Flintheath's Yule Ball 2010 Feast Menu (as remembered)

I'm trying to remember and/or recreate the menus from feasts I've prepared over the years. This was the first one I had the privilege of doing in Insulae Draconis (England). I can't seem to find where I wrote down my original menu. I think I can remember at least most of what I served, however, and will be able to find the recipes again to be able to post and link them.

The Story of a Feast

I wrote this before I started this blog, but it belongs here. The feast took place in December of 2010.

This year I had the opportunity to prepare my first feast in Drachenwald. I cooked a couple feasts in a previous kingdom several years ago, but Drachenwald has a lot more experience eating feasts, and there are many more phenomenal feast cooks, so I was a bit nervous that I might not actually be up to the level that everyone would expect. Yule feast, however, seemed a good place to start, as it was going to be a small, local event, with mostly our shire in attendance. That is to say, it was going to be a small, local event...

How Authentic are our Feasts?

Welcome back to the kitchen. Next month we’ll probably get back to actual cooking, but this month we’ll continue with the discussion I started last month. Last month I talked about two types of cooks I tend to see at events, calling them “Laurel Cooks” and “Pelican Cooks”.

Two Types of Cook

Hello there, and welcome back to the kitchen. I apologize to anyone who was looking for an article last month; I lost track of the date. Lets see if I can make up for it this month...

Recipe - herbed cheese spread

Here's the recipe I started from to make the "green cheese" or "pot cheese" as the base for the spread. http://www.medievalcookery.com/recipes/cheese.html

Recipe - Stuffed Mushrooms

Yet another recipe that is more improvisation each time than it is specific recipe. Again, I've been making these for ages, and don't think I ever saw an actual recipe. A friend of mine taught me to make these as a vegetarian option for a feast about 10 years ago, and I've morphed it several times since then. Still, either modern or medieval, they're really tasty.

Recipe - Barley Pilaf

This is something else I've been making for years, and don't really have the original recipe anymore. I'm not even sure there ever really was an "original" recipe that I found, but I've seen similar recipes suggesting that this is a reasonably period dish, even if I can't specifically document it.

Feast Menu for Drachenwald's Spring Crown Tourney

I'm trying to remember to track my feast menus, so I have a reference to use for later. Here's the menu from the feast I cooked this last weekend, for Drachenwald's Spring Crown event. I'll also try to post where I got the recipes, if possible, or will post the specific recipes in separate posts.

Dietary Restrictions

Welcome to the Kitchen! This month’s ramblings fall more into the “food for thought” category than the normal “how to” category. They were inspired by an online discussion I recently read, discussing, among other things, food safety and allergies. The basic question discussed was essentially “What duty of care does the cooking staff at an event have towards people with food allergies (or other dietary restrictions)?” 

If I was cooking dinner for a friend, I would do my best to make sure he could eat everything I served. For example, I wouldn’t invite a vegetarian to dinner and then cook a roast, at least not without providing an alternative dish for him. Likewise, if I had a friend who had a shellfish allergy, I wouldn’t cook her a dinner including prawns. This seems like common sense to most people, and they wouldn’t give it a second thought. From the point of view that cooking at an event is cooking for a group of your friends (even if you haven’t actually met all of them yet), it makes sense to make reasonable accommodations to make sure that everyone has food they can eat.

Along with the basic courtesy of providing food for everyone, there is the fact that people at events are paying for the food. It would be unreasonable and unfair to expect someone to pay for food at the event and then have to bring their own food or go off-site to eat. There are some instances where the cooking staff may not be able to meet a person’s specific needs, but that is something that should be able to be worked out ahead of time, and if the person will not be able to eat the food being cooked at the event, they should not, in my opinion, be charged for it.

Now, a cook can’t meet a person’s needs if they don’t know what those needs are. This is where the person with allergies or other restrictions needs to take some responsibility along with the cook. If you have any dietary restrictions, give as much information as possible to the event staff, along with contact information so a cook can get further information if necessary. For example, simply saying that someone is a vegetarian is not giving full information. I have known vegetarians who ate milk but not eggs; milk and eggs; or milk, eggs, and fish. When planning a menu, knowing whether someone can eat meatless dishes which contain eggs and cheese is important. 

Specific allergy information is even more important.  For example, saying that someone has a “nut allergy” is not very specific, as allergies to almonds, walnuts, and peanuts are all separate types of nut allergies. Someone allergic to peanuts is often fine with all other nuts, while someone who is allergic to walnuts is likely also allergic to hazelnuts and pecans, but not to almonds or peanuts. Knowing the severity of an allergy can make a difference from a cooking perspective as well. Someone who lists an egg allergy, for example, may be able to have eggs in baked goods, such as breads or cakes, but not in a quiche. Someone with a shellfish allergy may simply break out in hives from contact with shellfish (uncomfortable but probably not life-threatening) or they may have a severe reaction from breathing the air in a room where shrimp is being cooked. The way these allergies are handled from a cooking and menu planning perspective are very different.

