[Sca-cooks] Bad Cooking at Feasts - was good taste

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Food here is usually good. If not, well, then edible.

One "memorable" feast had edible food, but it was all modern, and a 
lot tasted like it had just been bought at a supermarket. There was 
precooked ham served with gooey couscous, precooked shrimp with 
standard shrimp cocktail sauce, supermarket pies and such like. But 
the cook and the small number of helpers all had hats and aprons 
machine-embroidered with their names.

A second "memorable"feast the cook had bailed out about 5 days 
before. He had composed a menu but had no recipes. A kindly person, 
who has since become a Pelican, took it over. They bought a lot of 
things in cans. Most of their helpers didn't know how to cook. One 
person was supposed to make a dish at home - they didn't show up 
during the feast prep in the morning, so around noon the head cook 
phoned them and phoned them. An hour or two later, they showed up. 
Clearly they hadn't made the dish (meatballs), but had sort of mushed 
all the ingredients together. I don't recall if it ended up being 
baked or pan cooked. Many diners kept waiting for the meatballs, not 
realizing that the meat-stuff-thingy they were eating was it. The 
food was almost universally awful. I was at the event, and wandered 
into the kitchen. Seeing the disorder, i offered to help, but i was 
just washing fresh produce, making a salad, helping others prep 
ingredients. The people on the actual cooking team were burning 
dishes (thin pots on electric stove set too high), improperly 
seasoning them (didn't know 'til in the tasting - pretty inedible)...

A third "memorable" feast, the head cook, who had often offered to 
help at feasts, but rarely turned up, somehow lost all their crew. I 
had no idea or i would have volunteered to help. I had asked if they 
needed help earlier in the day but had been told i was not needed. 
Anyway, the food came out late, in the wrong order, not quite cooked 
right... it was edible, but it was generally unsuccessful.

Basically, as i said, feasts here are edible to excellent. Those that 
are bad are rare. I gather there have been more bad ones in the past.

I almost never pre-test my recipes. I've only had one recipe fail in 
seven feasts - i've only been in the SCA seven years - and i tend to 
make feasts with a fair number of dishes. Fortunately our feasts tend 
to be for 80 or fewer diners. I've won a couple cooking competitions, 
including one in which we were cooking entirely off the cuff from 
Medieval recipes i'd chosen the night before, with no modern worked 
out versions (yes, Selene and Huette, at that Great Western War Iron 
Chef a couple years ago). One can cook without pre-testing, but 
either one is a fool or one is a good (or lucky) cook - note that i 
am NOT saying that all good cooks don't need to pre-test. Pre-testing 
is sensible. I think i've just been lucky.

I've volunteered to cook this year, but have been turned down twice - 
we have a lot of cooks here. I'm hoping to get a feast next year.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita