[Sca-cooks] Cook Book Recemendation Request

[Terry Decker]

Most of the cookbooks with adapted recipes are for "family" or "dinner" 
sized portions serving 6-8 for a meal containing 3 to 5 dishes.  Redon, et 
al., The Medieval Kitchen is a fairly nice example of the category and there 
are others listed in the Florilegium.

For scaling a meal for fifty, you might want to check out Food For Fifty, 
which has been a standard manual of the process for decades.  The scaling 
works reasonable well for up to two hundred or so.  When you go above that, 
you start stretching the capacity of many kitchens, so larger groups require 
more attention to recipe selection, quatities, staffing, preparation timing, 
etc.  One of the military cook's manuals is useful when thinking about 
really large groups.

It has been my experience that spicing does not scale linearly, being 
dependent on the quantity, quality and freshness of the spices and needs to 
be done by taste when cooking for large groups.  Also, since a feast is 
likely to have more dishes than the average meal, you need to evaluate 
portion size of each dish on the total amount of food per person.

Bear

From: "Joshua D. McCoy" <jdmccoy6336 at lavabit.com>


> Hi every one.  I am looking for cook books the has period recipies that 
> will help me cook for a small group (50 or less) and for large groups (500 
> plus)?