[Sca-cooks] Cutting Up Foods: Was Late Italian Feast

[Elise Fleming]

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/