Cooking at Strawberry Raid II
In contrast to the vile weather we had for most of the first Strawberry Raid, in 2022, this year's weather was wall to wall sunshine, for the most part, but with wind. My kitchen tent (a modern bolt-together gazebo) worked fine, since it has a vent in the roof that prevents it from being a sail or a balloon, and for the first three days of the event, I managed to keep pretty much all modern stuff out of it, at least during the hours of daylight.
(On the fourth day, the heat and exposure to the vile daystar caught up, and I spent most of it asleep. Sadly, this meant I didn't get to try out my new cookware.)
I taught a class on the Friday afternoon, in basic camp kitchen management. I’ve taught this before; it starts with “here is how to light a fire”, and goes on to talk through the kitchen setup, interpreting a recipe from al-Warraq, and the cooking of that meal. Participants eat the meal at the end along with whoever else we’re cooking for at that camp. It’s always an interesting class to teach, and it’s always different, because people bring such diverse prior experiences and understandings. It also challenges my own assumptions as to what’s common knowledge. Things such as tree identification (for kindling), familiarity with how matches work, the fact that fire tends to burn upward, and identification of herbs and spices have all been assumptions I've had to work on.
I tend to use one specific recipe for this class; the first mulahwajah from al-Warraq. It's a simple dish: meat, onions, leeks, oil, some spices, but it almost always comes out well. I did two versions, one with celery instead of onions, although the celery version was not as successful - it seems like pepper and celery interact oddly, and the dish was much pepperier than intended as a result. Or possibly there was more pepper in it, but I'm fairly sure the division was even.
Dame Lissette contributed a butcher's block/table to the kitchen, and it was immensely useful. Having more or less sorted out the storage issues I had last year - by acquiring dozens of period-oid jars and containers and baskets in the meantime - I'm now looking at some flat-pack furniture, and some alterations to the gazebo to, over time, completely replace it with more medieval materials.
Next year, I have a vague plan to leave the actual feeding of people to an onsite vendor (if we can arrange one) and to do much more snackish and experimental cookery myself. We'll see how that goes.
