[Sca-cooks] Cutting Up Foods: Was Late Italian Feast
Elise Fleming
alysk at ix.netcom.com
Wed Feb 20 12:44:30 PST 2008
Greetings! Margaret FitzWilliam wisely wrote:
>What's wrong with serving chicken in pieces with the two sauces
>separately? In my experience, serving a whole chicken requires someone at
>the table to have a good knife...
One of my personal peeves is being faced with a whole... chicken, slab of
beef, round of pork... At least in the English corpus, it appears that the
"lower tables" were served cut up meats. They weren't given a whole bird
for a table of 8. High table might get a whole bird for two people but
there would be a carver. I can't remember which source mentions who gets a
whole bird and which lords get a half a bird, but somewhere I've seen a
differentiation that the lower tables get dishes with small pieces of meat.
In the SCA, having a sharp enough knife to cut the food is certainly a
factor. Cutting it up so it's equally proportioned is extremely difficult
with fowl. Maybe we could start educating people about period-appropriate
servings?
Alys K.
Elise Fleming
alysk at ix.netcom.com
http://home.netcom.com/~alysk/
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