More Braaaaaaains ...

I will admit that I'm not the most organized person in the world, and this very post is a good demonstration of both my lack of organization and what I do to compensate.

Back in 2008 (wait ... was that really 8 years ago?!) I blogged about how I used The Brain Book when cooking feasts to make sure everything went as smoothly as possible. It's a neat little idea that has saved me all sorts of grief. I figured I'd follow up that post within a week or so with a link to an example Brain Book that others could use as a guide for making their own.

We can see how well that went. I got sidetracked into something else and ... well ... you know. Anyways, I came across a file while spelunking on my computer that turned out to be nearly complete. So I thought I'd clean it up and make it available before something else came along to distract me for another 8 years.

Let me know what you think.

The Brain Book

Levels of Medievalness

Whether it is dinner at a "medieval-themed" restaurant, a feast held by a historic recreation group, or a home-cooked dinner made for a school project (or even just for the fun of it), a question that might arise is "How medieval is this meal?"

Really, it's a very tricky thing to work out. There's all sorts of things that can enter into it, including such diverse elements as the type and source of the ingredients, the atmosphere (both ambiance and air quality) of the dining area, and even the time of year in relation to the foods served. In fact, considering all the extended variables, I suspect the answer to "How medieval is this meal?" is "Not very."

However, there are some aspects that are more easily controlled and which have a much larger impact on the ... medievalness? ... medievalosity? ... medievalery? ... ok, authenticity.  Let's look at them in order from least medieval to most medieval.

1. Medieval Ingredients

There are a number of foods that weren't available in medieval Europe. Some are things from the Americas (e.g. turkey, potatoes, capsicum peppers, peanuts, vanilla, chocolate) and weren't imported into Europe until after 1500.  Some are from other places (e.g. bananas, tea, coffee, yams), but were still not in common use in Europe.  Some are things that were invented well after 1500 (e.g. baking powder, mayonnaise).

The presence of any of these marks a meal as being modern.  It doesn't matter what recipe was used or how the food was cooked, they're simply not medieval.

2. Real Recipes

Even if all the ingredients used to make the meal were available in medieval Europe, that doesn't mean the resulting dishes would have been familiar to a medieval European.  Bread, ground beef, cheese, lettuce, and pickles are all reasonably medieval foods, but there's no account of any medieval cook ever making a cheeseburger (or any other type of sandwich, for that matter).

Fortunately there are a large number of medieval European cookbooks available, both in print and for free online. What's more, many have been translated into several different languages (for the benefit of those who don't read Middle-French or whatever), and there are even recipes that have been worked out with modern measurements and instructions.

3. Menu Consistency

Given both medieval ingredients and recipes, the consistency of the menu becomes an issue. By this I don't mean that the menu is too runny or somesuch, but rather that the individual dishes on the menu make sense to be served together.

While a World Fusion dinner can be fun, most people would be confused to be served a dinner menu of curried beef, Szechuan vegetables, tamales, poi, and hot chocolate. It's too strange a mix of cultures and cuisines.  The differences within regions and time periods in medieval European cultures can be very subtle, but they are there.  Twelfth century English food is very different from sixteenth century German.

Sometimes there are menus along with the recipes in many of the medieval cookbooks, which makes this part a lot easier. However there is still a lot of uncertainty to this aspect, and it's a great area for research.

It is only when the ingredients are medieval, the recipes are medieval, and the menu is medieval, that other aspects become important (like the apple variety, the quality of the spices, the shape of the serving vessel, the way the food is served, the color of the walls).

It's also important to work things in the above order.  Using non-medieval ingredients or modern recipes is kind of like building a ten-million dollar home and skimping on the quality of the materials or workmanship.  The final product simply won't hold together.

A Feast Complete with Garbage

I'm now (mostly) recovered from cooking the feast on Saturday. Even though it went well - in fact almost too well, in that there were several times where I turned to one of the assistants and shrugged because I had nothing to do at that moment - I was still completely wiped out at the end.

