So, you want to cook an SCA feast?
Cooking for small groups of twenty to crowds of 100, or more, can be the happiest and most fulfilling job or it can be the most stressful thing you will ever do, despite how much you were looking forward to it. Much of that depends on what you were able to accomplish prior to feast day.
One of my favourite parts of the process is determining the menu, I love the research involved in trying to put together something as period as I can while looking for combinations I think people may like. This, however, cannot be done without taking care of some very important steps first.
Things to know and find out:
- What will my kitchen look like?
- Who can I depend on for help?
- How many people am I expecting to feed?
- What will my budget look like?
- How long do I have?
- Will I be advanced money?
- What resources do I have for feast prep.?
- Other little things we sometimes forget
1. What will my kitchen look like?
You can be cooking in anything from a full professional kitchen to a cramped hall kitchen with one oven to a small bbq on the deck; there is no guarantee that the person organizing the event is going to choose a hall or site for its ideal kitchen.
What you cook, if you decide to cook at all after seeing the kitchen, may depend on the resources available at your kitchen site. I cannot say this enough, don’t make any plans until you see your kitchen and proceed with heavy caution if you are not given the opportunity to do so.
When you look over the kitchen you will be using, make notes of how much counter space, fridge space, what’s available for cooking (2 ranges, deep fryer...) and what’s available by way of mixing bowls, pots and utensils. This will have a direct effect on what you can produce and how you will do it. Make a list of what you will need.
The layout and the size of the kitchen will also determine how many people you can work safely with. This can also effect out-door cooking areas where a group of people may be forced to work under cover during inclement weather.
2. Who can I depend on for help?
There will be sometimes that you can do everything yourself, and many times where you will need the help of others. The success of the whole feast will lay not just on you but your entire crew and disaster can strike if the people working for you end up not to be dependable or do not work well with you. Years ago, at one of my first feasts, I had a bunch of friends working with me in the kitchen and we all got along fine, but the stress levels began to rise a bit every time the lot of them decided to go out for extended smoke breaks.
So, basically, know your crew but this isn’t to say that you can’t have new or inexperienced people working in the kitchen as there are lots of jobs to be done. However, if you really need some experience for whatever reason, always good to plan for a few good hands, and dependability is an asset for everyone.
3. How many people am I expecting to feed?
This may not seem as important at this point in time, but it may help you design your menu by way of time and food availability. For instance, if something it out of season and hard to get, then it probably isn’t a good idea to include it in a feast for 80, but it may work in a feast for 30 or less. Also, something that is very time sensitive to make, might not be as doable for a larger crowd, especially with a small number of untrained staff to work with.
4. What will my budget look like?
Along with the number of people attending your feast, is the importance of budget. Sometimes you will be given a number of people and expected to come up with a budget, while I much prefer to be given an acceptable budget and be told how many people we are expecting. I prefer the latter because it saves time where I don’t have to keep going back until I reach an acceptable number. Many groups, in my experience, have already established a, more or less, acceptable per person amount, however if it begins to appear too low, it may need to be challenged. If you can’t meet an exceptionally low number, don’t feel afraid to make this known and why. Of course, if the budget is more than accommodating, it does not mean that you have to fill it, though if you do, it should not become a problem as the organizers, or group, would not allocate more than they can afford or expect a person to spend.
With an established budget, you will better be able to plan around constraints such as expensive foods, or avoiding them all together. I wanted to have asparagus served at a feast and had to forgo on serving it because the cost would mean dropping something of typically greater demand. On the other hand, introducing free, or very cheap foods, could allow for more expensive produce to be served. Also, don’t forget other rentals that will affect your budget, such as added equipment, prep-kitchen rentals, and even staff. I have actually worked in a kitchen that ended up having extra expenses that included the need to hire a staff member to be present while we used it and while the cost was unlikely to have been added to the feast budget, it could have happened that way.
5. How long do I have?
If you have lots of time to plan for the feast, you will be better able to take advantage of sales and shop around. You will also have more time to make things ahead. I generally do not like making things too far ahead as the quality can suffer for it, but for some people this can be the best option. If the feast is nearing very soon, you may need to plan around uncomplicated dishes or at least less time consuming fare that is easy to obtain.
6. Will I be advanced money?
There have been times where I could not get money advanced to me, or done so in a very timely manner. One choice would be not to have a feast at all, though sometimes things can be worked out such as having to wait for paid reservations or accepting just partial funds in advance. Either way, this can greatly affect what you are able to accomplish, even if the group is willing to fully advance feast costs but only after they receive unpaid reservations as due dates for these still only give so much time to organize, finalize and shop.
7. What resources do I have for feast prep.?
Will you have access to the site kitchen early? Will you be using your own kitchen, a friends or a rented space for food prep? Sometimes there just isn’t enough time in the day or staff in the kitchen to create an entire feast on site so sometimes a lot of the work has to be done elsewhere. It’s always good to know that you have the resources to get these things done in advance.
8. Other little things we sometimes forget
To try and cover everything would probably take a whole site on its own and I’d still probably miss quite a few things that can only really be appreciated through personal experience. Sometimes the best we can do before stepping into the unknown is to ask questions and if you can only contact the event site through the event organizer, make sure they get answers. If at all possible, however, try to go through the people in charge of the site as the event organizer might not be able to relay information back and forth in a way that you need.
Over the years, such communications have avoided, or could have avoided, things like non-working appliances, only having use of a kitchen for a very limited time, learning that we could acquire carts to ease getting food from a distanced kitchen and so on. If you’re unsure about anything or wish to find out more, don’t be afraid to ask.
