[Sca-cooks] A little article I wrote on Le Menagier's sausages...

[Susan Fox]

Hullo, Master A!

Your introductory paragraphs setting the scene really intrigue me.  I 
would like to send this to my kingdom's Collegium people and set up the 
cookery track like this, rather than squirrelled away in a classroom.  
May I quote you here?

Yours in service,
Dame Selene Colfox, Caid

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:
> Hullo, the list!
>
> Last weekend I put out a dayboard for a smallish event in the Barony 
> next to the one I live in. I don't often do dayboards, nor am I 
> normally a big fan of them, so I ordinarily farm them out to people 
> that like to do them. But on this occasion, the smaller numbers and 
> the timing allowed for a slightly different setup and format than the 
> one I normally encounter at events with dayboards, and the whole 
> experience was terrific fun. All we did was cook medieval dishes one 
> or two at a time, running it as an ongoing class, matching our pace to 
> the skills of whoever was present in the kitchen at the time, and 
> serving them when they were done. And then doing it again, and again, 
> all day. It took some advance planning and prepwork, but on the day, 
> prep work was minimal, stress zero, timing relaxed, attention to the 
> questions of students pretty luxuriant, cleanup a breeze, and quality 
> control very high.
>
> In short, an all-day medieval hot-food buffet combined with a full day 
> of Medieval Food TV broadcasting. Dishes included hanoney and sawgeat, 
> beef ystywyd, coneys in papdele, grilled saucisson, cabbage porrey, 
> chewets filled with venison mincemeat, chyches, shortbread, and other 
> sweets. Around 7PM I was asked to stop cooking and serve only the 
> foods I had ready, so the creme yboyled became snow -- it required no 
> cooking, after all... the most perioid dish was the shortbread, which 
> I included because it was easy, quickly prepared in large quantities, 
> universally popular, on the outer edge of periodicity, and the perfect 
> tool to get someone who says they can't make period food to change 
> their mind.
>
> I actually had intended to get some video taken to put up somewhere 
> where it could be accessed by people like you, and then left my 
> camera, which I wanted to pack last so it would not be crushed, home 
> on my desk while I went on a 90-mile train trip with the other stuff I 
> needed for the event. I do have a couple of snapshots of drying 
> sausages and candied fennel and coriander confits, but nothing like 
> what I had intended.
>
> Next time. Now that we've got a format that seems to work really well, 
> there'll be more time to worry about other things.
<cleverly written recipe snipped for brevity>