[Sca-cooks] Calontir's Jubliee Celebration

euriol at ptd.net euriol at ptd.net
Thu Mar 5 05:43:02 PST 2009


Now that sounds like an absolute nightmare.

Euriol

--- Original Message ---
From:Terry Decker <t.d.decker at att.net>
Sent:Thu 3/5/09  8:24 am
To:Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subj:Re: [Sca-cooks] Calontir's Jubliee Celebration


What I was curious about is what dishes were used to represent the first 
reign.  I doubt anyone used any of the dishes we prepared for the first 
Crown tourney, as it was done without recipes and no records were kept.

The operative word in my comment is "try."  First Calontir Crown Tourney was 
held in Lincoln, Nebraska.  We drove in in the middle of a blizzard, 
literally following a snow plow up the highway on the last leg.  We arrived 
at between 4 and 5 in the morning to find the rooms we had reserved were 
still occupied by the state high school wrestling conference, that had been 
trapped by the blizzard.  We caught a few hours sleep stacked around the 
motel as the blizzard blew out and got to the site (a gymnasium) around 10. 
About an hour later, the Baroness of Vatavia finds out the head cook has 
caved under the pressure and pulls Erlich off the list field.  Erlich looks 
at the damage and pulls me into the kitchen.

The group holding the Crown tourney is new.  They have no experience in 
doing dinner for two hundred.  They have no recipes.  They have no schedule. 
They have sacks of groceries.  The next ten hours are kind of a haze.  We 
concocted marinades, sauces, prepped veggies, roasted game hens, poached 
salmon and figured out how to stretch everything.  There are no secrets or 
magic to what we did.  It was the application of 50 some combined years of 
experience to a rather thorny problem.

What we didn't have control over were the roasts, which were being done on 
barbecue grills outside.  What had worked fine in the summer test run failed 
sub-zero weather and the guy doing it was too obstinate to bring them into 
the kitchen and load them in the oven.  They were later described to me as 
"raw and frozen."

While we salvaged some of the food, we did not salvage the feast.  Whoever 
had done the (non)planning had based the feast reservations on the occupancy 
number of the gym (fans in bleachers) and not on the layout of the tables on 
the gym floor.  To accomodate all of the people, rows of tables were set up 
wall to wall with no room for servers to get through.  As a result, people 
on the side near the kitchen got fed while the people opposite did not. 
Erlich and I pulled off getting the feast out of the kitchen, but the feast 
failed on the logistics of service.  My experiences with this feast are part 
of the reason I demand absolute control of the kitchen and the hall when I 
do a feast.

Bear

> <<< Remembering the nightmare Erlich du Battenhelm and I had trying  to 
> salvage
> the feast at the first Calontir Crown Tourney, what, pray tell, did you
> serve in remembrance of the 1st Reign?
>
> Bear >>>
>
> So what happened and how did you manage to salvage things? I'm always 
> looking for stories and good advice for my fast-disasters-msg file. :-)
>
> As far as the memorial dishes, it sounds like these dishes were  chosen 
> from those of an entire reign and not from just a single Crown  or 
> Coronation feast, so I imagine they 




More information about the Sca-cooks mailing list