[Sca-cooks] Calontir's Cooking Symposium

[Debra Hense/Kateryn de Develyn]

We had excellent weather.  Wonderful selection of classes to choose from (I kept hearing complaints all day long about how people had to make choices because so many wonderful classes were scheduled opposite each other).  We had six tracks of cooking classes - so this was bound to happen.  

We had wonderful food.  Duke Cariadoc was absolutely wonderful as our lunchtime keynote speaker.  And I heard his class was extremely well attended also.  

We had a turnout of over 100 people for this single-interest event. And I believe we had people attending from at least seven kingdoms (Ansteorra, Artemisia, Caid, Gleann Abhann, Middle, Northshield, Outlands) There may have one or two more kingdoms in attendence, but it wasn't too shabby of attendence for a non-major war event.

The pot-luck feast was tremendous.  There was too much food (of course!).  We're cooks - our goal is to feed everyone way too much food.  I was glad I took a very small plate - I wouldn't of been able to walk away from the feast table otherwise.  It was good.  Very very good.

I got to renew my friendship with Gwen-Cat and catch up on her house adventures.  I got to take some great classes - the one taught by Mistress Agnes (formerly Calontir, very recently of Outlands) on plant confusions.  She showed photos of plants that have the same name and were widely different in appearance. And talked about plants are known by the same name in the middle ages but bears no resemblence.  It was wonderful knowledge to accumulate to see where the plant names diverge or merge or get renamed along the way from their appearance in a medieval recipe to modern times.

I wanted to take the class on humoral theory presented by one of our up and coming cooks (HE Caillin) in Calontir, because I feel I don't know near enough about this subject which so dominated cooking in the 14th and parts of the 15th century throughout Europe.  I wanted to take the vinegar class - because I understand students were presented with ways to start their own vinegar mothers(sp?).  I did take the potatoe puzzlement class.  It was based on a recipe from the Rumpolt collection (taught by Gwen Cat - Hi!!!) Each student made their own variation of the recipe.  The results all tasted good - and were in some cases quite dissimiliar.  But tasty.  

I look forward to the next cooking symposium..

Kateryn de Develyn