[Sca-cooks] Affording a period feast

[Volker Bach]

The sheer number of dishes that would be required for a meal served to landed nobility (which, at any SCA event, is present) to count as a feast would break the bank - not necessarily even in terms of ingredient cost, if we are a bit imaginative, but in terms of kitchen equipment and labour. When we do a feast here, we have three or four courses, usually a total of 6-8 meat or fish dishes, with side dishes, sauces and other condiments extra. This is served in the royal presence. By all the records I have seen, we are off by about an order of magnitude for a royal feast (though it is, oddly enough, roughly right for the daily meat day meal served to the Count Palatine and his retainers in the late fifteenth century). Even counts and knights would not have neen content with so few dishes to mark a special opccasion. The number is about right for the middling level of feast in many urban sumptuary laws. 

I wouldn't have a problem with serving a period bourgeois feast, but we have all those kings and dukes and counts around. 


    Terry Decker <t.d.decker at att.net> schrieb am 21:45 Dienstag, 20.September 2016:
 

 Think of the dearth of possibilities when the event is held in the ruins of 
a castle with no facilities and they won't let you build a cooking fire.

I suspect Volker is referring to the problem of finding a suitable site as 
much as finding the people to do the work.

Bear


And 'manage'? Why would that be any different?

I really can't think of a decent reason why you shouldn't offer a period
feast.  Unless they're expecting canned chili, it's not like the food is
_that_ foreign. People would pay far more to get weirder food, and less
of it, in a nice restaurant setting.

Liutgard, who is cranky today.

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