This is the final list of dances for the Canterbury Faire Ball (Friday night at Canterbury Faire). There are dances to suit all skill levels, and I hope the ball will be a lot of fun. If you have questions about the dances or music, please contact Lady Anna de Wilde or add a comment below.
UPDATE: all sheet music for the ball now collected here (thank you, Lowrens!).
Again, this is testing that I did in preparation for the feast at Canterbury Faire. I wanted to offer some sort of fruit-based pie as part of the final credenza course, and Messisbugo's date torte recipe first caught my eye, and then his other one did. I decided to test them both, since I had the luxury of all the ingredients and a group of people willing to taste test on hand.
Okay, so I was more optimistic and hopeful about the possibility of serving asparagus as part of the Canterbury Faire feast than realistic about the probability of getting decent fresh asparagus at the start of February. Still, with a number of avid asparagus eaters amongst my testers, I had plenty of people more than happy to indulge my desire to try out three different means of serving asparagus.
We wound up with eight people at William & Catalina's this afternoon, with a bustle of activity as what was originally "Sewing Sunday" becomes more and more a general group day.
A number of sewing projects were being worked on this afternoon: I put gathering threads in the neckline of a new chemise, while Anna tacked the lining of the skirt of a new dress in, then cut out some sleeves, and Katherina virtuously made some fingerloop braid cords to go on her new shirts.
This is the main meat dish that I want to serve at the Canterbury Faire feast next year. Although I had a fairly good idea that it would work, I wanted to try it so that I could check volumes of ingredients ahead of time. This particular recipe appealed to me as it is gluten free without any adaptations needing to be made.
These are two dishes from Messisbugo that I recently tested as I would like to serve them both at the Canterbury Faire feast which I am cooking next year.
I have translated both the recipes from a facsimile of his work; my translation for the meatball dish is here, and the one for rice & cheese is here.
As part of some recent recipe testing I did, I tried out three different tortellini recipes. I want to serve tortellini as part of the Canterbury Faire feast, but could not decide which recipe would be best. The answer was obviously to try them all, and get feedback from a bunch of people about which they preferred.
The first recipe came from Giacomo Castelvetro, Gillian Riley (trans.), The Fruit, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy (Viking, London, 1989)
We made a playlist of all the dances on the Canterbury Fair ball list, put in on random, danced everything as is came up, and practiced more intensely those that we had trouble with.
Meyer rapier and dagger: a first look.
Preliminaries: Meyer says that you can either defend with the sword and hit with the dagger, defend with the dagger and hit with the sword, or use the sword and dagger together (and the end he urges Germans to use the last tactic, as they get confused otherwise). Meyer then offers some examples of increasing complexity. In this section Meyer varies the footwork, sometimes standing left foot forward.