The food all turned out great, with compliments coming back about the Cormarye and the Applemoyse. The biggest sensation though was the dish I included for fun and announced as "The Chef's Challenge". It was an authentic 15th century English dish called "Garbage". Here are the sources I have for the recipe:

xvij - Garbage. Take fayre garbagys of chykonys, as the hed, the fete, the lyuerys, an the gysowrys; washe hem clene, an caste hem in a fayre potte, an caste ther-to freysshe brothe of Beef or ellys of moton, an let it boyle; an a-lye it wyth brede, an ley on Pepir an Safroun, Maces, Clowys, an a lytil verious an salt, an serue forth in the maner as a Sewe.
Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books (England, 1430)

Garbage. Take faire Garbage, chikenes hedes, ffete, lyvers, And gysers, and wassh hem clene; caste hem into a faire potte, And caste fressh broth of Beef, powder of Peper, Canell, Clowes, Maces, Parcely and Sauge myced small; then take brede, stepe hit in the same brothe, Drawe hit thorgh a streynour, cast thereto, And lete boyle ynowe; caste there-to pouder ginger, vergeous, salt, And a litull Safferon, And serve hit forthe.
Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books (England, 1430)

To mak a garbage tak the heed the garbage the leuer the gessern the wings and the feet and wesche them and clene them and put them in a pot and cast ther to brothe of beef poudere of pepper clowes maces parsly saige mynced then step bred in the sam brothe and cast it to pouder of guingere venygar saffron and salt and serue it.
A Noble Boke off Cookry (England, 1468)

The best strained meats you can have on meat days are made from the necks of pullets and chicks. And you must grind up the necks, along with the heads and bones, then grind again, and put in the cooking-liquid from beef cheek or leg, and strain.
Le Menagier de Paris (France, 1393 - Janet Hinson, trans.)

Simply put, it's a stew made from broth, chicken heads and feet, livers and gizzards, and spices. I'd purchased the ingredients from Jungle Jim's (I had to substitute duck heads for chicken heads - don't know why they sell the one and not the other), and put them in a large pot to cook for several hours. I'd checked the broth a couple of times to make sure it was ok, and actually it wasn't at all bad - tasted like a rich chicken soup.

I announced it personally right after the first course was served, briefly went over the ingredients, and told the guests that they could have it English style (with the ... pieces ... left in) or French-style (with them strained out). For added incentive, I offered a box of saffron as a prize to the first person who consumed a bowl of the stuff. I figured only two or three people would go for it. Silly me. As I walked back to the kitchen there were several people chanting "Garbage! Garbage! Garbage!" and shortly thereafter the servers came in with dozens of requests. Of all the things to run short of, I had to ration the garbage.

Her Highness received the saffron for emptying her bowl first (a bit unfair since she received hers first, but then rank has its priveledges). She'd been served a head, foot, and liver along with the broth, and all that was left was a scary looking pile of little bones.

It kind of figures. After years of hearing "medieval food is nasty" and having people turn up their nose at things like roasted turnips with cheese, I intentionally make something that I figure almost no one will like ... and it gets compliments. Now I've got to find something even weirder.

Ceilidh Feast 2010 - Shopping List

The feast is only a few days away, and I'm now putting together my Brain Book™. An important part of this notebook is the shopping list, and since I mentioned it in my earlier post I figured I should say a few words about it.

I've put a copy of my draft shopping list up online (sorry about it being in Excel format - if it's a problem then I'll look into converting it to something that doesn't require using a Microsoft application). It's really just a simple spreadsheet. The first page is all of the ingredients needed for each recipe, which is more an organizational tool so that I don't miss something super important. The second page is the same list, sorted by inrgedients, with totals needed for each ingredient. This page also has an estimate on the number of servings per recipe, a cost per unit, and a total cost for the ingredients.

Over the next couple of days I'll try to post and comment on the other parts of The Brain Book™ for this feast (of course, if things get too nuts then I'll post it all next week after the feast).

Ceilidh Feast 2010 - Menu

I've been asked to cook the feast for an upcoming SCA event here in southwest Ohio, and I thought this would be a good chance to document the whole process I go through in running these things.

The first step for me is working out the menu. In this particular case I don't have much time to try out new dishes or do a lot of research, so I decided to stick with dishes I know reasonably well. Also, since I seem to have been having trouble getting my act together lately, I figured it'd be best to choose more simple, straightforward dishes - less to go wrong. I knew I wanted the whole thing to be primarily English because their feasts were much less structured than those of the French (and therefore, simpler). After a couple of days I took the time to sit down and - with Kristen's input - settled on the following menu:

A Supper for a Meat Day

On Table:
manchet bread
soft cheese
fruit preserves

First Course:
Pegions Stewed (stewed chicken)
Onion and Parsley Salad
Chervis (carrots and parsnips)

Second Course:
Cormarye (roast pork)
Wortes (cabbage)
Rice Lombard

Third Course:
Apple Muse (with Snowe)
Wafers
Walnuts

Ok, so right off the bat I'll point out one major factual error. The title, "A Supper for a Meat Day", is in all truth incorrect. In the medieval religious calendar, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays were meatless days, so properly I should have a fish-based menu. However the problems with doing so are numerous, but the biggest ones are that a lot of people around here don't like fish and that they really like meat. If I did an all-fish feast I would probably be feeding 20 instead of 120.

