[Sca-cooks] amounts of food per person

[Elise Fleming]

Bear wrote:
 >When you are trying to serve 120+ (the smallest feast I've done was 
80, >the largest over 400), trying to display carving skills in a timely 
 >manner is a problem.  I can't find enough knowledgeable carvers.

But keep in mind that there aren't (weren't) 120+ people at high table. 
  Those were the ones that the carver served.  The lower tables had 
dishes that had already-cut-up meat.

This is one of those areas where, while we try to recreate a medieval 
feast, we do it with a modern mind set and end up creating difficulties. 
  A whole chicken to the guests at head table?  Then everyone gets a 
whole chicken.  Would it work to give the whole chicken, with carver, to 
the head table and present platters of pre-carved or cut-up chicken to 
the other tables?

Even that would be part of our egalitarian mind-set.  From what I've 
read, while something like that might have been served to the next set 
of tables in precedence, the lowest would have gotten a dish that had 
bits of chicken in it.

 From my perspective as a diner, I don't like to see whole anythings 
plopped on the table - roast joints of beef or pork, chicken... It 
rarely is then proportioned for the people for whom it is intended. 
And, as far as disjointing a bird, the carcass is often all that's left 
for the last person who is passed the platter.

Alys K., perhaps too fussy nowadays

-- 
Elise Fleming
alysk at ix.netcom.com
alyskatharine at gmail.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8311418@N08/sets/