[Sca-cooks] food on St Val's day

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Linda Anderson:
>I don't know the author pilloried earlier but enjoyed the idea that 
>no one could figure out how "That accent came from Brooklyn" as 
>priceless.

Ah. Back in the old days, when the SCA was a couple of groups on the 
West Coast of the US and a group in New York City shortly thereafter, 
one of the first things an East Coast SCAdian cook did was go to the 
bookshop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and get a copy of 
"Fabulous Feasts". Well-meaning friends would award copies for 
birthdays, Christmas gifts, etc., because when people found out about 
your weird hobby, that was the only book they could find on the 
subject. People began to use stacks of "Fabulous Feasts" to hold up 
the coffee table with the broken leg. Made a good doorstop...

It actually has a fair amount of good information on medieval eating 
habits, but the adaptations of period recipes are pretty dreadful, 
probably because the author didn't (and still doesn't, I'm told) 
actually know how to cook, and saw no need, since she was not 
specifically catering to the needs of reenactors, _not_ to go for a 
rather fanciful approach, one which posits that a drab-looking dish 
can be brightened up with a bit of color, so dressing it up with some 
shredded red licorice whip candy is an excellent idea. Never mind 
that a period cook would have solved this problem, if a problem were 
in fact perceived, in a totally different way. There are also some 
recipes, allegedly, made up out of whole cloth, as it were, with no 
foundation in any extant period recipe.

New York City SCAdians (such as myself, for example) have more reason 
than those above to find the lady fairly silly: for years she helped 
run the annual Cloisters Medieval Faire (at the Cloisters, the series 
of relocated and reconstructed medieval European monasteries now 
owned and run by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in uptown Manhattan). 
She made herself fairly unpleasant to SCAdians trying to do demos at 
that fair, doing things like cancelling parking privileges for 
SCAdians at the last minute, so people had to park their cars about a 
mile from the fighters' lists and lug their armor in and out. And 
then there was the time she cancelled the SCA's entire demo one year 
about fifteen minutes before it was scheduled to begin, and decided 
to read from Chaucer with E.G. Marshall instead.

She used to hold medieval feasts for various organizations, and 
trained her servers, as well as the diners, with the little speech I 
paraphrased in my earlier post, about eating with the manifold 
extensions to the hands, thah finnngaaaaaahhhs.

She ingratiated herself especially to my lady wife, who, while 
enrolled in a class on Chaucer at the City College of New York, was 
told by Professor Cosman that nobody without an English heritage (my 
wife is of Chinese ancestry) could fully appreciate the subtlety of 
Chaucer's language, so taking her class would be a waste of 
everyone's time... her own heritage consisting of birth into, and 
growing up in, a Polish-speaking Jewish community in Brooklyn, where 
her grandfather's name (originally something like Pielzcsnewsky, 
later changed by a clerk at Ellis Island) had become Pellner.

Currently, I understand she's made a fortune selling medical 
practices, starting with that of her husband, when he passed away, 
and expanding this into a sort of brokerage. And she really does talk 
funny...

Adamantius