Feast and Food - proposal

• Meal Plan
• Feast
• Catering for special dietary requirements
• Food budgets

Meal Plan

The event price includes these meals

• Friday night dinner (available later in the evening for those who arrive late)
• cooked breakfasts Saturday and Sunday
• basket lunches Saturday and Sunday
• Feast on Saturday night

and also

• tea, coffee each morning, cordial through the event
• snacks during (and immediately after) Crown Tournament
• late-night snacks around the bonfire on Saturday

Friday dinner

Ludwig's Friday Dinners have become famous in our Barony over the last several years. He has a standard menu of corned beef (with various sauces), pease pottage, a selection of roast vegetables and of course his freshly-baked sourdough bread.

It's a simple, hearty hot dinner, which accommodates most dietary requirements, and which is designed to be easy to re-heat well into the evening, so we can feed travellers well whenever they arrive on site.

Ludwig has cooked this meal several times before, so quantities, menu, and budget are all well known.

Breakfasts

We usually offer porridge, stewed fruit and some selection of bacon, scrambled eggs, sausages, and mushrooms; plus bread, milk, butter, sugar, tea, coffee, etc.

We don't try too hard to be medieval before 9am - we prefer happily-caffeinated SCAdians to authentically-grumpy ones.

Lunches

Inspired by the basket lunches at Darton's May Crown Tournaments; served on plates with cloth napkins: it's nicer to eat in style and comfort.

The kitchen assembles each lunch onto a plate: choose one and eat where you like, when you like.

Likely plate contents are a: hearty pie, selection of cheese, cold corned beef (we'll make extra on Friday night), boiled egg, greens, fruit, nuts, almond-biscuits.

Napkins

Large cotton napkins turn out to be cheaper than the fabric to make them would be.

• For sale for $2
  
• For hire for $1.10

We've budgeted $2/head for a cloth napkin for lunch. We expect substantial attrition over the event, so we're treating these as expendables rather than capital acquisitions. (Our Barony is of course funding the other infrastructure we're buying: our new list field, new serving equipment, etc.)

We'll wash these on site on Saturday night and reuse them on Sunday, so it's $2/head whether you are present for one lunch or both. 

Baskets

Our Barony has recently bought 72 stainless steel platters, that are about the size of the wicker baskets we'd previously considered. As the feast cook doesn't need them until later in the afternoon, we'll use these for lunches, at least for the first 72 people. The Barony (not the event) will buy whatever extra wicker baskets we need to cover bookings over 72.

• Wicker baskets for about $1

Snacks

During the tournament snacks will make the rounds: fruit, nuts, and perhaps something meatier from the BBQs (so we don't disturb the feast-cook in the kitchen). Feast left-overs will re-appear at the bonfire late at night.

Feast

Our well-tested feast-team: Vettoria di Giovanni da Verona (previously known as Caterine de Vantier) as chef, Anna de Wilde plating, and William de Cameron and Katherina Weyssin managing service and front-of-house. Of course, the feast will be in the style of 16thC Roman popes, because that's what Vettoria does best.

Vettoria will decide the menu closer to the event, but it will be similar in style to the Midwinter Coronation Feast in 2010, the Canterbury Faire Feast in 2012, and the Bloth Feast in 2013 (all produced by the same team).

Plans for refining our "standard" feast:

• starting earlier, so the first courses become "pre-dinner nibbles", and the first hearty course comes about when modern people expect dinner
• speeding up service and plating, so courses are closer together
• reducing the total volume of food, so people get plenty, but not dispiriting excess
• more theatre! more display! trumpets! flowers! baby elephants dancing galliards while carrying sugar sculptures! (ok, maybe not the last, but you get the idea . . .)

Catering for special dietary requirements

We do our best to cater to any special dietary requirements.

We're testing a new system for identifying ambiguous foods (e.g. pies with gluten-free pastry) with small colour-coded flags with labels ("GF - gluten free", etc); so visitors can read the label, but locals can use the colour-coding (which speeds everything up).

There will be suitable lunches (again, with colour-coded flags) for all the dietary requirements listed on booking forms.

For the feast: Vettoria typically prepares printed menus, which list all major dietary categories and suitable foods (we're updating how we do this, to make it closer to normal restaurant practice). We usually have menus on the tables, and the servers have access to detailed lists of ingredients, so that they can answer questions.

Food budget

Amounts are based on those we've used for similar meals for our last few similar events. No cooks have gone over-budget recently, most have used 85-95%.