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There are some odd triggers in my culinary habits. One of them is that I've become accustomed to having a supply of duck fat for those times when you just need to cook with duck. (I keep it in the freezer, because I don't use it that quickly.) This means that using up the last of the duck fat is a trigger for picking up a duck to roast. So that's what I did this week. The ducks at Ranch 99 come in several options of scrawniness, but some are "scrawny with lots of subcutaneous fat". So I now have about 1.5 cups of rendered duck fat in the freezer, a container of various bits of breast and thigh meat that will supply 2-3 dinners, and a stockpot full of potenez, the duck & lentil soup I invented to be part of Alpennian cuisine. I should come up with some more Alpennian dishes. It's fun.

The other fun food thing I'm doing at the moment is seeing to what extent I can live off the vegetables from my own estates. I'm currently getting reasonable supplies of tomatoes, squash, eggplant, and chard, with just enough green onions to get by. There are a few staples that aren't convenient for me to grow myself. Iceberg lettuce (and my leaf lettuce isn't enough currently to do my daily salad), corn, mushrooms. I thought I planed cucumbers but not sure what happened to them, so I get the occasional cucumber. And I don't grow my own avocados, not only because the trees take a long time to get established, and because it would take several trees to supply my wants, but also because I loathe and despise cleaning up after avocado trees. The leaves don't compost and they fall fairly constantly. But there you are. I suspect I could reasonably aim to grow all the fruit I need, if I was willing to forego having a long strawberry season. If I keep on top of long-range planning, there are more vegetables where I could grow all I need. Onions are a good possibility but it requires setting up a schedule to start new ones, which I'm working on at the moment. I'm still fiddling with getting the right balance of water to the plants. Last year the tomatoes were getting too much water, this year, not quite enough. Fine-tuning requires making fiddly adjustments to the micro-sprayers and drippers on the plants that don't need as much water, since they're all on the same circuit. Being on the same circuit means I can't simply do different durations. And at some point I'm going to expand to use the fourth circuit on the watering system in the back yard. I'm not sure why my landscaping guy didn't use all four, but since the basic system is all set up, I think I can manage to hook in another line on my own.

And the thing I'm not procrastinating about is writing a podcast script for the show I need to record tonight. So that's it for blogging.

At first I thought the whole sourdough fad was silly. Then I thought, why not be silly? A friend offered to mail me some dried starter with a "lineage", another friend jokingly asked that for a birthday present she'd like to have a sourdough culture named after her. After that, how could I not?

At first, I worried over the culture, keeping it out in room temperature, feeding it daily, making more things with the accumulating discard than I did with the culture itself. Eventually, by experiment, I figured out that the culture was perfectly happy sitting in a loosely-capped jar in the fridge and only being fed when taken out for walkies. Lately I've been baking around 1-2 times a month and it's perfectly happy.

At first, I used an elaborate process from the King Arthur website that involved a lot of steps, some interim refrigeration, and took about 3 days to go from first feed to finished bread. But through trial and error (and mostly trial, to be honest) I've come up with an optimum process for the batch size that works for me and goes from feed to bread in 24 hours.

Here's my method. It may or may not work for others.

Start in the evening. Mix 1 cup flour and 1 cup warm water in a medium sized bowl. Add the starter and mix. (I tend to keep about 1/4 cup, but the amount doesn't actually matter since you remove the same volume to put back in storage.) Either cover with a damp cloth or put it in a semi-insulated place (e.g., in the countertop convection oven) and let work overnight.

In the morning, remove the starter to return to the fridge. Add salt and olive oil to the dough and mix. Then measure out another cup of flour and add enough to make a kneadable dough. Actually stop when it's still a little sticky, put a bunch of flour on the kneading board, and knead, adding flour as necessary, until it's smooth and elastic (as the saying goes).

Use a little more olive oil to oil your bowl, turn the dough in it so it's oiled (against drying out) then return it to your rising location.

Any time during the (work) day when you end up in the kitchen, dump the dough onto your floured kneading board and knead it thoroughly. Return to the bowl, turning to oil the exterior again. Ideally, you'll have at least three kneading sessions.

