Timing

Welcome back to the kitchen. I hope you all had a happy and festive holiday season, and wish you wonderful things in the year to come. Cooking for the holidays this year actually brought me to my topic this month, how to time your cooking so your food is served at the appropriate temperatures.

In the past when I’ve tried to explain to non-SCA friends what was actually involved in preparing a feast, I would generally tell them that it was like cooking two Thanksgiving (or Christmas Turkey) Dinners simultaneously, and serving them one after the other. When preparing a large meal like that for family and friends, you probably do a bit of juggling to get things into and out of the oven in the proper order so everything is cooked and ready at the same time with your hot foods hot and your cold foods cold. The same thing happens when preparing feast, but on a much larger scale. So...how do you decide what to do first, and what can wait?

Personally, I like to have as much done as possible before I get to an event. You read old stories about celebrations where “preparations had been going on for days”. Well...a feast is often like that. Breads and pastries can (and often should) be baked ahead of time. Soups or stews can sometimes be pre-cooked and reheated at the event site to save time and stove-space for other dishes. I’ve realized, though, that sometimes that’s not feasible. For example, it is often easier to transport uncut vegetables, because you don’t have to find appropriate containers for them, and can just use the bags they were purchased in. Also, sometimes the shopping can’t be done early enough for early preparation.

So, once you’re at the event, how do you choose what to cook first? I generally have two answers for that...1) anything that must be cooked then cooled, to be served cold...and 2) anything that is going to take a lot of time to cook.

That first category, things that will be served cold, will generally consist of either salads or sweets. Choosing the order to cook these in, I’ll usually look at whether I can do more than one thing at once. For example, if I need to bake tarts for a dessert, and cut and boil cabbage for a salad, I will generally get the tarts into the oven first, then chop the cabbage while the tarts are baking. By the time the tarts are ready to come out of the oven, I have the cabbage on the stove coming to a boil, have cleaned my work surface, and am getting the next dish ready for the oven.

Dishes that usually take the longest to cook and need to be started early in the day are almost always meat-based. Roasted meat, when done properly, tastes delicious. It is, however, not always easy to predict exactly how long it will actually take to cook, and there is a real danger of either over-cooking, leaving your meat dry, or delaying feast while waiting for a roast to finish. My preferred way to prepare a roast for an SCA feast is to roast it at home a few days before the event, cooking it most of the way, but leaving it extremely rare on the inside. I then wrap it in foil and freeze it (if it’s more than about two days before the feast) or put it in the refrigerator. Then, at the event, I will slice the roasted meat and heat it in a warming pan (or deep baking pan) with broth or, preferably, an appropriate sauce or gravy. If roasting the meat early isn’t an option, I will start it cooking early in the day, allowing it more time than I think is necessary to cook. I monitor it closely through the day, and if it is cooking faster than I expected, I will lower the temperature on the oven, or pull it out of the oven early, let it cool enough to slice it, and, again, keep it warm in a sauce or gravy.

Stewed meats also can take a lot of time to cook. Again, they can often be done ahead of time and brought back to an appropriate temperature on the day of feast. If I have meat that I know needs to stew for several hours and I can’t do it beforehand, I will try to put it on the stove as early as possible on Saturday morning, or maybe even on Friday night.

So, you have your stew on the stove, your roast in the oven, sweets and cooked salads cooling...so now what? Now, you juggle. Timing is going to be different depending on the kitchen on site, and the equipment you have available. Remember, the aim is to have all the food assembled and at the appropriate temperature when it needs to be served. So, look at the dishes you have left. Do you have anything that is being served cold that didn’t require any cooking? (Again, this is usually salads of some sort.) Those dishes can be done at any point during the day, because you don’t have to worry about keeping them warm, or using space either on your stove or in your oven. Some of these, however, will need some time to sit before serving to let the flavors blend appropriately. (It’s similar to mixing dips for a party, where the instructions tell you to let them set for at least an hour before serving.)

Stove space is often at a premium in a feast kitchen. Often, you have less burners on the stovetop than you have dishes to prepare. You will sometimes need to swap pans on and off the stove to get everything finished on time. (See...I told you it was time to juggle.) When you’re planning your menu, you may want to include some dishes which will hold their heat fairly well after being cooked even if they’re not in a warming pan or on the stove. Thick pottages or mashed vegetables lose heat fairly slowly, as does rice or barley, as long as it’s kept covered. Some hot dishes can be prepared halfway, then finished off just before serving. I have cooked at least a few vegetable dishes, for example, where the vegetables are blanched or boiled, drained, then fried briefly with oil and onion. For these dishes, it is possible to boil the vegetables, then set them aside for a time and fry them just before serving, heating them to an appropriate serving temperature in the process.

Some cooks find it useful to write a schedule for cooking feast, detailing exactly when they’re preparing each dish. No battle plan ever survives the first contact with the enemy, and even the best laid schedule will sometimes have to be thrown out the window when something doesn’t go quite to plan. So, how do you know what can be let slip and tossed together immediately before being served? Dishes which don’t require any cooking time can be left toward the end if necessary. Herbed greens served with oil and vinegar, for instance, don’t need to cook and don’t have flavors which need time to blend. Fruit and cream, likewise, can be prepared early if you have time, or immediately before serving, if you don’t.

As the time to send food to the tables gets closer, your timing may get a bit trickier. Remember, though, that you don’t have to have all the food done when feast starts...you only have to have the first remove ready to go out. Generally, you’ll have at least 30 minutes between the time you send out the first remove and the second. That time goes by very quickly...but it does mean that you can finish off dishes for the second remove while people are eating the first.

Something to keep in mind during your preparations is to look for any place you can save a bit of time by combining steps. For example, if you have two different dishes that call for onion, why not cut all the onion at the same time and just set the portion needed for your second recipe to the side where it’s ready when you need it? Likewise, if you need pastry crust for multiple dishes, you can prepare all the crusts at once, instead of washing and putting away the rolling pin and flour, just to pull it back out again later. This is especially handy when you get close to serving time, and have several dishes that need to be cooked  just before being sent to the table, when you might not have as much time on your hands.

I know I’ve given you a lot to digest this month, but hopefully it went down fairly easy.