Welcome back to the kitchen. Breakfast has been cleared and cleaned, the fighters are on the field, and classes are in full-swing. Most people will acknowledge that Breakfast is important to get the day started, and the Feast is often the High point of the event. Still, if people are too hungry they won’t properly appreciate the Feast, and moods sour quickly if the populace isn’t properly fed. Therefore, we need to offer a hearty meal in the middle of the day to refuel everyone from the vigors of the morning’s activities in preparation for the rest of the day.
Preparing luncheon is both simple and tricky at the same time. It’s simplicity comes in that, like breakfast, this doesn’t need to be a fancy meal with multiple courses. Most people will want to grab a quick bite and go on to their next activity. An easy, fairly basic lunch consists of a selection of meats, cheeses, and bread, with fruit and/or soup. It becomes tricky, however, when you start to consider the weather, and special dietary restrictions (specifically vegetarian) in your planning.
You can buy pre-cut luncheon meats at most grocery stores, which works fine if you are short on time. However, it can be more cost-effective and better tasting to roast a joint at home a few days before the event, and slice it on your own. Done this way, you can also use the bone from the joint to add extra flavor to your stew for Traveller’s Fare. Slice the joint in thin pieces if possible, but don’t worry if they don’t look as uniform as pre-cut meats...because they won’t. You can use a variety of meats for this...lamb, pork, and beef are fairly easy to find. Roasted chicken served cold is another tasty option.
When laying out meat, remember to offer some condiments as well. Mustard is a fairly standard option, and you can dress it up a bit by buying stone-ground, and/or mixing it with a bit of honey. Mayonnaise is another choice, and one many people use on their meat sandwiches, but it’s not something I’d suggest for events. Mayonnaise must be kept cold, and the risk of food-borne illness is much higher with mayonnaise than other spreads. To be on the safe side, I’d offer butter instead of Mayonnaise, and maybe offer some herbed butter as a choice as well. A less expected, but extremely flavorful option, would be jelly made of hedgerow berries. Hawthorne and Rowan berries, in particular, make a tasty accompaniment to meats. (Recipes can be found in the Wild Food Guide at http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/ancient/wild-food-guide.php.)
Now on to cheese. Here is an area where there is a huge range in quality available, and you really do get what you pay for. It’s easy to go into your local grocery store and just grab a quick selection of different colored cheeses and consider it good. With a little extra effort, however (and money, I’ll be honest about that, this can be pricy) you can get farmhouse cheeses which have much better flavor and will give a bit of extra “wow factor” to your midday spread. (Remember, we’re trying to make people WANT to eat what is being laid out, not just eat it because it’s the only thing available.) Farmhouse cheeses are closer to what would have been eaten in period, as well. If you want to make your investment worth it, however, don’t just lay the cheese out in large chunks. You want to make sure that everyone gets some, and don’t want it going to waste, so slice your cheeses before putting it out on the table. Thin slices will go farther than thick ones, and good quality cheeses have strong enough flavors that a small amount goes a long way.
Now, meat and cheese are all well and good on their own, but bread is an important part of this meal as well. Remember that we’re looking at the nutrition as well as the flavors, and carbohydrates (i.e. bread) are where your body should be getting it’s energy. Again, you could just run down to your local grocery and grab some pre-sliced sandwich bread...or you could find, or bake, some hearty loaves of “proper bread” (as someone called it at one event.) If you have a local open-air market, see if there is a baker’s stall. Some of these small bakers produce wonderful breads, even sometimes going as far as to have contracts with mills who grind the grains in an old-fashioned manor. You may even find that some of the recipes and techniques these bakers use are from period, or at least very close to it. Yes, these breads can be a bit expensive (I believe they average around £2 per loaf), but using them to supplement less expensive breads can be worth it If your budget is tight, you may find that baking bread on your own is a better option. If you’re not normally a baker, it may seem daunting to try baking your own yeast breads, but if you find a simple recipe to start with, (there are a couple in the cookbook “Tastes of Anglo-Saxon England”,) you may surprise yourself. Again, slice your bread before offering it to the populace and it will stretch much further, with less waste, than if you just put it out in whole loaves for people to slice themselves.
We’ve now covered the main part of the meal with meat, cheese, and bread, but that would still seem a bit sparse if it were all we offered. I like to offer a selection of fruits at midday, as they give a bit of sweetness to the meal without actually preparing a sweet. Apples, oranges, and pears are fairly standard, inexpensive, and easy to set out. If you look at what is in season, you may be able to find other fruit relatively inexpensively to supplement these, though, and make them a bit of a treat. In mid-summer, you may even be able to find cherries or berries at a reasonable price. This is another area where your local open-air market can be a wonderful resource. A large market, such as the one in Bury St. Edumunds, has multiple produce stands and vendors who will offer fruits and vegetables for much lower prices than you could find at a regular store.
One last thing I like to try to add to lunches, especially here where the weather can sometimes be unpredictable, is soup. On a hot day, soup isn’t needed, or even necessarily wanted. However, more often than not, it is at least cool by midday, and round out the meal nicely. I generally try to make my midday soups vegetarian, as everyone can then eat it, and I see no point to preparing two soups for lunch. If someone wants meat soup, they can drop some of the meats you laid out into their soup. I don’t like to start a new soup from scratch for lunch. Instead, I generally take the leftover vegetarian soup from Traveller’s Fare and reincarnate it into something new. If I’ve made a hearty lentil soup for Friday evening, I will add some water, and possibly cabbage and onion. Now, it’s a new soup. My soups for traveller’s fare are generally hearty, almost more stew than soup, and are meant to fill people up. For lunch, however, I don’t mind the balance tending a bit more toward broth because it’s filling a different role. Soups at lunch, in my mind at least, are less filling and more warming...especially on a cold or wet day.
Now that we’ve gone over the types of food to set out for lunch, I’ll just say a quick bit about how to set it out. Generally, a midday meal is set out as a buffet where the populace can come and grab what they want and leave again. Not everyone is going to come at once, though, and we want to make sure everyone gets something to eat, and that it’s the proper temperature, not stale, etc. So, when I set up the buffet, I don’t set all the food out at once. People will tend to judge their serving sizes based on what appears to be available, so I will set a portion of the meats, cheeses, and breads on the table and keep some in reserve to re-fill the platters as necessary. This keeps the food fresher, along with allowing for a bit of portion-control. I’m generally less worried about the fruit, and will set it in a couple bowls along the table. I want to make sure that people are getting hot, or at least warm, soup, so I will generally keep the large pot on the stove, simmering on a low flame, and put a smaller pot out on the table, refilling and refreshing it often. The smaller pot is easier for people to serve themselves from, and empties quickly enough that the soup doesn’t generally get the chance to get cold.
As we set out the buffet, refilling it as necessary, we come to the end of the midday meal preparations. Cleaning up from this should be fairly simple; we can wash our knives and cutting boards while the populace is eating, wipe down the counters and workspace, and the kitchen is ready for the next set of cooks. When the meal starts to wind down, we can combine foods on platters which can be left available for the random snacker, grab our own meals, and sit to eat. Does this mean we’re done for the day? Maybe...but it’s still several hours until feast. Perhaps some tea-time snacks might be in order...
No comments:
Post a Comment