Introduction
Deciding on a Theme
Selecting Recipes
Costing
Costing Worksheet
Scheduling
The Precook Outline
The Day Of Timeline
Nice Touches
Bibliography
Calontir Cookery Guild

Kateryn de Develyn's Homepage

Selecting Recipes

Ingredients

Seasonal - strawberries in November/December? Try to plan your feast for the time of year it will be served. Strawberries in December are extremely expensive, and don't seem to taste as good as the one's available in May and June.

Turnips/beets and other root vegetables. If you are planning a wintertime feast, root vegetables are a natural. Plus, they are less expensive, and keep well.

Reliable/Good substitutions available? Can't get Shitake Mushrooms? What are you going to substitute? Will a button mushroom do instead? Think about fresh foods versus dried, canned, or frozen foods. Is the flavor or texture different from fresh? How will this affect your recipe?

Cranberries for lingonberries. When substituting, sometimes we need to make different choices based on what we are substituting for. For taste - cranberries taste an a lot like lingonberries. But, for texture - raspberries are better as lingonberries look a lot like raspberries.

You can substitute apple cider with a twist of lemon for verjuice if you cannot find verjuice in your stores or it's cost is way out of reach for your budget.

Complexity of recipe

Simple to prepare. Is this a recipe I can prepare easily and that my friends and helpers can prepare without my watching over them every step of the way? Does it require someone with a master cook's experience to know when the roux is browned just right to make the difference between a white sauce and a caramel sauce?

Does the preparation require many steps or many days? Making sauerbraten requires at least three days of soaking the meat in its marinade. Do you have the time and the space for this task? Does the recipe call for a dozen different steps - some of which require great skill? Such as making rosettes out of sugar as the final touch on an eight-layer cake? Perhaps you want to dedicate one person to just handling that one recipe for the feast. If it is an elaborate illusion food or soletie you may find it will take several days or even weeks of just one person's time to create it.

Ooh-ah v/s I want something I recognize as food. Are you trying for an ooh-ah from the crowd for each and every course? Is this a high-concept feast? Do you want to be totally in period serving dishes straight out of the period cookbooks? Or, do you want to have the feaster recognize some of the food? A lot of adults and children will not eat something they have never seen before. They also balk at foods that aren't plain. So, when planning your feast, allow for plain foods as well as more complex foods.

Sauces on the side. One way to cater to the more timid feasters is to serve sauces on the side instead of over the meats. This allows the timid feaster to have their plain food, and they can try the sauce to see if they like it or not. Other's live to eat adventurously - they dive right into anything put in front of them, pouring the sauce over their meats before tasting. However, if we don't want a lot of food waste, we need to plan for the timid, while providing the adventurous great new taste and texture sensations.

Flavors/appearance/texture/temperatures

Variety. You don't want to serve everything in a sauce, or all pottages, or all roasted meat. While sometimes the period feasts were all colored to look yellow or red. They still had different textures, tastes, serving temperatures.

Flavors. Do not everything flavored with garlic, or cloves, or ginger. Some people may not like garlic - so they won't eat anything with garlic. The strong flavors overwhelm some people’s taste buds and then they can't taste or enjoy anything else. Try for a balance of sweet, tart, spicy, and plain.

Try not to cut everything up small and serve it in a pie or stew. A whole piece of chicken instead of chicken cubes in a pottage, beef cubed into stew, pork cubed into the pie. While it certainly makes it easier for small children to eat without having to have an adult cut up all their food, adults appreciate variety.

Unless you are doing a "color" feast - varied colors are good. Notice there was no brown mentioned in the colored feasts! Bright red beets, white turnips, yellow saffron rice, green peas and beans. These help to make your meal more attractive. Brown roasts, brown stew, brown bread sounds pretty monotonous and somewhat unappealing doesn't it?

Hot/cold/cool/warm. It helps your planning and gives the feaster something to look forward to if you plan your meals so that you are serving food at different temperatures. Hot chicken, hot roasts, cool apple tarts, cold custards.

Fried/crisp/soft/gooey/moist/dry/roasted/boiled/steamed. Try to get a good variety of cooking methods into the foods you prepare for feast. Not only does this allow you to plan your range-top and oven usage better, but also it is a treat to not eat everything done the same way. The average feaster can only eat so much fried foods. And a person gets tired real quick of being able to eat their entire meal with a spoon because it is all soft and all gooey.