[Sca-cooks] medieval boil-in bag meals

[Anne-Marie Rousseau]

Hi from Anne-Marie :)
Stefan asks me:

Anne-Marie mentioned:
<<< I would vastly prefer to prepare these things over a cookfire,  
but the SCA
in our kingdom hasn't allowed fires consistently for years, >>>

Oh? What kingdom is this? West? Caid?  Sorry, but I can't remember  
where you live right now. I can't think of any Ansteorran camping  
event which hasn't allowed open fire cooking, except when a burn-ban  
was in effect. More inter-kingdom anthropology, I guess.

To whit I reply:

I'm in AnTir. For the last handful of years we've had pretty strict burn
bans, which are then interpreted by enthusiastic sca autocrats as NO BURNING
ANYTHING. No candles. No charcoal. Interestingly, propane torches (aka
"conflagrations on a stick") seem to be fine. Grr.

Even when I check the Friday before the event and see that I'll be able to
use charcoal in my brazier (14" off the ground, etc) I've arrived on site to
find that a burn ban was imposed by the sca event staff anyway. Since the
pots you use for fire cooking and the pots you use for a propane stove
aren't interchangeable (at least not mine) I was hosed for too many events
in a row....

<<< so I am
frequently reduced to preparing things at home in boiling bags and  
reheating
them on site with my trusty butane stove. That said, its amazing how  
many
medieval recipes adapt themselves well to this!  >>>

then Stefan asks me:
Anyone have some good suggestions for medieval recipes that adapt  
well to this technique? I'd like to add more such suggestions to the  
bag-cooking-msg  file in the Florlegium. And someday when I get one  
of the vacuum-sealer machines...

to whit I reply:
what recipes DON'T work with boiling bags? :). Any sort of stew thing works.
Herbolades work. Sauces work. Braised greens. Benes. Frumenty. Funges.
Basically any dish that you would have boiled, or simmered into a glop, so
pretty much most of the English and French medieval corpus ;).

I've even done roast pork with sauce by making the sauce ahead of time,
roasting the pork at home, sliceing the pork and packaging WITH the sauce
and reheating on site.

Again, I vastly prefer to cook in a period manner, but when modern site
rules dictate, I have come up with this work around :)

--Anne-Marie