Planning the menu
This is something I have seen different cooks approach differently, some may do all modern foods (something I do not suggest), some will do a mixture of modern and period foods (not highly suggested either), some will create a menu from period foods from different time periods and/or countries while others will try and create a menu from the same place and time or even try to remain true to one cook book. While I can’t suggest some of these approaches, even for new cooks in the SCA, all of these types of menus appear at SCA feasts today, some being generally more acceptable in some areas more than others.
For the new SCA cook, I actually suggest starting with recipes that, at least, originally come from period sources. With all the transcribed, “redacted” (to most, this means re-writing the recipe into a modern format though I consider it as re-interpreting a period recipe as well) or re-interpreted recipes all available through a quick web search, there isn’t much reason not to try. Often these recipes have been re-written in such a way that it isn’t much different than reading any recipe from a familiar or new cookbook. Also, after playing with many varied recipes, I can easily state that many are good and well tasting.
What many people in the SCA tend to do is plan the meal by modern standards, such as using the four food groups as a base and how the foods are ordered within the courses (what many people in the SCA refer to as “removes” are actually “courses” as we practice them and as they were practiced and called in the SCA period). Interestingly, many European countries course structure was not ordered much differently than how we do it today with meals growing in familiarity towards the later periods.
One thing you will notice when looking at recipes from period sources, is the lack of some dishes that are very popular in the SCA such as honey-butter or other flavoured butters as we know them today as well as tea-biscuits, soda bread, drinks such as iced tea and hot cocoa (even hot chocolate sits very close to the end of our period). Most people will not get upset if you serve them as they have become acceptable in SCA culture; however one should not tote these things as being period when they are serving them unless they actually have period directions, or otherwise, to back that up.
Another thing that some people try to work towards is having the dished planned in a way where they complement each other. Even the courses can be designed to complement the next, not so they all taste the same but that the contrasts are not overly jarring. One might notice on looking at foods from a particular time and place, is that many of the dishes, though different, carry some similar flavours and flavourings, though it is also possible that people unaccustomed to a certain flavouring might find them too much if they are in almost every dish. I once put together a meal that would have been served in late period England and one diner felt that all the dishes tasted alike, even though they had many different flavours and were prepared differently; he noticed a recurring spice mixture even though I felt the food gently spiced.
Themes! Many of the events I attended over the years had themes, be they period or just for fun and sometimes the feasts would be themed accordingly or have a theme of their own. This is not an unheard of period practice where foods could have a visual or other sensational theme. In the SCA, I have seen visual, cultural and fantasy themes, much like the events. These can both be fun as well as helpful when deciding on what kinds of foods to serve. One such year I decided on a “dayboard” (not so much of a period thing as it is an SCA thing in some areas) under a finger food/ Mediterranean theme where things not necessarily finger food sized were shrunk to meet the need.
Service and Ambiance
While not strictly relating to the kitchen, all the hard planning might not properly come together without it. Think of medieval cooking, serving and dining as carefully orchestrated theatre where one thing must happen before another can and where a feast cannot be fully enjoyed unless we cater to all the senses.
Many feasts in the SCA are either delivered from the kitchen to the table either by servers serving individually, or serving platters to the table. Sometimes feasts are served in a cafeteria style or where people serve themselves, and other times more than one type of service is utilized at the same feast. Each has their positive and negative points.
Individual service required a server to be busy for a large portion of the night if there are many people to serve and many volunteers are needed if anyone is to get a break from serving. It can also extend the time from dish to dish if there is not enough servers.
Table service (platters being delivered to the table) requires less servers and can even utilize individual volunteers from each table, but it also requires that there be enough table space to accept the platters. This also means that someone, group or hall would have to provide the serving dishes to make this work.
Cafeteria style service requires way fewer servers but lacks the ambiance and can result in line-ups full of people carrying their feast gear to and from the service table/counter.
Sideboard service, where people generally serve themselves usually only requires the cook to maintain it, but it also can lead to line-ups and can lack ambiance.
My personal favourite is a combination of the two first methods of service, while utilizing a sideboard for the servers to use and organize from. Regardless of which type of service you do use, it is important to make sure the people doing the service, or the person organizing it, is able to work with you, and you them, to ensure the food is delivered in an appropriate manner and time. Communications between the kitchen and service is essential. For many years, I have been to feasts where it was common for one dish to be served and then you would wait for an extended time until the next dish came out and so on. It wasn’t until I was cooking a feast and the same thing happened that I realized that it had become a communication problem as I had food waiting on the servers that was intended to be served together.
If you have the resources, it can also be a nice touch to bring nice things such as service ware, table clothes and even bread trenchers (where applicable), it isn’t just the event organizer who has to be responsible for the ambiance, cooks can do their part as well, with beautiful and well tasting food, carefully planned meals and servicing.
In the end, remember that your staff are volunteers who took the time to come out and help you, treat them like gold and do not forget to thank them. At my last feast, I even brought along a gift bag for volunteers to draw from at the end of a feast, but one things I would like to properly organize, which I had been unsuccessful with in the past, is to have a servers kitchen meal... usually this falls apart because many of the staff prefer to go out into the feast hall, are separated by other duties (at a short staffed or far flung event space) or the kitchen has to be vacated too early. I think, however, where it would work, it can be a great idea as kitchen staff are often paying for a full event and working on a feast that they have no time to eat. It is, however, a pleasure I would do over and over.