After work is done, heat your oven to 425F and knead the dough one last time, shaping it in the process to whatever type of loaf you want. (If you feel adventurous, roll it into a thin rectangle and sprinkle with additives: cheese & herbs, walnuts & chopped olives, whatever you please. Then roll it into your loaf shape.) Slash the top. All my commercial recipes say to give it another rise at this point, but honestly I get just as good results going directly to the oven.

Bake for ca. 30 minutes or until browned and when it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom. If you've done your dinner planning right, you'll have fresh hot bread for dinner. If not, you'll have it for dessert.

 Any time I check out a new breakfast cafe, one of the first things I order is Eggs Benedict. My theory is that a restaurant that can make good Eggs Benedict can be trusted for almost anything. And yet, what they heck kind of dish is Eggs Benedict anyway?

It is--let us be honest--awkward to eat. The layers that make it an exquisite visual creation are slippery, and the art of slicing it up into bite-sized pieces that include all the strata takes long to master and can fail at any point. The perfect poached egg that sits at the heart of the construction will immediately deflate into a pool of yolk when first addressed with knife and fork. If one is (as this one generally is) also juggling either an iPad or a book while eating a leisurely cafe breakfast, the need to wield two implements to eat the dish creates another impediment.

And yet... And yet...

One of my favorite breakfast cafes is Min's Kitchen on Clayton Road (a nice shortish bike ride away). In addition to the classic Benedict (Canadian bacon, eggs, hollandaise sauce) and the widely familiar Florentine Benedict (add spinach), the stereotypical California Benedict (with avocado & tomato) and a variety of seafood-based Californias (seafood is a speciality of their dishes) substituting shrimp and/or crab for the meat. Though Min's doesn't do this one, another favorite of mine is a smoked salmon Benedict--something of the love-child of a salmon bagel and a Benedict.

I regularly make Benedict breakfasts at home, thought it rarely feels like the result is worth the amount of work. (Because, of course, I make the Hollandaise from scratch.) But there's just something about creating a dish that is meant to be admired visually before being consumed. I don't usually have Canadian bacon around the house, so if I don't have smoked salmon on hand, I'll sub in regular bacon, nice and crispy. For a Florentine style, I find that sorrel, minced and sautéed up in butter, can make do for the tanginess of the Hollandaise as well as adding greenery. And, I confess, microwaving the eggs in a silicone cup is a lot easier than trying for the perfect poached egg (as well as making it easier to firm up the yolks to a less runny state).

This morning's breakfast-in-the-garden is a bit of a "what's in the fridge" version of the dish. Base layer on the English muffin of cream cheese (left over from my salmon-bagel splurge), sliced black forest ham (impulse buy -- as noted, I don't normally keep ham around the house, but I though it might make a nice lighter protein addition to some meals), nuked egg, and sorrel sauce on top. This time, it worked perfectly. The roses are blooming, the birds are singing, the Eggs Floren-sorrel-ham-tine are delicious, and the world balances in its turning for just one moment.

 Let's see, I last posted on Tuesday and now it's Thursday. And I still don't know how that happened. The days are very very much the same. Tuesday was the day I decided to crack out the poppy-seed filling that might or might not still be good past its use-by date. (It was good.) Made a large batch of kolatchky, froze about half, put half in a large ziplock bag to keep them fresh a bit longer, and put the rest on my fancy cake pedestal.

I'd decided to do sushi from GrubHub and ordered in advance to get it around 6pm. Then just as I was closing down the office computer for the day, I got a text from Beth in New York asking if I was going to join the movie-night zoom like I'd said. Time: what is it even? So I quickly signed on and joined the group (half-and-half some DISTAFF folks and Beth's friends from other contexts) to watch the new Emma, with commentary from all of us running in the chat box. A minor infelicity in that the zoom host who is presenting the movie evidently can't participate in chat without disrupting the show. The sushi arrived early in the movie so it really was a dinner-and-a-show night. We decided to watch Clueless next week for a compare-and-contrast, since some of the participants had never seen it.

