[Sca-cooks] Local Feast Disappointment

[David Friedman]

In my experience, offering people period nibbles, running cooking 
workshops, and offering to do period feasts, works reasonably well as a 
way of getting people involved in period cooking.  I wouldn't think that 
doing period recipes would make portion control or being comfortable in 
the kitchen more difficult than doing modern ethnic cuisine, which 
sounds like what you are describing. Those issues are pretty much the 
same whatever cuisine you are cooking.

On 11/7/13 2:46 PM, Susan Lin wrote:
> I've been reading all the comments here and while I agree that I would like
> to see more historically accurate food I am more interested in getting
> everyone involved.  That being said, at MidWinter this year we are not
> having a feast - we are doing an all days "sideboard".  We, the autocrats
> chose a theme of Spices Along the Silk Road.  That left most of the known
> world open to choose from.  Then we recruited 4 head cooks who have never
> cooked a feast before.  Each one has a few hours when they are "head cook"
> - it is our attempt to get people excited about cooking without
> overwhelming them.  Everyone is picking a place along the silk road and
> while they are keeping "period" in the back of their minds they are working
> more on portion control and being comfortable in the kitchen.  They're
> excited and so are we.  We chose not to do a feast because this is an event
> where the Crown will be attending and we never know how late court will run
> - this way people can be snacking all day and when court is done we can get
> on with the dancing and musical chairs.
>
> I'm hoping those that wished for a more period experience will forgive more
> modern food as we work to bring more cooks into the SCA.  One step at a
> time.
>
> Shoshanah
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 9:18 AM, David Friedman <ddfr at daviddfriedman.com>wrote:
>
>> 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/
>>
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-- 
David Friedman
www.daviddfriedman.com
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/