Notes from the Firepit

by Joshua and Rufina

We enjoyed ourselves so much at Whyt Whey's camping event in Brooklyn
last year that we volunteered to cook for it this year.  As soon as it
sank into our brains that we were cooking for forty or so people at a
campsite without a lot of amenities, we decided to pre-cook as much of
the feast as humanly possible, and to stick to a familiar,
tried-and-true cuisine.  Which in our case meant 14th-15th century,
French and English: we already had well-tested interpretations of all
the recipes except the syseros and the green sauce.

A handful of Whyt Wheyfs showed up at our apartment a week before the
event to help: we boiled and picked the meat from half a dozen
chickens, cored, peeled, and poached forty pears, and cooked a few
hundred wafers on an electric wafer iron.  Two or three days before the
event, we mixed up the syseros, cameline sauce and green sauce.

The day before the feast, we did last-minute grocery shopping and
cooked ten tarts -- five ``ember-day'' and five of spinach and beet
greens.  When we reached the site, we had lunch, the third course, and
half of the first course ready to serve, and if disaster had struck
everything we planned to cook, nobody would have starved.


Lunch: Ember-day tarts, syseros, pita bread, pears and peaches

On the table: Bread, butter, peaches

First Course:  Roast leg of lamb with cameline sauce and green sauce;
tarts of spinach and beet greens; sallat of divers greens

Second Course:  Chicken in Bruet, Pottage of Pasternakes, Rice

Third Course: Pears poached in wine syrup, wafers.


Post mortem: Due to problems with fire sources, the rice wasn't cooked
enough to serve, and some of the lamb was underdone (although enough
was cooked for everyone to have some).  All the precooked stuff worked
well.  The moral of the story, I guess, is to arrange for plenty of
firewood several days in advance and to start the cooking fires before
you need them....


from the July 1998 Seahorse