[Sca-cooks] A small feast (long)

[David Friedman]

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