THE COMPLEAT COOK by Alys
Katherine, OL
Others
have written how to put on a feast, purchase food in bulk, cook for hundreds,
with details of kitchen sanitation. I
would like the cook to consider the preparation from several other points of
view: documentation, cohesion, and presentation. A feast may be tasty and the food may be plentiful but feasters
can feel “incomplete”, not quite knowing what is missing. Tasty little meatballs, rolling around in a
too-big bowl with no sauce to cover them or anything to put them on might be
one reason. A special subtlety, loudly
proclaimed by the herald and paraded through the hall, invisible because of
weak candlelight, might be another. An
Arabic dish served with English beef or French lamb may be third. I would like you to consider with me some of
the potential difficulties modern cooks may have in presenting a medieval or
Renaissance feast to the public. My
comments (which I hope are applicable
to any cook) are written with cooking apprentices in mind, those who are
comfortable with cooking for hundreds as well as those who prefer to cook for a
select circle of guests.
If
you are new to cooking medieval foods please don’t let the ideas presented here
keep you from experimenting and cooking for groups. One does not become an “master medieval cook” overnight. The concepts of documentation, cohesion and
presentation are meant to stretch your horizons and expand your idea of what
cooking a feast can be.
Feast
cooks are, appropriately enough, concerned with the budget, the mechanics of
preparation, and even the mechanics of cleaning up the feast hall to ready it
for Court or dancing. Those who pay for
a feast are concerned with whether they will get good value for their money and
whether the food will taste good or be “weird.” But, consider how SCA armor has progressed. It has gone from freon cans and carpet
padding protection to armor and tabards that look “real”. While beginning fighters may use blue plastic
barrels to make their armor, most fighters continue to improve their armor,
making it more “medieval” as they continue to improve their fighting. No one really forced this. It came as a natural consequence of fighters
wanting to look more “period.” SCA
feasts need to leave this “freon can” stage of feasts and begin to investigate
how a medieval or Renaissance feast was put together, how the tables were set,
how the food was garnished and presented to the feasters. When you, as a cook, make some simple, or
spectacular, changes to make your feasts more “period”, others will follow. Only then will this important part of our
re-creation begin to mature and develop as have our armoring and arts and craft
skills.
PREPARING DOCUMENTATION
Cooking
is a transitory art. Once the food has
been cooked, it is eaten and the leftovers are disposed of...in a tummy on a
later day or into the trashbin. Nothing
really remains to tell us how it tasted, what variations were made in the
recipe, or what changes are recommended for the next time. There are several reasons why one may wish
to document what was cooked. Entering
competitions, proving that one can cook historical recipes, and “leaving a
trail” are three that come to mind.
Competitions
First,
you should start with a historical recipe.
It is therefore important to list the source of the recipe, the author
(if any) of the cookery book, when it was originally printed, and any modern
book that it was taken from. In other
words, one is providing a cooking footnote so that others can go to the same
(or similar) source and find the recipe.
It is much more difficult (and rather argumentative) to “back document”
a particular dish. “I know they used
beef, and I know they had onions and some places had noodles so this fried
onion, noodle and beef dish could
have been done. Besides, this is
‘creative anachronism’!”
If
you are entering a competition, you should provide a copy of the original
recipe either as a photocopy, re-typed, or carefully written out. This allows those judging the food to
determine how closely the adapted recipe follows the original. For a competition, you should include the
actual recipe that you used. If this is
your own adaptation (interpretation/redaction) you should state that. If it is an adaptation done by someone else
(a modern cookbook author, for example) then say that. If you use someone else’s recipe and do not
say so it is the same as plagiarism.
You should note what changes you made from the original and why the
changes were made. For example, you
might note, “I omitted the nuts because I am allergic to them,” or “I didn’t
use alkanet because I had no source for it so I used food coloring
instead.” Other changes such as “I
added twice the rice flour because it wouldn’t thicken,” may be useful in
determining why the end result is the way it is.
In
competitions I have found that judiciously honest comments can inform the
judges what you learned while preparing the dish. “While this dish is tasty, next time I will try....” is an
example. Or, you may have tried a
“period” way and decided that doing something different will make the dish
taste better. You could submit both ways to the judges with comments on what
you learned during the cooking process.
Point out the pros and cons, why you decided to do something different,
and what you learned.
While
you should expect that your judges are fellow cooks, they will probably
appreciate a step-by-step account of what you did. For example, “I then cooked the meat” doesn’t say as much as “I
gently boiled the meat in salted broth over a low fire for two hours.”
