing them, too, as they did get cooked
again afterwards!

My dear friend Iuliana made the mukhallal, then got assigned the eggplants
which we had been pre-boiling one at a time. We made an abortive attempt
to perform endoscopic surgery on them in order to get easily stuffable
enclosures, but that didn't work, so Iuliana fileted them. It was a
horrible job and I owe her... fileting 18 eggplants is no picnic.

Juliana was assigned the garlicky chikcen and only when it should have
been done (cooking in an electric roaster) did we realize that the ONE
instant-read thermometer on site was missing. We did find it and
discovered that we needed to rearrange the 8 chickens and cook them
another hour-- I hadn't been specific enough about using 2 roasters and
the dish was probably better because we put them all in together anyway.

Due to crossed wires, we accidentally boiled the almond milk, and made
almond cheese. Someone was sent out for more almonds.

We also ran short of cilantro, which I was under the impression I had
bought bushels of. We finally ran a fugitive bunch to earth under the
salad stuff, finished the stuffing, and put the stuffed chickens in the
oven.

People were in the scullery washing and picking through a case of
spinach with infinite patience. We got that finished and parboiled, and
started pre-plating the mustard, quince paste, vinegar, oil, salt, etc--
everything that could be plated and put aside. My brother wandered in and
was detailed to make a salad with the herbs, the lettuce, the mustard
greens and some additional spinach.

Someone started rice in the two rice cookers and barley in two crockpots
(one for the barley grits with water, for vegetarians).

The eggplant, Iuliana realized, was going to have to be done in large
roasting pans on top of the stove, not in pots as I had thought-- they
wouldn't hold together if stacked that way for boiling. That slowed down
our stovetop activities as it used 4 of the 6 burners. Luckily the
chickpeas were done.

At about 5, we checked the oven and found that it was running very cool--
we didn't have time to stick the salmon in! Also the sausage wasn't fully
defrosted-- we dumped it into a spare roaster, added hot water, and turned
it on. As the sausage defrosted, we began frying and cutting it up.
(Christopher was our fry cook, with the chicken and the sausages, and made
up the second batch of almond milk, and sweated the bacon for the
spinach.)

Executive decision time-- we would swap courses one and two, since
everything for course two was done.

The table of 12 servers -- mostly kids-- had gotten serving instruction.
There was a coordinator for the servers, and another, Hedwigis, for the
handwashing-- we did handwashing before the start of the feast and between
every course. They looked very natty in their towels (mom and I had made
towels from cheap cotton, 3 yards by 2 feet and 2 yard by 2 feet for the
shorter kids). Handwashing was offered at the tables, by the servers,
using orangeflower scented water.

We plated everything for the starters except the eggs (in the fridge, they
got overlooked) and set Juliana to coordinating the service. Brighid came
in and handled the salmon, while my mom made the lemon drink up for the
first course, then walked around making sure all the cooks got some!

We pulled the chicken from the oven and added the salmon,
then plated the first course and sent it out. The cooked sausages were
placed in another roaster on low to keep warm. I pulled out the bacon and
started chopping, while starting the vegetarian version of the spinach on
the stove. Thus I learned my first lesson about my new knife: Henkels are
very sharp. Right as I cut my finger, my friend Robin, the chirugeon
walked into the kitchen, and dragged me out for first aid. My staff
continued.

Now bandaged, I overheard someone ask about the stuffed eggs! Oops! Two
people were detailed to plate and send out the eggs. I threw together the
chopped spinach, Iuliana and Christopher finished the sausages, we plated
the barley (which had gotten crusty around the sides of its crockpot) and
sent it all out.

At that point, Iuliana's back went out on her. I pulled up a stool to the
stove and put together the chard dish, handed the salad to Juliana who is
a wiz with oil and vinegar and told her to plate it with oil and vinegar
dressing. Brighid made up the Pomegranate drink for the last course, and
we started plating the last course, madly. It all went out, hot.

We then put a cloth over a spare table and arranged the Marzipan, Hais,
Candied Coriander, Quince Paste and Lemon peel in periodesque dishes I had
brought from home.

Then I wandered out into the hall and got their attention. I told them I
was the feast cook-- i had to stop while they cheered-- and that I didn't
have any wafer thin mints (the reports coming back to the kitchen were
that they were thoroughly stuffed) but I did have some dessert if they
could find a corner for it, here it was.

Time from start of service to end: about 6:05 to 7:20. All of it came out
warm, my spies claim. Hurray. Everyone ate like pigs. Hurray. They liked
it! Hurray!

We did have hassles-- like picking over the herbs on the day, and
disorganization that meant we all stopped everything to hunt for whatever
someone needed--but it went pretty well.


-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
"I am in a corner without being back[ed?] there and often come out
fighting." -- James Thurber, 1960 interview with Life