The bread, cheese, and preserves are all pretty dull and straightforward. For this event I've got someone else to make the bread (thanks Amari!), so that's one less thing for me to do ahead of time.

Pegions Stewed is a simple recipe. I'll be using chicken legs and thighs instead of using pigeons both to save costs and because they're more acceptable to the locals. Of course once I've got that on the menu then the onion and parsley salad is a natural accompaniment.

Chervis is essentially a variation and simplification of a recipe from Menagier de Paris. Really it's just cooked carrots and parsnips with spices.

Cormarye is an old standby for me. Pork is plentiful and inexpensive here - sometimes cheaper than chicken, and this is one of those recipes that is really hard to mess up. If things go well then I'll thicken the juices from the roasting pans with some bread to make a sauce.

The recipe for Wortes is one of Kristen's. One of the VIPs apparently has an intense dislike for cabbage, so I'll have to do a separate dish for head table.

Rice Lombard is a new dish for me, but it's really just rice cooked in meat broth with spices.

Finally in the last course are wafers, walnuts (which will be sugared if there's time), and apple muse topped with snowe.

The apple muse gave me pause though. The most common recipes for it call for almond milk and honey, which adds a lot of effort and expense for such a simple dish - especially when cooking for so many. What I'd like to have is something more like Chardwarden, which is thickened with egg yolks and sweetened with sugar. After some serious digging, I did find a couple medieval variants of the recipe that did call for eggs and sugar, so that's what I'm going to use. Apparently I'm incapable of doing even a simple feast without researching at least one new recipe.

With the menu settled, the next step will be to work out the shopping list.

A Medieval Calendar

One of the things that I've always tended to get all geeky about is calendars. For some reason the various methods used around the world and throughout history to measure the passage of time are like chocolate cupcakes to me. I'm pulled to them irresistibly and can't help but to eat four or five ... ok, maybe the simile breaks down there. Anyways, I think calendars are cool, and since I'm also into medieval European history, and into food, it's no surprise that I'm very interested in the type of calendar used throughout Europe in the middle ages.

There's a lot of stuff out on the net about medieval calendars and the like, including some beautiful images, but what I really wanted was a typical example that had links to information about the saints it listed. Nope, I couldn't find one. This of course meant that I had to make one for myself.

So it is with great pleasure that I present Halidai's Kalendarium - a medieval-style calendar that lists the feast days for the saints, as well as the information about those saints taken from the Golden Legend. There really isn't anything groundbreaking here - it's all stuff that's already freely available online. I've just put it together in a way that I thought would be useful to me. Hopefully others will find it useful as well.

Oh, and tomorrow is the feast day of Saint Hilary.

Food Related Painting of the Week

The Marriage at Cana
Gerard David
ca. 1500

The Marriage at Cana, Oil on wood, Musée du Louvre, Paris
(from the Web Gallery of Art)

A busy painting from the late medieval period, this one is unusual in that it has a lot of food detail for a religious-themed artwork (if you look at the paintings titled "The Last Supper", you'll find that nothing was being served other than bread).

The first thing that catches my eye in this one is (of course) the pie being brought in at the left. The perspective is a bit squashed, but this is a nice example of the geometrically perfect, cylindrical medieval pie - I'll post other paintings with such pies in the future. My gaze then travels across the table to the right, noting the bread, knife, and beaker-shaped glass just in the foreground of Jesus. Just right of center a server is carving a piece of meat. The resolution here isn't good enough to make out what's on the platter next to him. There's a nice salt cellar next to that.

Something else worth noting, in this painting the diners are seated all around the table instead of only along one side as is the case in most feast scenes. This makes me wonder if the seating arrangements in all the other paintings are wrong (set up so you could see all the figures), or if it's this one that doesn't represent how feasters sat, or perhaps even if both arrangements were common. Something I'll have to check into.

Harvest Days 2008 - Feast Report

I guess I've recovered enough from the whole thing, so it's time to post my thoughts before I forget them.

The Menu
No big surprises here. Everything was reasonably well liked, with one exception - the Gelye de Chare. No surprise here, but most people just can't cope with meat-flavored jelly. I really didn't expect people to eat much of it, which is why I only made half a cup per table of 6. I don't think I'd serve the Boiled Sallet or the Frutours at another feast as they both need to be cooked just before serving, and therefore cause logistics troubles.

