Post-Raglan Kitchen notes

 After cooking the feast at Raglan this year, several people were surprised that a feast could be produced under the unusual conditions they saw in the kitchen. While a good magician never reveals her tricks, a cook doesn’t have the same restriction.

For those of you who weren’t at Raglan, here’s an idea of what I was working with. Saturday morning it looked like rain (welcome to Wales), so the kitchen area was set up in the undercroft - a small series of underground rooms. I set the kitchen in the room immediately below the stairs, so I had light coming in from outside through the stairwell and one window in the ceiling on one side of the room. I had a camp stove with three burners (propane powered), three tables, about five pots of varying sizes (from a small saucepan to a large stockpot), and a couple of skillets. I also had three warming pans, and a small selection of serving dishes. So, the question is, how do you prepare a feast with two removes, with several different foods between them, with so few pans? The answer is - a bit of flexibility, a little juggling, and a LOT of planning. 

 

Preparing a feast from a camp kitchen can take a lot of planning even under the best of circumstances. Planning and preparing portions of your feast before arriving on site will make your preparations on the day much easier.

In this case, anything that required an oven was done ahead of time at home. This included the breads, meat, and chickpeas. Breads and meat were then frozen, to allow them to act as the ice in the cooler and keep the rest of the foods at a safe temperature until it was time to prepare them on Saturday. The chickpeas were roasted at home then kept in a plastic container until it was time to cook them in the broth at Raglan. This time I bought chickens pre-cooked (smoked, actually), but otherwise I would have roasted them at home as well. 

Sweets were also done ahead of time. Rock candy takes a couple weeks to grow the sugar crystals, so that was started first and left to set in a cupboard. Candied almonds were also made at home and brought. While it would have been possible to make the almonds on site, making them early meant that I didn’t need to take the time during other feast preparations when hands, and stove space, could be put to other uses. Pears cooked in a Greek Wine syrup were actually made on site, but they were done in camp the night before. The pears are supposed to be served cold, and it made more sense to make the syrup and give the pears all night to cool, instead of, again, taking up stove space and hoping they would cool enough if I made them on Saturday morning.

So, on Saturday, once the kitchen was set up, it was time to start feast preparations in earnest. I had expected to have more utensils, serving dishes, and pans, but circumstances conspired against me. It also hadn’t occurred to me that there was not only no running water, there wasn’t an easy place to dump waste-water, either. Here’s where a bit of flexibility and juggling came into play. The large pot became a pot for washing-up. Occasionally, I would find a volunteer to empty it for me, and bring it back with clean water which would be re-heated for the next round of washing up. I also had some wonderful volunteers to fill a large water jug for me so I had water available for other purposes.

With limited stove space and only three warming pans, timing the food preparation was going to be important to ensure that hot food made it to the tables hot (or at least warm). So, foods that were going to be served cold were the first to be prepared in the newly assembled kitchen. A wonderful volunteer cut apples and onions, mixing them into a salad while I worked on the pickled cabbage.

Because the meat was pre-cooked, it didn’t have to go on the stove. The pork was sliced while cold (which is actually easier than cutting the meat while hot) and put straight into the warming pan, covered in the basting sauce from the original roasting. The chicken was likewise broken up (quite literally - it was easier to rip apart by hand then to slice) and put in the warming pan with the sauce poured on top. Heating the meats in the sauces served two purposes. First, it keeps the meat moist, and second, it lets the flavor from the sauce absorb into the meat. 

Frumenty was cooked early and put into warming pans so I wouldn’t have to worry about the timing later. Other vegetable dishes that were to be served warm were cooked most of the way, but left at a point where they could be brought back up to a serving temperature and finished off quickly. As the time to serve the feast got closer, I started the rice cooking in a large cast-iron pot, where it would be able to stay warm even off the stove. 

As the populace started seating for the feast, I checked the temperature for the rice and finished the peas, bringing them back up to the proper temperature. As soon as the first remove was sent out to the tables, cooking pots and warming pans that had been emptied were washed and reused to heat vegetables for the second remove. Sweets were put on the tables between removes to give a bit of time for cleaning serving platters so they could be used again for the second remove. 

Although circumstances in the kitchen weren’t ideal, none of the challenges were insurmountable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a kitchen where everything went exactly as planned. The important thing to remember is “don’t panic”. Plan ahead as much as possible, and if something doesn’t work exactly the way you’d expected, take a breath and find a way to work with what you have. Chances are, no one will know things didn’t work right unless you tell them.