[Sca-cooks] serving unusual foods
Stefan li Rous
stefanlirous at austin.rr.com
Sun May 10 22:39:45 PDT 2009
Urtatim mentioned getting a Japanese breakfast:
<<< She was beaming broadly as she brought us our fresh hot
breakfast. Hot green tea. Lots of hot white rice. Bowls of miso soup
(i LOVE miso soup). Dishes of uncooked nori (the flat seaweed sushi
is wrapped in). Raw eggs.
Raw eggs? So the Japanese students who were hanging out with us
showed us how to eat them. At the exact moment, take the steaming hot
rice out of its covered dish, put it into one's rice bowl.
IMMEDIATELY crack the raw egg over the rice, drop the shell aside,
and stir, stir, stir. The rice is hot enough to "cook" the egg. >>>
What would you have done if you didn't have these Japanese students
around to explain what to do with the egg? Do you think you would
have figured it out on your own? It sounds like if you don't mix the
egg in quick enough you might not get a good dish. Would you have
broken it into the miso soup? Soft-boiled it in the shell in the miso
soup? Would you have put the nori in the miso soup? Eaten the egg raw?
Unfortunately this is how I feel when in some different ethnic
restaurants or in some ethnic food stores. Shelf upon shelf of
unusual items that *might* be interesting in food or cooked or
prepared somehow. But how? There are some books now that help de-
mystify the various ethnic groceries.
But do you ever serve some medieval dishes that might strike people
the same way? What dishes? How have you handled it at feasts you've
cooked? Have you just expected the feasters to figure it out? Perhaps
it's simply the matter of which sauce goes with which meat or food item?
Perhaps it is the matter of serving a whole, small bird. Not all
feasters have been faced with figuring out how to eat such a thing
before. Or eating a whole, or almost whole fish with most of its
bones intact. Or sending a large chunk of bird or beast to the table
and expecting those at the table to be able to portion it out? (Not
to mention this is probably not a period way of doing it). How did
you handle things?
In some places medieval foods/feasts have a bad reputation. Sometimes
it is because the feasts in those areas have been inedible. Sometimes
perhaps it has been something like this, the unfamiliar. What can be
done to solve this?
Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous Barony of Bryn Gwlad Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris Austin, Texas
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at: http://www.florilegium.org ****
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