[Sca-cooks] A small feast (long)
David Friedman
ddfr at daviddfriedman.com
Mon Nov 1 17:02:21 PST 2004
This past weekend the Shire of Crosston (West Kingdom) held a music
and dance event for which I was autocrat and head cook (I was also
wearing two or three other hats, and was completely fried by Saturday
evening). I planned the dinner to have as little work done on the day
as was consistant with serving hot food. The food not being a main
focus of the event, I kept it simple--one course of four dishes, plus
bread, drinks, and a dessert sideboard after dinner--and refered to
it as "dinner" rather than as "the feast". I knew we had some
vegetarians coming, so included two substantial meatless dishes. The
event site is only two and a half miles from my house, which
simplified things.
We served:
Bread: my standard non-period-recipe oatmeal bread, made with mostly
white flour, and baked in round loaves. It was supposed to be served
with butter, but the butter went out late enough that I think they
had eaten most of the bread by then. I made the bread dough at home,
first thing in the morning, and baked it on site, scenting the air
for the next few hours. It was very popular.
Sekanjabin: syrup made a week in advance with mint from our garden.
Small mead: from Sir Kenelm Digby's 17th-century recipe. Given the
SCA's alcohol policy, this was our donation, even though it's not
very alcoholic (on the one occasion we measured a batch of this, it
came out about 1%). Made two weeks in advance.
We had pitchers of these two and also of water out on the tables.
Torta of herbs from Platina's recipe: the version without the
optional sugar and ginger. Came out too greasy, which the one I had
taken to the shire meeting a few weeks before hadn't--I don't know
whether the cheese I had bought in bulk was higher fat, or the butter
got mismeasured, or what. I used paper towels on the top to get off
the excess grease; these were very popular. We had made pie crusts
from scratch and frozen them in the pie pans in advance, and on
Friday had washed the herbs and removed the stems, juiced the
spinach, grated the cheese, and separated the eggs, as the recipe
calls for eggs whites. Saturday afternoon we ground the herbs in a
food processor, mixed them with the cheese, the egg whites, the
butter, and the spinach juice, dumped this into the pie shells, and
baked.
Roast chicken with Platina's orange sauce: we now have a new version
of this for the next Miscellany, starting with sour orange juice from
someone's backyard tree (probably not a Seville, maybe a lemon-orange
cross, but sour whatever it is: she gave us bags of them last year
and we juiced a bunch and froze the juice). Only a couple tablespoons
is needed per chicken, and the current Miscellany version has too
much rosewater. We mixed the sauce up on Friday, roasted the chickens
Saturday afternoon, and poured the sauce over immediately before
serving.
Potage from meat, also Platina's: I made beef broth from bones and we
did the first part of the recipe (leaving out the bread crumbs) a
week in advance and froze it. On Friday, we washed and removed stems
from the herbs and grated the cheese. On Saturday, we chopped the
herbs, unfroze the meat and broth, added the bread crumbs and stirred
it smooth, added the cheese and eggs and herbs and verjuice and
served it, a bowl or tureen on each table with a ladle in it.
Cooked dish of lentils (Andalusian): we chopped onions on Friday, did
everything else Saturday--this is a pretty easy recipe. It burnt on
the bottom at the end, while the eggs were cooking in the hot
lentils; I served out most of it into bowls to go on the tables, put
what was left over into another dish, scraped out the pot and put
water into it to soak. Next time with a pot that size, I should start
it a little earlier and just turn off the heat and let the eggs cook
with the stored heat of the lentils.
Flaune of Almayne: pie crusts made in advance and frozen, filling
made and the pies baked on Friday.
Khushkananaj and Digby's excellent cake: both made Friday. These and
the flaunes were put out on a side table during the evening.
Feasts aren't very common out here, and when they happen, they tend
to be the focus of the event, so I didn't have much prior experience
for judging how many people to expect. I had nagged everyone I
thought likely to come to tell me if they expected to be there and
had about 40 listed by final decision point (Friday morning, when I
did most of the shopping); I decided to cook for 56 people (7 tables
of 8 people). I was wrong. I got almost exactly the number that had
signed up--a few cancelled, a few added--and had to give away a bunch
of food (fortunately, we had a lot of old plastic tubs and zip-lock
bags with us) and bring a bunch home; as a result, the dinner broke
even almost exactly instead of making a modest profit. I charged $6
for adults, half that for children; if we had had my 56 people, I
would have spent about $3.85 a head.
Time spent: two weeks in advance, the time to make the mead; a week
in advance, 2.5 hours for myself and three other people; Friday, a
13-hour day for me minus about an hour for meals (shopping and
cooking and packing stuff into the cars) plus about 9 hours total of
other people's time; Saturday morning, a couple hours making bread
dough and finishing packing, half an hour for two or three people
bringing stuff into the site kitchen and organizing it, plus a little
of my time finishing the bread; two or three people's time off and on
from 3:00 to 6:15, plus three servers' time getting the food out,
plus time spent cleaning up after the feast (I don't have a very
clear idea of that). Dinner was scheduled for 6:00, and the main
dishes all went out between 6:05 and 6:15.
Elizabeth/Betty Cook
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