[Sca-cooks] where and when to start
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Thu Feb 1 04:45:59 PST 2007
On Feb 1, 2007, at 6:51 AM, terry l. ridder wrote:
> hello;
>
> when should planning start for a celebration feast with roughly 600
> guests? that number includes young children.
>
> where does one start planning such an event?
>
> my best guess would have the event happening june/july 2008.
> approximately 18 months from 1 jan 2007.
Sure, it's doable. It would help to know what your cooking and
storage facilities will be ( -- he said, fearing greatly he knew what
the answer would be... ;-) ) . Is it a sit-down meal with servers or
will people be walking around with plates and eating from a buffet?
What's your time window for meal service -- how long do you have in
which to stuff X courses into people? Indoors or outdoors?
In general, for a summertime feast, I find it hugely helpful to have
a sideboard (or, for 600 people, several). That way you can have some
dishes preset on the tables (if any) for the first course, add to
them as the feast begins, and your first course is out quickly. Then
you clear everything and serve the second course you've got waiting
on the sideboard (which will be mostly cold foods, pre-plated). That
leaves you a relatively long time to set up your third course (if you
do one) with comparatively little interruption.
Or, do two courses. Most people today would find this perfectly
adequate, just as medieval people frequently did, and then you can
serve your first course from the sideboard and have most of that
service time, probably nearly two-thirds of your total feast time, to
set up and serve the second course.
I'd advise against doing more than three courses under most
circumstances. In my area, even three courses is pushing it, even if
there's no delay between them. I can't recall a time when people
didn't overeat in the first two courses and see the best dishes go to
waste because they were too full (even though they knew there were
still more courses to be served), and then there's the problem of 600
people milling about instead of eating your third, or fourth, or
fifth course.
Well, planning should become easier once we have answers to some of
the questions above...
Adamantius
"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils mangent de la
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them
eat cake!"
-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
"Confessions", 1782
"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry
Holt, 07/29/04
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