So no yard work Tuesday, but I'd been planning to take the day off anyway. No yard work Wednesday because I was still feeling a bit dragged out in the afternoon. Did something interesting with chicken and stir fry with a tomato-coconut-milk sauce and a bit of Sri Lankhan spice mix (that came with the cookbook kickstarter). Not any specific recipe. I really do need to try working through a bunch of those recipies seriously.

Just as I as finishing up dinner, threadwalker pinged me about our dinner night (which doesn't always align with actually eating dinner). We figured out how to play Splendor through zoom. The game is well suited to that purpose, given that the game play is all in the open so one person with the set can serve as moderator as well as player, as long as you can adjust your webcast camera to see the play on the board. I used some of the color-coded spice jars from the kitchen re-org as my tokens and tracked the rest of my hand on post-it notes. It's a fairly fast game, even with the ramp-up for figuring how to do the online play. (Yes, there is also an offiicial online play version, but this was more fun.) Great game. About 70% strategy and 30% luck of the turn of the cards.

So will I get to yard work today? Only time will tell!

ETA: During our monthly staff meeting yesterday, the topic came up of whether the company is going to be more open to general working-from-home after the Current Unpleasantness is over, and it sounds hopeful. I also brought it up earlier in the day with my boss in our regular one-on-one.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the possibility of doing WFH at lest two days a week routinely going forward.

On twitter, I mentioned something to catherineldf about an early hot chocolate recipe I'd once made that was best described as "chocolate tea", which led to promising to post it if I could track down my notes. Well, it meant getting back to doing more of my ongoing archival file conversions (because the only copy I had was in a PageMaker format for some reason) but I did find the original.

I couldn't manage to get the ingredients properly ground, which is why it comes off as "tea" more than as proper hot chocolate. That and the fact that it's early enough that it's made up with water rather than milk. So in addition to being a bit of a hybrid of two early recipes, it would be better for some more experiments in texture. The occasion of working this up was a "chocolate potluck" at work for Valentine's day quite a number of years ago -- which makes it notable that I still have the rest of the dry mix in a tupperware container in the fridge. It still smells good, so maybe I will try a finer grind sometime soon.

* * *

17th Century Hot Chocolate

Original recipes are taken from: Coe, Sophie D. & Coe, Michael D. 1996. The True History of Chocolate. Thames & Hudson, New York. ISBN 0-500-01693-3

The recipe of Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma (1644)

100 cacao beans
2 chillis (black pepper may be substituted)
a handful of anise
ear flower [a spice]
2 mecasuchiles
(powdered roses of Alexandria may be substituted for the two previous ingredients)
1 vanilla bean
2 oz. cinnamon
12 almonds and as many hazelnuts
1/2 lb. sugar
achiote to taste

The recipe of the Grand Duke of Tuscany (1680)

10 lb cacao beans
jasmine flowers
8 lb sugar
3 oz vanilla beans
4 to 6 oz cinnamon
2 scruples ambergris

* * *

My recipe

I liked the idea of nuts and flowers and the sweet spices, but enough of a non-fan of chili peppers that I wasn't about to add them to my experiment. And ambergris was a bit out of my budget for this project. So here's my ingredients:

1/4 c. cacao nibs
4 t sugar
1/16 t ground cinnamon
approx. 1.5” vanilla bean
1/4 t dried jasmine flowers
1/4 t dried rose petals
1/8 t anise sead
1 T blanched almond
1 T blanched hazelnut

Process all ingredients in a cuisinart until completely powdered and blended. Mix approximately 1 T powder to 8 oz boiling water. There will be sediment, so either leave the dregs or let sit for a short period then strain into your cup.

The jasmine and rose flowers were sourced from an herb company (Lhasa Karnak, I believe) to be sure they were culinary grade. The food processor simply wasn't up to the job of grinding the ingredients finely enough. The result was … interesting. You had to approach it without any preconceptions of what it was supposed to taste like. Pleasant, but definitely unexpected.

As I sit here on a Saturday afternoon, enjoying the 75F weather on my patio and looking out over my garden (hey, look! I've got flowers on the quince, cherry, and medlar trees!), it occurs to me to post a review of the Adult Beverage in my hand, since it represents an interesting variant on the plethora of hard ciders that -- much to my delight -- are infiltrating the adventurous end of the local market. The bottle notes say, "First sampled on a warm winter day while grilling, this dry, tannic blend gets tilted with smoked apple. Racy, with notes of earth, spice, smoke, and of course, apples. Pair with aged cheese, burgers, and a side of derring-do."

Let's see: paired with aged cheese, check; burgers, nope have to settle for smoked salmon; and a side of derring-do, (peeks at novel in progress) check. Alas, I can't say that the smoke flavor does anything much for me. I mean, it's an ok cider. Quite pleasant and nicely dry. Perhaps it would pair better with a robust red meat than my current crackers-and-cheese lunch. But it seems more like an interesting gimmick than a real flavor winner. Ok, ok, and I'm really more of a light and fruity sort of gal. Still, it's nice to have a lot more selection than good ol' Woodchuck like in the bad old days.

(For previous posts in this series, see items tagged with 'messisbugo'.)

The boundaries between the 3rd through 5th courses are necessarily somewhat fuzzier, given that 3 of the menus only have 3 courses and only one has the full 5 numbered courses. But if we take the contents of the menus with more numbered courses as defining the cut-offs, then the template for the Third Course is what remains.

But even this approach leaves some very sloppy edges. The 1548 menu (as mentioned previously) includes in the Second Course two oyster dishes that the majority rule would properly place in the Third and Fifth Courses. And then the 1524 and 1540 menus seem to have a reprise of the non-fowl parts of the Second Course as part of the Third Course. (The 1524 menu, which had the extra fish dishes in the Second Course also reprises these in the Third Course.) The 1524 menu also has placed several fruit dishes in the Fourth Course that the other menus all place in the Third.  So this chapter will analyze what appears to be the common template for the Third Course even when specific dishes in specific menus are listed elsewhere. The “reprise of the Second Course” dishes are going to be treated separately as a sort of “Course 2b” as the majority rule identifies them as excluded from the standard Third Course template.

The 1548 menu gives us a clue to the basic theme of the Third Course when it explicitly labels it “Fruits and Others”.  Overall, the dishes here are somewhat lighter and have almost no focus on meat (with the sole exception of the oyster dishes). In contrast to the Second Course, we again see a clear set of common dishes across all or most of the menus.

Second Course Reprise

Roast Suckling Quadruped (2 menus)

The 1524 menu, which had stuffed lamb and kid breast in the Second Course, reprises it with whole stuffed roast kid. The 1540 menu, which had whole stuffed roast kid in the Second Course, reprises it with roast suckling pig.

Roast (Veal) Loin (2 menus)

These might better be considered “displaced” dishes, as the 1524 and 1540 menus were the only two that had no roast loin dish in the Second Course.

Sauce (2 menus)

Mustard is listed separately in the 1540 menu while Peacock Sauce has its own line item in the 1524 menu but follows the listing for roast peacock (see below).

Other Dishes (1 menu)

The 1524 menu, which has been noted previously as the most extensive and elaborate,  also includes roast peacock (with the aforementioned peacock sauce), hare in black broth, and three fish dishes: small fishes, stuffed lobsters, and fish gelatin. These “reprise” dishes constitute all but one of the items listed for the Third Course in the 1524 menu, so in terms of conceptual structure it really is more of a duplicate Second Course. That is, this menu has five numbered courses, not because it adds an extra at the end, but because it duplicates one in the middle.

The True Third Course

Fruits

Olives (6 of 6 menus)

Fresh grapes (5 of 6 menus)

Note that the 6th menu is the one where grapes were put on the table in the First Course and explicitly noted to be left on the table for the rest of the meal. So we can count grapes as being present for this course in 6 of 6 menus.

Guaste pears (5 of 6 menus)

Two types of pears are listed: Guaste and Caroele. I don’t know the difference.  In 3 menus, these are cooked into pies or pastries.

Caroelle pears (2 of 6 menus)

These are listed simply, in one case accompanied by “paradise apples”. All of the menus have at least one pear dish.

Apples (1 of 6 menus)

Little apple tarts

Oyster Dishes

5 of 6 menus have some sort of oyster dish. Interestingly, the exception is the 1524 menu which is the only one with non-oyster seafood dishes. I’m sure there’s some sort of story behind this.

Oyster Pies/Pastries (4 of 6 menus)

Fried Oysters (2 of 6 menus)

In both cases, a sauces is also mentioned.

Other

A Decorative Dish (3 of 6 menus)

These are grouped, not by material, but because the dish is  clearly intended as a visual decoration. One is custard-filled pastry in the shape of a fleur-de-lys. One is described as “various arms, German-style, fried with sugar”. And one is an Italian jelly with a mantle and laurel leaves.

Jellies (1 of 6 menus)

In addition to the above decorative jelly, there is a “French jelly”.

Pastry (2 of 6 menus)

Pastries of wafer dough and “guanti” which are hand-shaped fried pastries.

Marzipan (2 of 6 menus)

In one case listed only as “marzipan pastries”, in the other a detailed description “tegole of beans of faux royal pastry, fried, filled with marzipan” which would be baffling except that it is included in the detailed recipes and is apparently little marzipan “beans” enclosed in a fried pastry “pod”.

Misc. (1 of 6 menus)

Three of the remaining dishes occur in the same menu: pistachios and pine nuts, butter pats stamped with armorial designs, and “tall farate(?) without skin on them” whatever that might be. Another menu has "Fennel and other fruits in vinegar"

Summary

So if I were going to design a basic Third Course template, it would be something like this:

• Olives


• Grapes


• Pears in pastry


• An oyster pastry or fried oysters


• A visually decorative dish, either of pastry or jelly

The full listings are complicated here by my attempt to show not only the dishes listed in the Third Course, but also to indicate dishes listed elsewhere that fall under this template, and to indicate which items listed as Third Course seem to belong under other templates. Because of this, there are a couple places where I’ve moved one of the dishes from the original order given, in order indicate these groupings.

15?0 (order altered slightly for thematic groupings)

• Olives, 10 plates.


• Fresh grapes, 10 plates.


• Caroele pears and paradise apples, 10 plates.


• 10 large oyster pies in 10 plates.


• 200 fried oysters, covered in cameline sauce, in 10 plates.

Listed here, but belonging thematically to the Course 4 template

• Cheese, 10 plates.


• Butter vermicelli with rose water and sugar, with fine sugar on top in 10 plates.


• Clotted cream [lattemele], 20 plates.


• Clouds and wafers, 20 plates.

1524
Course 2b

• 20 suckling kids stuffed and roasted, in 20 little plates.


• 20 loins in cavezzi in 20 little plates.


• 20 spit-roasted peacocks in 20 little plates.


• Hare in black broth in 20 little plates.


• Small fishes, 20 little plates.


• Stuffed lobsters, 20 little plates.


• Fish gelatin, 20 little plates.


• Peacock sauce, 20 little plates.

Course 3

• Olives, 20 little plates.

Listed in Course 4 but thematically included here

• 20 little apple tarts in 20 little plates.


• Marzipan pastries, 20 little plates.


• Guaste pears and apples in large pies, 20 little plates.


• 100 caroelle pears in 20 little plates.

1536

• 10 tall farate [?] without skin on them, with fine sugar, in 10 plates.


• 40 oyster pasties in 10 plates.


• 90 pasties of wafer dough in 10 plates.


• Fresh grapes, 10 plates.


• Olives, 10 plates.


• Peeled pistachios and pine nuts, 10 plates.


• Guaste pears in 10 plates.


• Washed butter stamped with various arms, with candied cinnamon on top, 10 plates.

1537

• 350 fried oysters, covered in strong sauce on 14 plates.


• French jelly in 14 plates.


• 14 large fleur-de-lys in 14 plates. (That is, a fleur-de-lys shaped pastry filled with custard)


• 14 large pastries filled with guaste pears in 14 plates.


• 140 tegole [lit. “tiles”] of beans of faux royal pastry, fried, filled with marzipan in 14 plates.


• Guanti in 14 plates. (a fried pastry shaped like a hand or glove)


• Fresh grapes, 14 plates.


• Olives, 14 plates.

1540 (order altered slightly for thematic groupings)
Course 2b

• 12 suckling pigs, roasted, in 12 little plates.


• 12 veal loins cavezzi in 12 little plates.


• Mustard in 12 little plates.

Course 3

• Large pies of currants and guaste pears in 12 little plates.


• Various arms, German-style, fried with sugar, in 12 little plates.


• 12 large oyster pastries in 12 little plates.


• Olives in 12 little plates.


• Fresh grapes in little plates.

1548
Listed in the Second Course, but belonging thematically here

• 7 large oyster pies in 7 plates.

Course 3

• Italian jelly with a mantle and laurel leaves, 7 plates.


• Olives, 7 plates.


• Fresh grapes, 7 plates.


• Guaste pears with candied aniseseed on 7 plates.


• Fennel and other fruits in vinegar, 7 plates.

Listed here, but belonging thematically to the Course 4 template

• Faux junket with sugar, almonds, and rosewater in place of clotted cream, 7 plates.


• Small and large wafers, 140 in 7 plates.

(For previous posts in this series, see items tagged with 'messisbugo'.)

No, you haven’t missed parts 11-13. Those are scheduled to cover the other numbered courses and I’d already set up the file templates with those labels. But I decided to add one more overview discussion concerning how the various dishes were served to the diners. You may have noticed that each dish provides serving amounts indicating the number or quantity of food and the number of plates it’s served in. For example: “80 thrushes, 120 polpette, 80 turtledoves, together on 20 little plates” from which we may calculate that each of the 20 plates contained 4 thrushes, 6 polpette, and 4 turtledoves. Or “80 large fried kid livers with yellow sauce, 10 pounds in 20 little plates” from which we calculated each plate to have contained 4 kids livers comprising half a pound total. But how does this relate to the number of diners? Did each diner get their own thrush and turtledove? Perhaps. The per-plate count of items ranges from one each for larger items (e.g., capons, ducks), 2-4 for smaller items (pheasants, turtledoves, tomaselle) and 6-10 of small items such as pastries. And in general the total number of smaller items will be a multiple of the total number of diners (or at least of ordinary diners).

The number of diners (including the host(s) and guest(s) of honor) is enumerated for each menu. And each menu will tend to have a default number of plates of each dish served. A typical example is: “A dinner that was given by the magnificent Messer Girolamo Giliolo for the Most Illustrious and Most Excellent Lord Duke of Ferrara and other Gentlemen and Ladies, who numbered 38 at the first Table.” That is, counting the host and guest of honor, there were 40 diners. (The reference to the “first table” suggests that there may have been other tables, but the menus only seem to be describing what happens at the “first” table.) The default number of plates per dish in this case is 10.

In general, the default intent seems to have been to have one plate per 4 diners. The complication in this arithmetic is that sometimes this only works if you don’t include the host(s) and guest(s) of honor in the count of diners. In most cases, they do seem to have been included. It isn’t clear to me whether this represents two different styles of serving (one where the hosts/GoH’s may have been served something different that isn’t specified -- though this would seem a bit odd for the type of document we’re examining) or whether they hosts/GoH’s quantities simply weren’t included in the totals listed (though this would seem odd if the intent were to document quantities of food served).

After going through each menu in detail, I’ll synthesize the results into a generic serving template.

15?0

44 diners (1 host, 3 guests of honor, 40 “ordinary” guests); not counting the confection and collation courses, 30 dishes in 4 courses

10 plates for each dish (i.e., 4 diners per plate counting only “ordinary” guests) except:

• 40 marzipan biscuits


• both salads specified as “one per person”


• 20 plates of partridges


• 20 plates each of clotted cream and “clouds and wafers”

Items per plate range from 1-6 but there isn’t a clear focus around a “typical count” that matches the number of diners, though the plurality revolves around 40 -- the number of “ordinary guests”.

