#caldicot

[djwezg]

Wez G - At The Café

This song is mellow breakbeat chillout, a nice relaxing mood – remember Wez G next time you are at the café!

Wez G - At The Café

[thejoyofseax]

Ormthing 2024 Feast

The feast for Ormthing is done, and having that last major SCA obligation for the year out of the way seems to have broken the dam on getting some writing up of stuff done too. Well, that, and being on a ferry for four hours on the way back with little enough to do; I was on the verge of feeling bored for a few minutes there.

The idea for Ormthing (a 4-5 day camping event at Caldicot Castle in South Wales) was to produce a Norman feast. Norman is not one of the cuisines from which I often cook, so a little research was in order first. Magnifica Magdelena Grace Vane helped with that, and indeed would have been my co-cook for the event had circumstances of modern life not gotten in her way. It would appear that there's very little out there about Norman food, though. There's more known about WHAT was eaten than there is about early Irish food, for example, but there aren't recipes or many coherent accounts. What's there is not massively different from the 14th-15th century English and French food I think of as "generic medieval", though it's argued in some places to be simpler, and in some to have more in the way of spices and bold tastes - the latter coming from Norman contact with the Arabic world via Sicily. The best guess at a feast menu would therefore be roast meats in plenty, bread, some strong tasting sauces, and - in August - quite a lot of fruit. I also guessed that fritters of some kind would have been available. So with these parameters, I went about constructing a three course feast.

Of course, account had to be taken of the actual circumstance of the feast (evening, after a day in which there were already two tournaments, including the Principality Coronet Tourney, and would be a third to follow, in the castle courtyard by torchlight) and the diners. So I went for having the "main food" of the feast in the first course, with stronger tastes and sweeter things to follow. I reckoned that five roast meats per course with fish to vary would be too much - and indeed, in the unavilability of things like swan, heron, and porpoise - it might be difficult enough to make it to fifteen different meats.

So the initial plan was:

Course the First: Roast Beast (Venison or Beef) Frumenty Chicken Pottage Vegetables

Course the Second: Fish in Aspic Chicken on Sops White Fish in a Fruit Sauce Vegetables

Course the Third: Roast Duck Baked Orchard Fruit Dates in Compost Cream & Honey Fritters

… with bread for all courses.

This did not entirely survive contact with reality. I have done fish in aspic before - indeed, I once did a beautifully clear aspic with a whole trout suspended in it - and nobody, including myself, would actually touch the thing. Aspic is one of those things which sound weird, and turn out to look alien. So I decided not to do that, and replaced that with little dishes of anchovies, which I reckoned would convey the strong taste, and not offend as many people. I was able to get pickled mussels as well, so they were added in.

The vegetables for the first course were buttered turnips and creamed leeks, and for the second, stewed cabbage and a bean pottage.

Master Richard of Salesberie was able to source excellent meat for me, about two-thirds venison and one-third beef. It did, however, arrive from the farm shop already diced, so the idea of roasting it went by the wayside. Instead, I decided to brown it in a pan, and then bake it "in gobbets".

Due to various happenings of availability and illness, I wasn't able to have any of my usual kitchen crew along, but there were volunteers from the big island: Lady Julian ferch Luned, Lady Milada von Schnecken, The Honourable Lady Amphelise de Wodeham, and Halvar Darylson, all good cooks in the their own right. We had a relaxed kitchen with no particular rush, and indeed we were able to take breaks to go see bits of the tourneys, check in on family, and so forth. Early in the day, I saw my lady, Master Agnes Boncuer, have her champion Master Alexander of Derlington take the Coronet for her, which made the high table rather more familiar in terms of tastes and needs.

The kitchen in Caldicot is a modern one, situated just off the banquet hall. It's not big, and with five people in there, it was full. It also came without pots and pans, and there were no trays that would fit the steam oven. We knew about the pots in advance, so Amphelise - who accompanied me shopping, doing the driving and money-handling - and I picked up some the day before. We discovered the lack of suitable trays about three hours before serving, but the baked fruit went into a (slow) gas oven, and disposable roasting trays were procured at speed from the village - by whom I don't know, but I'm very grateful to them! The gas hob and the steam oven were excellent, though, and there was a dishwasher in a separate room.

The menu looks somewhat deceptively simple; there was a LOT of peeling and chopping of fruit and vegetables. We were able to do quite a lot of that during the day and get things going, so we weren't rushed, but I'm taking note of that for future reference, and might consider either some degree of prepping stuff the day before, or buying pre-chopped ingredients where possible.

We had people eating in three places - in the banqueting hall, in a smaller hall down a corridor and some stairs, and then more outside (and down a steep stairs), under a sunshade in the courtyard. This meant that service pretty much had to be to the tables, rather than my usual preference for a buffet. And we hadn't suitable serving dishes for most of what was there, so it was largely a matter of sending out the pots. Master Robert of Canterbury, Lord Trygg of Eplaheimr, Dominic of Flintheath, Lord Etienne the Younger, Kit of Flintheath, Taliesin Denet, and Sidney of Flintheath did excellent work, coping admirably with heavy loads and much stair-climbing.

Everything seemed to be well received, in general. I heard good things about the venison, the turnips, the chicken pottage, the pickled mussels, the chicken on sops, the sweet-and-sour fruit sauce for the fish (but not necessarily the fish itself, I noted), the duck, the orchard fruits, and the fritters. By the time of the duck and the fritters, the torchlight pas d'armes was under way, so I was able to wander round with the dishes and hand them out to the crowd, which is one of my very favourite things to do. We had more than was necessary of pretty much everything after the first course, so if I'm doing something like this again, I'd cut back on the quantities in the second and third courses.

Almost all the feedback I've had was good (with a couple of comments on the blandness of some dishes, but that's countered by others saying they were grateful for the edibility of those). Overall, I'm happy with how things went, considering the limitations of the kitchen and the service - there are things I'd do differently if I'm cooking there again, but that's always the case for the first use of a kitchen. I'll write up a document for the next person using it, and I can at least say that nobody went hungry!

[wezg]

Review: Queens of the Crusades – by Alison Weir

I had previously read Alison Weir’s most excellent book specifically on Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine many years ago so the author was familiar to me. I chanced upon this title in my local library (Caldicot) and thought I’d give it a go. It covers the lives of several British Queens, or rather the historical period in England during which they lived. The period is one of the most interesting…

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[architectureforsuicides]

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (David Yates, 2010) Second Severn Crossing / Prince of Wales Bridge Redwick, Gloucestershire, England - Caldicot, Wales (UK) Bridge over the River Severn Type: cable-stayed bridge.

[tommothetour]

Jade: we've been [sabotaged] by our team

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[clemsblog]

Early Bays

[littlemixnws]

jadethirlwall: Kweens of Caldicot

[castlesandmanorhouses]

Caldicot Castle (Welsh: Castell Cil-y-coed),  Caldicot, Monmouthshire, southeast Wales.

www.castlesandmanorhouses.com

Caldicot Castle is an extensive stone medieval castle built by the Norman earls of Hereford from c. 1100 near the site of Harold Godwinson’s earlier Saxon castle.  The castle became a Grade I listed building in 1953.

It looks rather like an adapted motte and bailey - with the keep on a motte on the left and the curtain wall following the boundary of the old bailey.