So, what “duty of care” does the cooking staff have? I would say that “reasonable accommodation” is a good place to start with most people’s dietary needs. I won’t, for example, necessarily make alternate versions for every dish at a feast that someone can’t eat, as long as they can eat the vast majority of the food offered. I will make sure that there is a vegetarian alternative available for whatever the main meat for each remove is, provided I know a vegetarian is attending. When I am cooking for people who I know have religious restrictions against eating pork, I will make sure they know which bread (if any) has been made with lard, and I will make sure that there is an alternate dish for them if the meat offered is pork. This alternate dish, however, can be the same as is being served to the vegetarians; often, a single alternative menu item can accommodate multiple people’s dietary needs. 

Allergies, however, need to be treated very seriously. Cross-contamination in the kitchen could incapacitate or kill someone. While in the kitchen, make sure to wash your cutting boards and knives with hot water between items, and do not use a mixing spoon for more than one dish without washing with hot water. Make sure anyone helping in the kitchen is also aware of allergies, and washing items between uses.

If you know someone at the event has a severe allergy, it may be safest to avoid that item altogether. Shellfish, especially , is a reasonably common, often severe, allergy to an item that is not hard to avoid during menu planning if you know you have someone with that allergy attending the event. 

To finish off for the month, I’d like to reiterate that there is responsibility on both sides here. People with dietary restrictions of any sort need to be sure they are giving full and complete information to the cooking staff, and should not necessarily expect to be able to eat everything at an event. However, the cooking staff should also make sure they understand the restrictions that individuals may have, take extreme care when it comes to allergy items, and make reasonable accommodations for other dietary restrictions to be sure all guests at the event can safely and comfortably enjoy the menu items offered.

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.

Budgeting for feast - part 1

Welcome back to the kitchen! Over the last few months I've talked about how to cook meals other than feast, and we've made it through most of the event. I may come back to teatime snacks in a later article, but for now I'm going to switch themes for a bit, and we'll talk about budgeting and shopping for feast. Again, this will be covered in the next few months, as it's too big a topic to thoroughly cover in one article.

When first given a food budget, autocrats will often say "you have £10 per person"...or something similar. The thing is, while that is the way the autocrat needs to look at the money, it doesn't necessarily translate well for the actual budgeting when planning a menu. So the first thing to do is translate that into a number we can use.

How many people are you expecting to feed? Lets say we're planning for 50 people...a reasonably sized event. So, if we have £10 per person, and 50 people, we have £500 to spend. One of the first things I try to do when budgeting for food is to take about 20% off the top and leave that for "emergencies"...or for last minute additions or things I forgot to account for. This pad will help keep your autocrat happy, as you are less likely to go over budget.

Now that you have your basic budget, start looking at what you want to use it for. Where do you want to splurge, and where can you scrimp, without it looking like you scrimping.

One of the first things people think of in regards to a feast is meat. I will often plan my menus around the meats I want to use for each remove. Meat is generally one of the more expensive items in the budget, so it's good to account for it right away. If you're planning a basic meat, such as pork, beef, or chicken, you may be able to get a good deal from your local butcher or supermarket. If you want a slightly more exotic meat, however, such as venison or wild boar, try looking online. You can also try looking for meat suppliers who generally sell to caterers or restaurants, and give them a call. If you explain what you are doing. some of these commercial suppliers will sell to you if you're buying a large enough quantity, and you will pay less for a higher quality meat than you would at your local market. If you want rabbit, or hare, you may be able to make a deal with your local game warden, as well.

Still thinking about meat, a big question is "how much do I need"? A good rule of thumb (pulled from the Known World Handbook's article on "How to be a Feastocrat" years ago) is that each person should have between a quarter to a half pound of protein.  Now, meat isn't your only source of protein...and that quarter to a half pound is in the entire feast, not a single remove. So, any fish, beans, meaty stew, fowl, or roasted meat that you are serving count toward that total. This means that for your 50 people at feast, you only need about 30 pound of protein in total. (Half of 50 is 25, and I'm adding a bit to account for the natural shrinkage that happens during cooking.) So, for 50 people, if the only protein you serve is meat, say fowl in one remove and beef in the other, you only need about 15 pounds of each. If you're serving beans, or have a meat stew as well, that total goes down.

It may not look like you have enough meat, and I'm one of the first people to panic and worry that someone will go hungry. However, something to keep in mind is that with the number of dishes generally offered at a feast, no one could possibly eat full portions of all of them, and the goal is to let everyone eat their fill, but not have huge amounts of leftover food which needs to be disposed of. Meat is one of the easiest places to over-buy, so do your math early, and budget accordingly. This is one area where quality will be appreciated more than quantity. (People will be generally happier with a reasonable amount of well-cooked, good meat than with larger amounts of cheaper meat.)

I’ll leave you with that to mull over for this month, and next month we’ll look at budgeting and planning the rest of the meal.

Raglan Feast Menu and recipe sources

I promised I would post sources for the recipes from Raglan's feast, along with any modifications I can remember having made. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask and I will answer to the best of my ability.

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.