1524

78 diners (2 hosts, 2 guests of honor, 74 “ordinary” guests); not counting the confection and collation courses, 44 dishes in 6 courses

20 plates (i.e., 4 diners per plate) for each dish except:

• 37 plates of each salad


• 12 plates of crab (this is a “presentation” dish with a motto gilded on the back of each crab)

This time the diners per plate comes out neatly to 4 including the hosts and GoH’s with a couple servings to spare. The exception is the salads where the count matches one for every two ordinary guest. Items per plate range from 1-4 in most cases with 80 total items being typical. Odd exceptions are 25 pheasants in 20 plates, 30 capons in 20 plates.

1536

40 diners (1 host, 1 guest of honor, 38 “ordinary” guests); not counting the confection and collation courses, 36 dishes in 5 courses

10 plates  (i.e., 4 diners per plate) for each dish except:

• 32 each of salads


• 20 plates of turtledoves


• 30 cups hippocras

At 10 plates and 4 diners per plate, the hosts and GoH’s are covered in the serving count as well as the ordinary guests. The salads, on the other hand are insufficient for each ordinary guest to have their own and too many for them to be shared in pairs of diners. Foot items per plate range from 1-4 generally with a plurality having a total of 40 items, matching the total diner count. In addition to the odd number of salads, the 30 cups of hippocras don’t match any obvious diner grouping.

1537

55 diners 1 host, 3 guests of honor, 51 “ordinary” guests); not counting the confection and collation courses, 33 dishes in 5 courses

14 plates (i.e., 4 diners per plate) for each dish except:

• 32 each of salads

• 51 plates each of wafers and clotted cream

Food items per plate range from 1-4 generally, with 4 being the most common number for a total of 56 items. (This would appear to cover all diners, including host/GoH’s.) The most plentiful food items were fried oysters (25 per plate) and plain oysters (cooking method unspecified, 1000 total in 14 plates which comes to almost 20 per diner!) Note that once again the number of salads is too large to suggest they were intended as multi-diner servings, but too small for each diner to have their own. The very specific number of wafer and cream servings matches the “ordinary guests”.

1540

48 diners (1 host, 1 guest of honor, 46 “ordinary” guests); not counting the confection and collation courses, 31 dishes in 4 courses

12 plates (i.e., 4 diners per plate) for each dish except:

• 24 plates of each salad (i.e., one for every 2 diners)


• 46 [plates, presumably] of capon livers and sausages

The plate-count is sufficient to cover diners in all categories. Food items per plate range from 1-4 though in this menu the total count is not always given (e.g., “whole stuffed roasted kids in 12 plates” where we may presume one per plate but it’s not explicit).

1548

30 diners (1 host, 2 guests of honor, 27 “ordinary” guests); not counting the confection and collation courses, 34 dishes in 4 courses

We get a clue to a possibly uncounted category of diners from one of the non-food activities: “While they were eating the confections, my Consort sent two baskets with 27 packets of scented flowers, some real and some faux, one for the Most Illustrious Lord Duke, and one for the Most Illustrious Lord Prince, which their Lordships distributed among the dinner guests.” This reaffirms the notion of “ordinary guests” as being a key number and introduces for the first time the question of whether (in general) the host(s)’ wives should be included in the diner counts (even though never mentioned in the description).

7 plates (i.e., 4 diners per plate) for each dish except for:

• 16 plates each of both salads (note that this would be sufficient for 2 diners per serving even including host/GoH)


• 20 plates of (total of 400) oysters with oranges

Items per plate range from 1-4 with the majority involving a single larger item on each plate, though there are several items were 28 are specified. Exceptions to this pattern include 30 tomaselle (along with 28 chickens) on 7 plates, 35 small flaky flans in 7 plates.

Summary

The total number of guests ranges from 30 to 78. There is only a slight correlation between this number and the total number of dishes served or the number of courses, though there is a rule of thumb that the greater the number of courses, the greater the overall dish count. (Keep in mind that “number of courses” here includes the “pre-course” not just the numbered courses.)

• 4 courses: 30, 31, 34 dishes


• 5 courses: 33, 36 dishes


• 6 courses 44 dishes

The 6-course dinner also has the largest guest count, but this would seem to be a feature of elaborateness of the banquet, not that a greater number of distinct dishes was needed to provide a greater amount of food. (That is, this dinner featured a greater amount of food per person, not just a greater amount overall.)

