[Sca-cooks] Cooking Feasts without a Kitchen

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Muiriath wrote:
>   I was asked many weeks ago to cook Coronation Feast again here in 
>Caid. Doing this is not a problem, except I was told that I will not 
>have any kitchen facilities.  I will have a dayshade or 2, 
>electricity and a water source but no sink.  Also, i live about 1 
>1/2 hours away from the site so cooking at my home and bringing it 
>there will be difficult. Oh and no refrigeration either.
>
>   I will look into buying/renting a big pit BBQ roaster for meats 
>but any other things will have to be simple.

This may be redundant, but...

I cooked a wedding meal for between 80 and 120. The site had a 
kitchen, but had run out of money before it was furnished. It had a 
modest sink, big deep counters, lots of electrical plugs, a small 
home microwave, and a small home refrigerator (which was full of 
wedding beverages, so i didn't use it).

I rented a convection oven that would hold 4 half-sheet pans and a 
friend brought a small "hot plate" that was large enough to boil a 
half-gallon pot of water. I tried to rent a more commodious 
microwave, but none of the places i called rented them.

I live about 2 hours from the site, which was in the Santa Cruz 
Mountains along a dangerous and winding highway in fog and rain.

So i pre-cooked and pre-made most stuff.

I cooked 30 lb of pot roast (with 10 lb of potatoes, 10 lb. of 
carrots, 5 lb. parsnips, and a *big* can of tomatoes and other 
seasonings) at home (that took almost 9 hours - since i had to make 
it in three loads) a couple weeks before the feast, and froze it. I 
cooked 25 lb of chicken in a spice and fruit sauce at home and froze 
it.

I made several sauces and dips, boiled about 100 eggs...

I took the meats out of my freezer well ahead of time so they'd thaw.

On site we reheated the meats, peeled the eggs, made a Caesar salad 
from scratch (i had purchased garlic herb croutons at an artisanal 
bakery near me), stuffed (with stuffing i'd made) and broiled fresh 
mushrooms, microwave-steamed the broccoli... the rest is a fog, since 
i didn't get enough sleep the night before (isn't that the way it 
usually is?)

Now, granted this wasn't an SCA feast, but once again, the keys were 
(1) planning the menu - making sure there were lots of dishes that 
didn't have to be hot - and (2) pre-making as much as possible.

So... i recommend renting a convection oven, planning so that most 
food doesn't have to be hot and making made ahead as much as possible.

Several years ago i made a feast for 150 that would be served at a 
very rustic site. We were allowed to have propane stove ONLY on one 
parking lot, as there was a high fire hazard level that August. I 
made MOST of the food myself - i froze the meat dishes. Then on-site 
we made dishes or assembled cold dishes, made couscous (and by 
request tabbouleh, but without tomatoes :-) that involved only 
pouring hot water over the grains and letting them sit in covered 
pans, and heated the frozen foods using one of those big three burner 
propane stoves on tall legs.

Again the keys were pre-cooking and reheating hot dishes, pre-making 
as many cold dishes as possible, and making other cold dishes on-site.

While this feast was mostly period Middle Eastern, similar things can 
be done with period European feasts. Tarts are great pre-made. And 
here you have a huge range of possibilities - meat, veggie, 
egg-and-cheese, fruits.

The Greco-Roman feast for 100 i did also featured dishes about half 
of which were made ahead. That site was a church with limited 
facilities (two home kitchen electric stoves, a double sink that 
tended to back up through a floor drain into the kitchen, a small 
home refrigerator). We assembled a number of dishes on site, and one 
of the main things we cooked in the ovens (four home size) was 
roasted chicken.

Because of the virtual lack of refrigeration, a number of my cook 
helpers brought coolers for the things that needed to be kept cool.

My feast descriptions are on my website
http://home.earthlink.net/~lilinah/diningniche.html

Washing up - you'll need some cooker to boil water and lots of dish 
pans. Set up several stable tables and have several wash stations, 
each with a hot soapy dishpan, a warm rinse pan, and a second rinse 
pan - i've never added any of those sterilizing additives - in a 
situation like this they're probably not necessary. And of course 
some way to dispose of the grey water...
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita