[Sca-cooks] Adding to Siege Contests

[Sharon Gordon]

When people participate in siege or iron chef contests and come back to the list and talk about it, some cook, organizer, or judge participants do a great job of describing the event.  Their descriptions are so vivid that we can smell the smoke, and the aroma of the dishes has us salivating.

I've enjoyed these so much that I think it would be wonderful to expand coverage of some siege or iron chef contests by adding an oral historian/reporter/photographer(or videographer) to the team.  I envision this person being able to ask (during and after the cooking in a way that didn't slow down the cooks) all those things we'd like to be able to hit a pause button and ask the iron chefs on TV.  Or what we could create if we could have an IronChef-SecretLIfeOf-Unwrapped SCA show :-).

My idea of dream coverage would look something like:

I) A)Info on how and why Sponsors chose the foods they did.
B) Detailed descriptions and quantities of foods for each team such as
1) Whole 5-6 pound chicken with neck, heart, liver, gizzard
2) 6 large white chicken eggs, 3 large brown chicken eggs, 3 green or blue arucana eggs
3) 5 pounds of white whole wheat flour from King Arthur
4) 4 red plums weighing approximately 18 ounces total
5) 2 ounces fresh sage
6) 1 pound mixed size (1-3 oz) yellow sweet onions
C) Rules of contest
Sponsors would also decide if the reporter could verbally assist their team during the actually cooking phase of the contest or just ask questions and document.  I'd vote for allowing verbal assists as then you wouldn't have to decide if the reporter asking why they cooked X instead of Z, was a hint to consider cooking Z or just a request for info.
D) Setup and conditions of the contest
E) Weather conditions during contest

II) Team Info
A) 1-2 paragraph biography of each participant
B) Team cooking apparatus, cookwear, servewear, and written resources used in contest
C) How team preprepped
D) Additional foods brought/used by team
E) How/why team chose the dishes they did.  Why they chose one thing over another if they were deciding between a couple of things.
F) What they made and what period recipe it was based or loosely based on
G) How they think it turned out--Perfectly roasted, needed more onions, carrots worked well instead of the turnips the recipe called for...    Descriptions of what dishes tasted like.
H) Pictures of team, preparation, cooking, finished dishes, plating.  If anyone on the team needs to avoid being indentifyable in posted pictures, making sure to have some pictures of just their hands in a prep stage, etc.
J) Theme that participants centered the dishes around if any
K) How team works together--one person maintains fires and coals, two people create menu, two people chop all the vegetables, each pair of team members does a dish from start to finish, one person does all the ongoing dishwashing, etc.

III)Judging Info
A) 1-2 paragraph biography of each participant
B) Thoughts Sponsors and Judges had about what the teams might do with the food--thought everyone would use German or Italian recipes with this set of foods
C) What Judges thought of each team's strategy and balance of dishes
D) What Judges thought of taste and presentation.  Descriptions of how the dish looked and tasted.
E) Strategies Judges suggest that could have helped the particpants
F) What additional tasters or observers thought of the food and presentation

IV) Post coverage to a website and links to SCA-Cooks and regional cooking lists.  Send edited video to Iron Chef show when they are collecting examples of how other people do Iron Chef cookoffs if desired.

As you can probably guess, what I'd really like is the SCA cook's version of a Vulcan mind meld :-).  So this list of dream  siege contest coverage is an idea of the next best thing.

Sharon
gordonse at one.net