[Sca-cooks] Wines at a Feast

[Volker Bach]

Am Freitag, 21. April 2006 20:54 schrieb Barbara Benson:
> Greetings,
>
> This is an interesting concept, but I am curious about something. Has
> anyone come across any references that imply or state that such a
> thing as pairing wines with specific foods was a practice known in
> period?
>
> Evaluating the food and then selecting a wine to complement and
> balancet the "experience" seems to be a thoroughly modern concept to
> me. But it would be fascinating should someone be able to document
> otherwise.

I doubt such a thing would have been done with the typical feast / grand 
occasion simply because of the huge variety of foods served in a single 
course. While there may well be suggestions as to what wine to take with what 
food, until service 'a la Russe' comes in, you'd have to have a wide variety 
of wines with each course. It's now that we have this system of 'serve X wine 
with course A, Y wine with course B...' because our courses consist basically 
of single main dishes. 

> I have at times thought about letting people know what beverages would
> have been consumed with the meal, be it wine, beer or mead. Or
> possibly supplying a carafe of water that has hypocras spices infused
> into it for people to water their own wine. But I haven't figured a
> good way to accomplish this.

I guess you could let the advice go out with the ingredient list and/or post 
it on the event website with the menu. We toyed with the idea once of giving 
each diner a 'feast booklet' at troll, but a quick cost calculation convinced 
us that was a bad idea. Which means by the time they got to read it (one per 
table), it was sort of too late. 

Giano


	

	
		
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