[Sca-cooks] Cooking and Serving Equipment

[ranvaig at columbus.rr.com]

>
>Can others on this list discuss how their branch or guild does the
>"own their own cooking and serving equipment" thing, please?
>
Our shire usually has one or two events with a feast per year. The sites we have used for the last few years (schools and lately a summer camp) have pots and pans but no serving dishes.

The shire owns quite a few serving dishes, most of which are very heavy, cheap china.  Heavy and very hard to schlep around.  I've been told that it came from a restaurant that went out of business. 

A couple of years ago, someone proposed that they get rid of the china in favor of lighter plastic and or metal, but the cheap plastic stuff they bought hasn't lasted very well.  None of it looks very period, and most are either too big or two small for the serving sizes for a typical feast.  But its what we have, so we work with it.

Between events it is stored in a rented storage locker, along with list ropes, signs and other event gear.  The storage is on the second floor, and there is a set of steps with no elevator, so its not very convenient. 

When I did my feast in fall, the inventory list was several years old, and listed lots of things that were nowhere to be found. 

In the late 80's we had feasts that served 300 people and had the dishes to serve them, but there are more events now, and our feasts are around 100 people now.  I've no idea what happened to the other serving stuff.  Broken, left at an event site, or lost when someone who stored them faded out.

The current site doesn't have a dishwasher.  Before the event, I took all the dishes home and ran them through my dishwasher, and even though they had been washed on site, I took them home and ran them through again afterwards.

Years ago at we had an event when the head cooks didn't recruit cleaning help and burned themselves out.   They piled things into boxes that someone else hauled away. The next year when the new head cook went to get the dishes, she found that they had been put away unwashed.  And several boxes of fruit and nuts strung for false entrails, which they didn't finish, and various other badly spoiled food items.  Nasty. .

Our barony includes much of the state of Ohio, and some of other groups have their own serving dishes.  I'm not that familiar with what they have.  The barony has a new cooking guild, and I'm going to suggest fund raising for baronial cooking gear, that the various local groups can use.

Ranvaig