[Sca-cooks] Local Feast Disappointment

[David Friedman]

On 11/7/13 7:42 AM, Daniel Myers wrote:
> I've faced the same thing continuously for the past decade.  In spite of
> having a surprising number of cooks in my area who are interested in
> medieval cuisine and are more than willing to teach, a large number of
> local feasts are blatantly modern.
I think there's a significant difference between potatoes and "remove." 
We can't, as a practical matter, make everything at an event 
historically correct--the people who are coming closest (the "perfectly 
period feast" group in the West) are producing one feast every three 
years, and they are still using modern tables to serve the feasts on. 
Different people make different choices about what features of 
historical authenticity matter to them. To take one particularly 
striking example, almost all of our feasts charge for the meal. The 
medieval feasts they purport to be modeled for don't. Most of our indoor 
feasts use electricity and flush toilets. So while I'm in favor of 
getting people to cook feasts from period recipes, I have to accept the 
fact that other people in the Society have other priorities.

The case of "remove" is entirely different. That isn't a modern 
convenience, it's a modern error. The only excuse I can see for 
deliberately using it is the view that the SCA isn't a historical 
organization, it's  a self-referential subculture loosely inspired by 
history--the view I like to refer to as "of course it's period--we've 
been doing it for years." That's an entirely different argument than the 
point about practical constraints.

To put it differently, I don't want to get all feasts in the SCA to be 
perfectly period, since that would mean no or almost no feasts. I do 
want to get all of them to not refer to courses as removes.

-- 
David Friedman
www.daviddfriedman.com
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/