[Sca-cooks] where and when to start

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

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