There
is a mistaken idea that medieval food didn’t taste good. Modern world authors such as Terence Scully,
and SCA cooks such as Duke Sir Cariadoc of the Bow, have put the lie to that
idea. People did not eat rotten meat
and disguise it with spices. Most foods
were not heavily spiced, although there were exceptions even as there are
heavily spiced foods today. If your
recipe does not taste good you may want to consider how your interpretation of
the recipe may have colored the results.
Talk with local medieval cooks, correspond via the Internet or through
cooking newsletters. Look through more
cookery books for similar dishes.
Perhaps there will be a hint for a different heating technique,
variations or even measurements for spices or other ingredients. Record what you have found out. If the dish still doesn’t taste good, leave
it alone and try something else!
Proving
Yourself
If
you cook feasts, you may want to let the feasters know something about the
meal. A simple way to do this is to prepare
a list of the dishes and place it on each table (First Course: Basque Chicken,
Spaghetti with Moorish Sauce; Spinach with Raisins and Pinenuts). The next step up is to let the diners know
that the recipes are from period sources.
You could add similar information to what was listed for competition
documentation, above. For example, “Moules (Mussels), The Viandier of Taillevent,
French, 1370,” or “Sugar Paste Dishes, The
Second Part of the Good Hus-wives Jewell, Thomas Dawson, 1597.” Most diners will appreciate an English
translation of a food such as “Syseros (mashed chickpeas with garlic).”
If
you have been planning far enough ahead you could prepare a number of feast
recipe booklets. This should include
the list of foods served and the recipe you used along with any changes you
made. Ideally, it should include the
original recipe (for those diehards who want to check what you did with the
original!). A final nice touch in the
booklet would be a complete bibliography of all your sources with title,
author, publisher, year, etc. I have
seen spiral-bound feast booklets with heavy-stock covers that contain
historical information about the country, the period author, or about some of
the foodstuffs used in the recipes.
Others contain just the recipes photocopied on regular paper and folded
in half. Your fee for the book will
depend on how many pages, your printing costs, and so forth.
Leaving a
Trail
This
is for your personal record or for the assistance of your advocate or
teacher. It is like an artist’s
portfolio. Ideally, you are well
organized and have lots of time to record what you are doing! Your portfolio would include the recipes you
tried, the dates you tried them, the feasts (if any) at which you served them,
your particular adaptations, the results, and what you would do the next
time. A “simple” way might be to
photocopy the original recipe and write down your changes in the margins or
below it. If you are using this to help
your teacher or advocate help you, then comments about the dish’s reception,
what you learned, and what you will do differently are needed. People can see your progress through the
repertoire of medieval cookery and gain an insight about how you might have
grown and improved.
Photos
are another helpful asset to your portfolio.
Just photographing a chicken isn’t very informative, but if you have
gilded the chicken, arranged it artistically and perhaps placed decorative
foods around it, that is more useful.
Those interested in your advancement can see that you have begun to
think about the presentation of the food and that it is visually appealing as
well as (we assume) tasty.
Do
you have to have a portfolio to be recognized?
No. If, however, you would
ultimately like the highest recognition the Society offers, the portfolio can
give a type of permanence to this impermanent art.
COHESION
Cohesion
refers to the unity of the feast. It is
something that usually develops after the modern cook begins to master the
individual dishes. Many feasts are a mixture
of dishes from several countries separated by several centuries. Usually there is no thought given to the
interrelationship of the foods themselves or the final dish. Most feasters probably won’t notice if an
Arabic food is served alongside an English dish to be followed by an Italian
Renaissance dessert. And, sometimes all
the cook wants to do is prepare things to be eaten by everyone, fighters and
cooking Laurels included. But,
attention to presenting a unified whole can indicate that you are beginning to
master the details of your chosen hobby.
Cohesion
is often difficult to pin down. Imagine
that you want to put on a clambake for your friends. You “automatically” know something about the foods that should be
served, how they should be prepared, and something about an appropriate
setting. Now imagine that you are a
cook some 500 years in the future. You
decide to put on a re-creation of a 20th-century clambake. You can only get a limited amount of clams
since they are expensive and scarce so you stretch your meal with the more
common mussels. It’s a clam “bake” so
you prepare them in the oven and freeze them for later use. It says to use their “liquor” so you have
carefully saved and fermented the liquid from their baking. You discover from one source that
corn-on-the-cob was served. You can get
corn but it’s not on the cob. It’s in a
sterile irradiated pack and comes with a milky sauce. It should be a reasonable substitution, you decide, since you
can’t get the other and everyone likes it.
How was the food presented?
