[Sca-cooks] A&S Idea

[Sharon Gordon]

There's a new book out by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio called Hungry
Planet: What the World Eats

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5005952

It has beautiful photos of a family and all the food they eat in a week.
There's also a grocery list and garden list with subtotals for each type of
food, and information about the family's life.

I thought it might be fun to do a medieval version of the same.  Choose a
culture, time period, and month.  Write a short family persona story.
Assemble a real or faux family in appropriate garb and a week's worth of
ingredients.  Take a portrait-still-life photo like those in the example.
Then spend time during the week cooking the ingredients and photographing
the results and perhaps a meal's worth of ingredients here and there to add
to the effect.  Have pictures of at least one meal of the real/faux family
in garb dining on the results.  Eat the other dishes as convienent and in
garb or not.  Or cook all dishes in one day, eat some for dinner,  and
freeze some for later, etc.  If some meals are repeated, they need only be
photographed once.  Also have photo of real cooks in garb.

The real cook(s) may or may not be some of the real/faux family members as
desired.

For A&S display, provide so everyone can see
1) photo board (or powerpoint) of pictures
2) persona family story
3) culture, time, month
4) list of weeks food and amounts.  No need to try and develop a
historically correct price list.  But do note which ingredients were grown
by cooks or real/faux family.
5) Menus for each day
6) In book or notebook discuss in a page or two what it was like to work
with this set of seasonal ingredients, and what it was like to eat the
combination of dishes.
7) In book or notebook, provide recipes and redactions.  May also create
recipes that would have been plausible to utilize some of the food.  For
time periods without recipes, create plausible recipes based on
archeological evidence and provide references to the evidence.

And in general have a week's worth of seasonal food fun.

Sharon
gordonse at one.net