[Sca-cooks] Valentine's Day dinner... sort of...

[Elaine Koogler]

Too, too funny!  I read your description to Phillip, and he cracked up!

Kiri

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:

> ...was fairly to moderately dreadful. We had committed to attending 
> the 70th birthday party of a newish friend of some old friends, at 
> whose home this party was to be held. The Birthday Girl was in charge 
> of dinner, and it was... unique. Some of it was quite good, although a 
> lot of it I simply chose to avoid, since it involved nutrients I am 
> avoiding at present. There was a seafood curry, and I can only say I 
> haven't had a curry like that since I was a child, but even though 
> when people normally say that it is meant as a good thing, in this 
> case, it wasn't, or at least not as god as I hoped it would be.  It 
> reminded me of some English or Imperial curry recipes, basically 
> English interpretations or imitations of real Indian curries. This 
> seemed to be some kind of cream or white sauce with a little curry 
> powder in it , with chopped apples and onions, with, of course, all 
> sorts of stuff in little dishes to sprinkle on top. My mother used to 
> make a chicken curry along those lines (although hers was 
> tomato-based), but as kids the fun part was dousing it all with 
> raisins, coconut, peanuts, pineapple, etc.
>
> I don't normally see that much at Indian restaurants ;-).
>
> 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
>
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