Since it deals with seafood the setting surely must be on a beach, so
you have the guests, wearing bathing suits, sit on the floor on a layer of
sand. While this isn’t an exact analogy
to what we do to medieval food there are similarities. The medieval cook already “knew” certain
parameters about the food, the way it needed to be prepared, and the
setting. In the SCA we tend to
re-create only the individual dish, not the entire meal, the presentation, or
the ambience of the setting. Therefore,
at some point in the learning process the modern cook should begin to be aware
that this isn’t “how it was done back then” and should look at refining his or
her skills. For example, your
particular interest may lie with French cookery. Work on being able to present a feast using the spices and dishes
used in France. Society cooks have
compromised by cooking each course from a different country or century.
Investigate
how meals were presented in certain countries and centuries. For example, I believe that during most of
SCA’s time period England used only two, or at the most three, courses but each
contained from ten to thirty or more dishes.
Italy apparently used more courses and had a different arrangement of
what food was presented when. In
certain countries the humoral theory was prevalent. In others, the humors had ceased to be considered. To make a cohesive whole you should become
aware of what foods would have been served first, which foods would not have
been served with others, and how to modify the basic nature of a particular
food so that it would not be “dangerous.”
While you may choose not to present a whole unified feast, your medieval
counterpart would naturally have done so.
One
memorably cohesive feast was served as if the hostess were in her own manor in
15th century France. All the dishes
were from that time and were served in the order that period menus
suggested. We were brought basins of
water to wash our hands at the appropriate times. It was one of the few times that I began to feel as if I were
sharing something that I would have shared “in period.” While this may be beyond the capabilities of
a large feast hall certainly an enterprising cook can make adjustments. One part of the feast hall can be set aside
for the “above the salt” meal and the feasters limited to what can be easily
handled. Special care can be taken with
the presentation and service to these few with the remaining feasters getting a
standard SCA feast.
At
the risk of over simplifying, many people can be good cooks and serve a tasty
feast. But, if you wish to master the
craft you should learn to go beyond just preparing individual dishes so that
you learn how to present the food as it would have been presented “back
then.” The public will not demand that
you educate them. They are probably
unaware that the normal feast bears little resemblance to period
practices. But, part of our Society is
education. With care and planning you
can move your already tasty feasts into something that would more closely
resemble a feast in a particular country at a particular time. Informing the public through a tabletop menu
(and brief explanation) will help them learn a little more about the practices
you are presenting to them either in one particular course or in the entire
meal.
PRESENTATION
Presentation
covers a wide area, from the physical characteristics of the hall to the final
serving of a completed dish. You may
not be able to do much about some of the physical characteristics of the hall
but you should be aware of its limitations as soon as the site is selected and
begin considering how to modify various elements. If this is not something you particularly like to do find someone
who does and make him or her the Hall Steward.
The
kitchen is your bailiwick. The feasters
won’t usually see it. However, the
feast hall is another matter. How will
you set out the tables? Can you
approximate one of the several ways that medieval or Renaissance halls were set
up? Will you need to limit the number
of feasters? For much of our early
period, at least in England, the halls were set up with a High Table at one
end, often on a dais, and two long rows of tables down each side of the room. People sat (or stood!) at the outside of the
table, leaving the inside for the servers to work. At Society feasts people are often placed at both sides of a
regular table which doesn’t leave much room for candles, their feast ware, and
your serving dishes. What kind of
physical arrangement was common given the time period and the country from
which your dishes come?
Medieval
feast hosts did not expect their guests to bring their own illumination. The host provided extra torches to make the
hall shine brightly and to show off his wealth and power. Modern halls are often too brightly lit for
our Victorian-inspired tastes. What can
your Hall Steward do to modify the lighting and still permit people to see your
splendid dinner? One solution might be
to carefully drape material on the ceiling to soften the harshness of
fluorescent lights. Another might be to
use the dimmer switch the hall may have to lower the level of light. A third might be to turn out several banks
of lights but still leave one or two on.
Communication with the event staff is important in this case so that
someone doesn’t come along and turn out all the lights which you so carefully
left on. (You might want to tape over
the switch and put a note on saying “Don’t touch!”) Another possibility is for your group to provide a number of
candles for each table to augment what the individual feasters have
brought. If you have access to lights
that could be aimed off the ceiling, this would provide indirect lighting and
still allow the diners to see their food.
