[Sca-cooks] dealing with mundane cooks

[Phlip]

Ene bichizh ogsen baina shuu...

> I went to a feast once that was cooked by a professional chef.  He said
> that one of the menu items had been purchased ready-made.  Because of
> mundane time pressures, he had been unable to make it himself.  He
> considered this acceptable, because the food was hand-made at the store
> where he got it, and the quality was up to his standards.
>
> -- 
> Lady Brighid ni Chiarain

Brighid has a good point, here. When we're cooking an SCA feast, no matter
what we do, we aren't going to have the resources that a medieval kitchen
has. We just don't have the staff to do everything by hand.

Using bread, as an example, in period, there was already a bakery in place-
a medieval kitchen was in the habit of putting out X numbers of loaves of
bread, each and every day, no matter what else was going on.

We're not in that habit. I know that people like Brighid and Bear take a
great amount of pleasure in baking their own breads for feasts, but to
people like me, who _can_ bake competently, but who take no joy in it, it
makes much more sense to foist- er, I mean delegate the job to a baker-
whether a commercial baker who makes an acceptable product, or an
enthusiastic hobbyist like Brighid- after all, the job of the Head Cook,
now, as in period, is to get the food out there in acceptable quantities
with acceptable quality.

And, if you look at the actual period practices, how many period cooks will
say something like "have your spice merchant grind this fine" ? For Heaven's
sakes, they didn't send off kitchen staff members to India or Africa or
wherever to grow their spices, they bought them!

And it makes simple sense to take what we can that's pre-made from our
merchants- after all, we have more than enough to do, to come up with
reasonable fascimiles of foodstuffs that were common in period, but very
unusual nowadays.

Now, for a feast Iasmine cooked, I actually got a veal calf, slaughtered
her, and turned her into kebabs and a crown roast and veal stock. Would I
think less of someone who, rather than slaughter their own calf, went to the
butcher and bought meat? Certainly not! I was slaughtering as a way both to
help Iasmine by providing _exactly_ what she needed, and reducing feast
expenses, as well as enhancing my own medieval experience, by doing things
somewhat more as they might have in period.

And for Northpass Tavern, when I was looking at herbs for the salad. I
picked Jadwiga's brains for the appropriate plants that would have been
available at that time of year, discussed the matter with Adamantius, and,
at his suggestion, rather than buying the individual greens and making a
salad from them, I used a commercial mixture of salad greens that happened
to be very close to the ones Jadwiga had listed for me. Don't tell me
Adamantius isn't a chef- them's fighting words- and as a teacher should do,
he guided me in the achievement of my goal- a highly conjecturally period
feast, served on time, under budget ;-)

So, not taking advantage of the resources we have is just plain silly,
unless you have a specific reason for wanting to do something the hard way.
In the case of the cook who bought the pig pre-cooked- more power to hir- I
bet s/he used to time and aggravation saved by delegatring that duty to
enhance another aspect of the feast.

Saint Phlip,
CoD

"When in doubt, heat it up and hit it with a hammer."
 Blacksmith's credo.

 If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is probably not a
cat.

Never a horse that cain't be rode,
And never a rider who cain't be throwed....



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