[Sca-cooks] An SCA feast

[Terry Decker]

You are making the mistake of seeing an SCA feast as an exercise in 
historical cooking.  It isn't.  It is an exercise in verisimilitude.  It's 
meant to emulate medieval dining and help the attendees stay in the medieval 
mood.  There are those of us who extend this by preparing historical 
recipes, but we don't usually follow the religious restrictions that would 
have been in place for our feasts.

There was a comment posted on this list about the preparation of historical 
recipes that stressed the opposite side of this, speaking of rigid adherence 
to the recipe which also ignores the feast as an exercise in verisimilitude. 
It was, I believe, a complaint about my modifying recipes to meet various 
dietary restrictions.  In my defense, I would point out that the period cook 
had to produce pleasing dishes that met the health requirements of their 
patrons, so my modifications are in keeping with both historical practice 
and expanding the verisimilitude.

Bragg MacMorrichai is obviously ignorant of your predilection to ask 
questions and provide advice.  Since a quick search doesn't provide anything 
under that name, she appears to be new to the SCA.  Cut her some slack.  As 
a culinary historian, maybe we can pick her brain.

Looking at the menu, I would suggest that you encourage Diana Wertz to think 
about preparing actual period fare for her next feast.

Remember verisimilitude, if the feast isn't period, they aren't problems, 
just rough places that need to be smoothed to make a more historically 
correct offering.

As for your other questions, the menu is "perioid."  Without the recipes, it 
is difficult to determine how close they come to historical recipes.  No 
stuffed mushrooms that I can recall, but I would serve either mushroom tart 
or Martino's mushroom recipe.  Very flakey pastry is possible, but a period 
meat pie would generally use a hot water and rye coffin.  Assorted drinks is 
how you deal with not being able to serve many of the period drinks.  The 
assorted desserts is of interest to me, since it doesn't convey what they 
are.

I'm not on Facebook, so if you want to re-post this over there feel free.

Now, back to 16th Century German.  I got a couple recipes to test.

Bear



<clipped>
I posted that honey butter wasn’t period. and got this reply:
Diana Shell Wertz
<<< uh,.... why wouldn't 'honey-butter' be period ???? both are period. why 
couldn't they have been combined ? I thought 'honey' was considered a 
'spice' (sorta) there's just no reason they couldn't have been…… >>>

And gave one supporting file and one that I thought could be used to create 
alternatives.

clipped>

Then I get criticized with:
<<< Bragg MacMorrichai
As a culinary historian, I appreciate the fact that you point out, we have 
no period recipes for honey butter. Seeing as in Meridies , a"period" feast 
is usually announced as such , with attendant documentation presented before 
hand....and most of our feast are not period,but a mix of traditional 
favorites and sometimes even blatantly mundane fare, to dig on this one 
thing out of a menu, seems a bit uncalled for. >>>

I don’t think I’m being overly critical. Am I?

That was just a very obvious mistake to me and I thought it worthwhile to 
correct it.

I think there are other problems, too, without have more details. For 
instance, I don’t know what the “Assorted drinks” included.
The “very flakey crust” seems very unlikely to me.

Any other comments on this feast as given?

I’m not just trying to be critical, at least I don’t think so. This feast 
does seem to be much better than many of the SCA feasts in Meridies from 
what I’ve seen in feast menu announcements.

Stefan
PS: Does someone have a period recipe for stuffed mushrooms? I sure would 
like to find one.