While
the hall’s lighting isn’t part of the cooking it can have a direct relationship
to how people perceive your feast. One
hall source was so dark that we took turns holding a flashlight so that the
table volunteer could carve the chicken and not cut his fingers. The same flashlight came in handy to hold
while each feaster examined a dish to see whether it was a salad or a grain
dish! At a recent feast the cook had
gone to great lengths to have five or six lovely subtleties made. Each represented a barony, was placed on a
specially-cut board in the shape of the barony’s symbol, and was topped by
marzipan figures and tiny cookies hanging from a tree inserted into the cake on
each board. The heralds cried an
explanation and the cakes were paraded through the hall. Unfortunately, no one could see them since
the only illumination was from the candles which the individual feasters had
brought. People were unable to
appreciate the skill of the cook.
Additional
items to consider might include whether your group chooses to provide
tablecloths for the guests or provides any decoration for the tables. Tablecloths seemed to cover all the tables
and English “courtesy books” describe how they were laid. Most paintings do not show table decorations
except for the trenchers, a few dishes and goblets, and an impressive “salt” at
Head Table. There are references,
however, to flowers strewn on the table in different time periods. And, again, customs differed from Italy to
Germany to France to England.
Medieval
feasts, just as many other facets of medieval life, were labor intensive. Today we do not have the luxury of having
many servants available and this can make serving the feast a challenge. They, too, are part of the “presentation” of
food. The medieval server knew what to
do, did it on a regular basis, and had appropriate clothes to wear which
enhanced the reputation of the host. We
use volunteers who need an inexpensive meal!
If your group puts on events somewhat regularly you might consider
enlisting group members as part of a regular servers’ corps. One group’s impressive servers wear special
tabards, line up in the back and after Head Table has been ceremoniously
presented with the food by the “majordomo” and his staff, enter marching in
unison with the food held high to be placed on the feasters’ tables. While this may not be feasible for every
group those who can manage some degree of ceremony will add to the ambiance and
the “cohesion” of the feast.
Presentation
of the food most definitely falls under the cook’s jurisdiction. Most of our emphasis tends to be on the
cooking of the various dishes. The food
is placed in bowls or on platters and taken out with little thought to the
visual impact it may have. Those tasty
meatballs rolling around in their bowl would have had a better impact if they
were placed on, for example, greens or even a grain dish, with their sauces
nestled snugly beside them for immediate use.
Colorful greens, triangles of toast (sippets), or fancifully cut
vegetables can enliven a dish and entice the diner to eat it. While most early period cookery books don’t
talk about the presentation touches there are mentions in cookery books from
the late 1500s and beyond. As a cook,
you should give consideration to what might have been done for the dish you are
re-creating and then give that task to someone who will put on the finishing
touches before the servers present the dish.
Besides
the presentation of the individual dish you need to consider the presentation
of the course and the dishes in it. This
involves organizing the kitchen so that all the foods that are to be eaten
together are actually sent out together.
One unfortunate feast included eight small pork slices sent out,
ungarnished, on a too-large platter, once slice per person. Some ten minutes later, a sauce
arrived. All the meat had been eaten by
that time. Some ten minutes after that
came half a baked apple per person.
While the meat may have been tasty it certainly lacked something, being
the only food available for quite a while.
And, what can the diner do with sauce and no meat to put it on?
Part
of becoming a “master cook” involves learning how to manage the cooking and
“serving forth” of multiple dishes.
And, the best-laid plans of a modern cook can oft times go awry when the
oven refuses to work or the pots have all disappeared. Modern cooks might take advantage of
Chiquart’s lists of equipment needed when his master traveled away from
home. Local groups, as funds are
available, can stock some of these items so that the cook isn’t caught
short. Serving dishes and serving
spoons (so the diners do not need to dip their saliva-coated spoons into the
common bowl!) are particularly useful.
As
you learn more about how food was presented in various times and places you can
begin to experiment with subtleties and fanciful items. Keep in mind that while the Head Cook
oversaw the complexity of the entire feast preparation, he did not prepare
everything himself. In the largest
establishments the pastry was prepared by one specialized section to be filled
by the cooks. The confections and
subtleties were often prepared by a third specialized group. Subtleties, while often composed of edible
parts, were not always edible and might have been constructed by the carpenters
or the plasterers with assistance from painters. The presentation of these spectacular pieces would often be
accompanied by musicians or dancers.
The herald would read the “motto” which explained the meaning of the
subtlety. A number of these have been
recorded in the herald’s notes from English royal feasts.
Conclusion
While
most cooks focus solely on the preparation of a dish there is certainly more to
presenting a realistic re-creation of medieval food, dining, and feasting. Using historical sources rather than
“medievalizing” modern food; keeping adequate records of one’s experimentations
with different recipes so that successful attempts can be repeated; offering a
unified “whole” with foods that would have been served in the same meal; providing a realistic atmosphere with
attractively presented dishes; all are part of what we should be attempting as
we experiment with medieval cookery.