I did have one good-sized hitch here. The sotlties between the courses were all centered around a piece of food-art created by Wulfwen Atte Belle (Hi Wulfie!). Sadly, her car died early Saturday morning, which meant that the aforementioned piece of food-art was stuck some 5 hours' drive away from the feast. Without it, none of the other sotlties would make sense, so I decided to scrap them and just stick with serving food.

Planning and Prep
Here's where I really fell down on the job. Things have been really nuts for me the past month or so, and I didn't get things planned out as well as I should have. As a result, a lot of food prep that could have been done in advance was left for the day of the feast. If I didn't have the help of my apprentices and a bunch of amazing volunteers, this feast would have been a fiasco.

In specific: I should have had all the bread cooked (was 3 batches short), the needed eggs separated and stored frozen, the turnips roasted and peeled, the Leche Lumbard and Chardwarden made.

The other major planning problem rested with my lack of organization. When I got to the site on Saturday morning, I realized that I'd left the bread in the freezer at home. This meant I had to drive back home and return - an almost 2 hour trip - just to pick it up. I ended up finally getting to the kitchen and getting to work around 1:00 p.m. Again, if it hadn't been for my apprentices taking charge in my absence (and making good use of the Brain Book) things would have gone very badly.

Hall Setup and Service
The hall steward did an excellent job at setting things up and wrangling the servers. There was one issue though that caused continued problems. I had planned the feast to serve 100 (plus head table), but the total number of feasters was actually 90. If I had the presence of mind (or had built it into some sort of checklist) it might have occurred to me to drop two tables from the hall setup. That way instead of having 18 tables that were partly filled, I would have 16 tables that were almost completely filled (each table could seat 6). My failure to realize this meant that we had to dish up 2 extra platters of food for every dish and still have too much food at every table. Obviously I need a "Hall Setup" page for the Brain Book.

Gritty Details

The bread, cheese, and preserves were set out before the feast started. No problems here.

The first course had a couple of hectic parts. The beef in pevorade and blancmanger were pretty straightforward - apparently there were several people who really liked the blancmanger. I had the pety pernauntes made as individual tartlets, which caused some minor issues because of the seating, but it all worked out. The boiled sallet was a real pain though. It had to be cooked right before serving in table-sized batches. Zophia (second apprentice) did an excellent job of making sure this got done.

The second course was where things really started to go haywire. The jelly was sent out first while I plated the venison and frumenty. With the full kitchen staff preoccupied, the servers began taking the venison out while it was still being plated. This made it really hard to keep track of how many plates had been done. The leche lumbard went out sometime around here, but I missed it. Then Avelyn (first apprentice) plated the great pies - which looked really cool - and we sent them out. Life was good. Little did we know ... (insert ominous music here).

Finally, while Zophia was frying apple fritters as quickly as she could (the other pain-in-the-butt dish) and I was plating them, the Chardwarden went out. The fritters followed shortly.

It was then, while we were looking around with an eye to starting the cleanup and saying to ourselves something like, "Wow, we're done!" that someone noticed two big steamer pans. We'd (I'd) forgotten to serve the turnips. The diners were still seated and the servers were just coming back, so we grabbed some bowls and a big spoon and sent the stuff out. Apparently the feasters were amused to receive turnips for dessert. Then again, there is medieval documentation for serving turnips and cheese last at a feast.

Avelyn suggested that I make a huge copy of the menu to post on the wall for next time, so we can cross off dishes as they go out and prevent this sort of thing from happening. I thing that's a great idea, but I don't want to think about a "next time" just yet.

Conclusion
On the whole, I'd say the feast was a success. The food looked and tasted good, and people got fed to the gills. There were some behind-the-scenes problems, but (other than the out-of-place turnips) none of it was apparent in the feast hall. I can live with that.

Braaaaaaains ...

No, I'm not going to write about brains as food - at least not yet. What I'm talking about here is one of the most useful kitchen tools for cooks who have to make the occasional huge feast: The Brain Book™.

Background
I'm quite sure others have come up with similar concepts before - I don't claim at all that this is original - but I got the idea for The Brain Book™ after watching a good friend organize a miniature-painting competition. She had a box which she referred to as "the brain", which contained all the paperwork, reference sheets, rules and other documents. When one of the many people assisting her needed to know something, the answer was usually along the lines of, "I don't know, check the brain."

Now I'm one of the first people to admit that I'm not the most organized person in the world. In fact, my organization skills have been scientifically measured as being the third-worst in all of recorded history. This is why, when thought about "the brain" in terms of a way to organize cooking feasts, I immediately saw how useful it could be. So two and a half years later I finally managed to get around to putting it into action (which is a pretty good turnaround time for me).

