[Sca-cooks] Bad Cooking at Feasts - was good taste
lilinah at earthlink.net
lilinah at earthlink.net
Mon May 22 16:37:40 PDT 2006
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
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