[Sca-cooks] Feast Menu for Atlantian Coronation

[Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise]

> I think of iced tea as one of the more strikingly OOP things the SCA 
> does. In your case, the use of tea fits the theme--but do we have any 
> evidence that it was drunk iced as well as hot in asia in period?
> 
> If I read the menu correctly, you are mixing period recipes with 
> modern ethnic recipes--at least, I don't know of any period source 
> for Ukrainian Cucumber Salad or some of the others. Do you do 
> anything to keep your diners from concluding that, since they are 
> being served in a medieval feast many of whose recipes are period, 
> they must be period as well?

Cariadoc raises up an interesting point that I've been thinking about 
lately, because I've been reading books with other people's 
interpretations in them again.

I find myself fussing in certain ways about what people do in their 
redactions and in their service, and in different ways about what I do, 
and what corner-cutting or accomodations to modern life we find 
acceptable. 

I, for instance, tend to fuss about modern spicing and modern 
expectations of textures being accomodated in redacting and menu 
choices. But then I smack myself about serving modern crudites in my 
dayboards, and my tendency to serve certain sauces to be eaten with 
bread. 

And then there's the drinks. Infusions of herbs and jalabs of sugar 
syrup are very popular in my kingdom, and I've helped to make them so. 
But I wonder if anyone routinely drank cold mint tea or cold lavender 
tea rather than small beer or small mead? What about my lemon-ginger 
syrup jalab? I serve that at events, and people think I'm being very 
period-- but I made that recipe up, using the proportions in a modern 
sekanjabin recipe, and I have to keep admitting it. That recipe has 
escaped out into the SCA cooking world and has a separate existence. 
People think it is period because they've had it at feasts that were 
full of redactions from period recipes. 

I've served Vanilla pizelles in  place of period wafers with something, 
because that's what I had time and people would eat, and comforted 
myself with the idea that Vanilla is the modern equivalent of rosewater. 
But my pizelles weren't from a period recipe, and they had vanilla in 
them!

And yet, I'm still cranky at Constance Hieatt because in Pleyn Delit she 
recommends allspice in a recipe, though the allspice can't be documented 
as a regularly used spice in our period, and because her cameline sauce 
is based on a completely obscure version, which, if tweaked by 
unsuspecting cooks, comes out as a raisin-nut stuffing...

-- 
-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net 
"I thought you might need rescuing . . . We have a bunch of professors 
wandering around who need students." -- Dan Guernsey