[Sca-cooks] Feast Report - Siege of Glengary

Euriol of Lothian euriol at yahoo.com
Sun Sep 23 17:22:11 PDT 2012


Hello all,

This weekend I cooked my first feast in 3 years. I must say I got a bit rusty in those three years.

I would have to say that each individual dish that made it's way out the door to the feast hall was successful, and by the lack of leftovers returning to the kitchen this appears to be confirmed.

The biggest issues were timing issues. It is challenging when you don't have a kitchen the week before that you can feasibly do any prep cooking and storage of food. So Friday night the plans were to get some the prep done.  Well only the essential prep work was done on Friday, leaving the other work to be done on the day of the feast.   Then first two hours the morning of the feast (oh, I was cooking lunch too by my choice) I found myself alone in the kitchen. I plugged away at what I was doing and unfortunately cut my left hand in the process. There was no threat of food contamination, but I had to take time to bandage the cut and find a glove and went back to work. I was surprised how much longer it took me to do things because my left hand was in the glove all day. Key equipment also got to me later than expected that day. With all these complications, my entire time schedule was thrown off. We plugged away trying our best to catch up, but the
 dishes did not make it out the door in the order intended.

Two dishes did not go out at all. The pine-nut candy did not get to the temperature that was needed for it to properly set and then proceeded to stick to the aluminum foil. We decided the time it would take to rescue it was not worth the effort. The Peers in Confyt also did not go out because all the pears were accidently used in the dish for lunch (Rissoles of Fruyt). And the flour was forgotten for the Rissoles of Fruyt, so it was served more like an apple sauce (none of it made its way back into the kitchen).  There was not enough rice flour for the liquid that went into the Cryppys, but I happened to have some barley flour in hand. More chewy texture on the Cryppys, but still enjoyable. And since we had the flour issue, there was no rice flour for the Strawberye Pottage  but I had remembered I also had millet flour so we used it instead. The millet flour did not set up the Strawberye as nicely as the rice flour did, but we served it in individual
 cups and no cups were returned to the kitchen. The Sambocade filling was lacking the sugar noted in my recipe, so it did not go out as intended, but a number of people were adventurous enough to try it. I was told it went really well with the Strawberye pottage.

I had a number of things that detracted me in the weeks before the feast, and it showed in the management of the kitchen. Fortunately I had a great set of people who did come in to help and I feel the feast was a success.

I could not sing stronger praises of three young gentles (teenagers) who spent most of the day washing all the serving dishes and the tools being used by the cooks that day. If it were not for them, the management of that kitchen would have been dire.

For anyone interested, the feast menu is published here: http://sites.google.com/site/medievalcuisine/Euriol/feast-lunch-menus/siege-of-glengary-2012

 
Euriol


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