So what goes into The Brain Book™? Good question!

What goes into The Brain Book™
I start with a thin 3-ring binder - one of the ones with a clear pocket on the front and two pockets on the inside - kind of like this one. All of the pages that go inside are put in clear plastic sheet protectors - an especially good thing in a kitchen, where a notebook naturally attracts substances like grape juice and peanut butter. The actual contents, in order of appearance, are as follows:

• Shopping list
• The Menu
• Pre-cooking and prep work schedule
• Cooking schedule
• Plating and garnishing guide
• Recipes
• Receipts envelope

Shopping List
This is one of the few things in the notebook that doesn't go into a sheet protector because it's a multiple-page document. Instead I staple it and put it into the inside-front pocket. I usually work up the shopping list in a spreadsheet. All the ingredients for each recipe are listed, with the quantity needed multiplied out for the entire feast. Then I sort by ingredients and total everything up. Finally I add a list of all the non-food items (e.g. paper towels) I'll need at the bottom. When things are purchased, I check them off on the list. This seems simple, I know, but it really does help things.

The Menu
Not much to comment on here. This is mostly so the other staff in the kitchen can check on what goes out with what.

Pre-Cooking and Prep Work Schedule
This is a one or two page, day-by-day listing of what needs to be cooked or prepped in the week or so before the feast. For example: Monday - bake & freeze 2 batches of bread, Tuesday - buy tart crusts, Wednesday - put frozen meat into refrigerator.

Cooking Schedule
This is another spreadsheet. I break the day down into 1 hour segments across the top, and have the full menu (broken out into sub-components of a dish where necessary) down the left side. Then I mark out when things need to be chopped, cooked, put into holding boxes, plated, and served. The part of the schedule that covers the actual feast is sometimes broken down into 30 or 15 minute intervals when appropriate.

Plating and Garnishing Guide
A list of every dish, grouped by course. It states what kind of serving plate should be used, what serving gear (e.g. spoon or fork) should be included, and how the dish should be garnished.

Recipes
One page per recipe, with the full list of ingredients and complete instructions. This year I'm experimenting with adding a "red card" to recipes where I need to make accommodation for guests with particular food allergies - I'll let you know how it works out.

Receipts Envelope
This is so I can get reimbursed for any money I've spent. It gets tucked into the rear-inside pocket of the notebook.

This seems like a lot of work, but it's worth it. During the feast, any of the kitchen staff can determine on their own what work needs to be done, how something should be cooked, and how and when it should be served. Because of the redundancy, multiple people can be working on different things at the same time (e.g. two people can be working on different recipes, another can be plating, and another can be instructing servers). This hugely improves the efficiency in the kitchen, reduces stress, and helps prevent mistakes. It's also very helpful in that during a feast, when the staff asks what needs to be done and my mind has turned to mush, I can say, "I don't know. Check my brain."

Harvest Days 2008

I'm now in the middle of preparations for the Harvest Days event. I've got a substantial - all English - feast planned, with some new dishes (OK, the recipes are actually some 500 years old, but they're new to the re-enactors of this region).

The feast is going to be held on September 6th, so naturally I'm going a bit nuts right now. Therefore it seems like a good idea if I add to that workload and start posting bits and pieces about what I'm doing.

The Menu
All was good with the menu until a couple of months back when I realized that the current Prince (and future King) of the Midrealm is allergic to pork - which of course appeared liberally throughout the feast. So I scrapped a half-dozen dishes and added three or four different ones. Then I heard from my local huntsman and game-keeper (Hi James!) that the pigeons weren't breeding fast enough and kept dropping dead for no reason. There goes another dish (bother! I was so looking forward to serving everyone squab. Oh well, there's always next time).

So now as it stands I've got a menu consisting of 3 courses and 16 dishes (give or take, depending on what you count as a dish. Medieval menus are pretty flaky about the number of dishes claimed for a feast, so I see no reason to me more accurate than they were).

Sotlties
I've also got at least three sotlties (entertaining/amusing bits for during the feast - in France they were called entrements) planned that should go over reasonably well. I can't tell you more about them though as it would spoil the surprise.

The Kitchen
My apprentice visited the site yesterday evening and reported back that the kitchen is the size of a small country. There's also an outdoor barbecue pit (which is good because one of the dishes - pommes dorreys - works best when cooked over an open fire).

That's enough on things for now. Sometime in the next few days I'll probably post some pictures of the kitchen with comments, instructions and examples of making a Brain Book™, and various notes about food and prep-cooking.