[Sca-cooks] large birds for feasts
Terry Decker
t.d.decker at att.net
Thu Mar 3 14:23:02 PST 2011
I much prefer telling people precisely what they are eating and find recipes
appropriate to the time and place of the feast I am preparing. If I don't
have bustard or swan, I do have chicken. And if the time frame is prior to
1530, turkey is out. But if I am recreating a German feast from late-16th
Century sources, well, hey, Rumpolt gives me twenty ways to prepare turkey.
And since I was doing that for my last feast, I served cold, sliced turkey
ala Rumpolt. The hall probably detracted more from the atmosphere than what
I served.
Bear
> Recently we've been talking about large birds such as turkeys and bustards
> for feasts. Here is a message from Johnnae about this subject from a few
> years ago. It isn't in the Florilegium because I never got enough other
> material for a file on large birds, so it will probably eventually end up
> in the fowls-a-birds-msg file in the ANIMALS section. But for now, I
> thought some of you might wish to see it again.
>
> She recommends not using chicken or turkey to substitute for other hard to
> get birds. While I recommended serving turkey as if it was bustard. To me,
> and others, turkey reeks of modern food and I was trying to avoid pulling
> people away from the medieval atmosphere, while allowing a way to cook a
> large bird in the style of the times without using hard-to-get, much less
> endangered birds. Yes, it is period if you mean by that term used in
> Europe before 1600, but even knowing that, and many people don't, it still
> risks ripping the medieval atmosphere we try to create.
>
> I agree that we shouldn't serve one thing saying it is another. Perhaps a
> good compromise is to list it on the menu as "xxx turkey, cooked in the
> style of bustard" or "xxx bustard (using turkey)". Or maybe you can get
> away with listing the turkey ingredient just in the ingredients list but
> not in the menu.
>
> Stefan
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