[Sca-cooks] Looking for "Celtic" foods, especially "finger foods"

[Johnna Holloway]

Have given this some more thought and have come to the conclusion
that maybe you need to concentrate on the finger food aspects.
We don't have "Celtic" manuscripts or printed books that contain a pre  
1700 record of recipes,
and if we did, would they be much different than the medieval English  
or French recipes of the same era.
Scotland's earliest printed cookbook is 1730s. Ireland is c1710 and  
it's a reprint of an English volume.
There is one manuscript from Ireland that is worth a look.
Mary Cannon's Commonplace Book. An Irish Kitchen in the 1700s. http://tinyurl.com/6g2w7ye

It arrived today. It purports to be a privately kept Commonplace Book  
from Ireland.
It contains 120 recipes collected between 1700 and 1707. In terms of  
recipe collections from Ireland, that makes it pretty early.

So depending on the budget and number of people attending, perhaps you  
could ask for donated dishes
to create a potluck of sliced corned beef, sliced ham, salmon (maybe  
smoked), maybe sliced chicken, whole grain breads, cheeses, butter,  
honey, and a salad if you can provide plates or bowls. Then do some  
items like the oatcakes, and some sweet cakes. Maybe fresh berries and  
cream. You'll have to decide what vegetables work as finger foods for  
this gathering.

If you have the time, check out for modern recipes and suggestions:
The Country Cooking of Ireland by Colman Andrews.
Big beautiful expensive, great bibliography, photos,  250 recipes

Forgotten Skills of Cooking: The Time-Honored Ways are the Best - Over  
700 Recipes Show You Why by Darina Allen. This book features the  
skills of an agricultural past when people raised their own hens and  
gathered berries in the woods. 600 pages covering lots of skills and  
aspects of food and cookery. These are traditional recipes and skills,  
but not medieval skills, so don't think that it's a one stop  
encyclopedia for how to do it in a medieval fashion. (Too often people  
still equate traditional with being old enough to be medieval. This is  
country cooking from Ireland's past.)

Mahon, Brid. Land of Milk and Honey. Dublin: Poolberg, 1991. (also
Mercier Press, Irish American Book Company edition, Boulder, CO,  
1998). This is a good brief historical account.

And back in 2006 I posted this neat item which for a bardic event  
might be worth looking at.
August 8, 2006

Browsing this evening, I came across The Image of Irelande, by John  
Derrick
(London, 1581). The most famous plate of the set shows the chief of the
Mac Sweynes seated at dinner and being entertained by a bard and a  
harper.

http://www.lib.ed.ac.uk/about/bgallery/Gallery/researchcoll/ireland.html

Johnnae

On Mar 2, 2012, at 12:23 PM, Raphaella DiContini wrote:

> Greetings,
>       The event is "Celtic bardic", and for some reason they  
> strongly want to have a "finger foods" potluck for dinner. snipped  
> Perhaps something like oatcakes too, but my other limitations are  
> several people with Wheat/ or Gluten allergies, at least one person  
> with an alergy to ginger & pork, one Vegetarian, and another who's  
> allergic to black pepper.  It's not "finger food" but I'm also  
> contemplating making Egerdouce for the Barony's main contribution to  
> flesh out the finger foods everyone else is being asked to bring.