If we may generalize by a majority rule: dishes are normally served in plates that serve 4 diners each. One consistent exception is the salads, where each salad (remember there are normally two) may be intended to serve either one or two diners. (In two menus, the salad count falls between these two and I have no idea what’s going on.)

Without getting to too detailed a level, here are some typical quantities of food per (4-person) plate:

Fowl

• Capon 1


• Duck 1


• Partridges 2-4


• Pheasant 1-2


• Peacock 1


• Pigeon 4


• Quail, thrush, turtledove 4

Quadruped

• Hare or rabbit 1


• Roast kid, lamb, or suckling pig 1


• Veal or unspecified loin 1


• Veal breast 1

Processed Meats

• Sausages (various types, some sliced) 1


• Small “meatball” types dishes such as tomaselle and polpette 4-6

Oysters

• Oysters, fried 20-25


• Oysters, unspecified 50+/-

Pies and Pastries

• Small pastries 4-10


• Large pies, tarts, tortes (various contents) 1

Confectionary and “Desserts”

• Confections 1 lb


• Marmalade boxes 2-4 (sometimes with different specified contents)


• Fruit (oranges, pears) 3-5


• Wafers 20+

(For previous posts in this series, see items tagged with 'messisbugo'.)

We now enter the home stretch by circling back to the “numbered courses”. To review: after the diners finish with the course that was on the table when they were seated (if I’m interpreting correctly), we enter a sequence of courses that in most of the menus are numbered “first, second, third, etc.” although there are exceptions to this labeling system. (For the 1537 menu where the courses start numbering from the “pre-course” I’m treating them as renumbered from 1 after the pre-course.)

Of the six Carnival menus, three have three numbered courses, two have four courses, and one has five courses. When the specific dishes are matched up across the various menus, it makes sense to discuss five groupings, though specific dish groups may be combined into a single course in some cases, and more rarely may be shifted in position in the meal from what appears to be the majority case. The general distribution of dish types and their appearance in the six menus looks something like this:

Course 1: Multiple fowl dishes, a liver dish, a quadruped dish, frequently a fresh fruit dish, and other dishes with no general pattern -- This appears as the First Course in all six menus.

Course 2: Multiple fowl dishes (in most cases), a roast of a young quadruped (veal, kid, lamb or suckling pig), a sauce, a flan or torte (in most cases), in a few menus there are other dishes with no general pattern -- This appears as the Second Course in all six menus. However one menu includes dishes in this course that more commonly appear in the Third and Fifth (that is, they’re displaced from the majority position).

Course 3: Oyster pies or fried oysters, olives, fresh grapes, pears and sometimes also apples in pies, a decorative dish in jelly or pastry, a dish focusing on nuts (in various forms) -- This appears as the Third Course in most of the menus, but the 1524 menu places most of this group of dishes in the Fourth Course and instead has a Third Course that recapitulates some of the Second Course with the addition of fish. (If I were relabeling the courses to match up conceptually, I’d call this recapitulation “Course 2B” and then identify the oyster pies through nuts as “Course 3”.)

Course 4: Wafers (often with “clouds”, whatever that might signify), in some cases cheese and a pasta dish, in some cases clotted cream, and in isolated cases other dishes with no general pattern -- These appear as the Fourth Course in three menus, in reduced form as part of the Third Course in two menus, and is entirely absent in the 1540 menu.

Course 5: Oysters, sliced oranges with pepper -- This is a separate Fifth Course in one menu, appears as part of the Fourth Course in two menus, and is entirely absent in two menus. In the 1548 menu, these dishes appear but as part of the Second Course.

So that’s the basic overall structure. But the specific dishes within those themes may differ, and there are some dish types that only occur in a single menu or perhaps two and so don’t seem to be part of an overall template. In looking at the courses in detail, my general format will be to match up dishes across the menus that seem to be variants of the same template slot, group them according to the general topics given above (with “miscellaneous” coming last), and then to discuss them in decreasing order of the number of menus that dish-group appears in. In some cases, if one or more menus seem to duplicate a template slot, I may discuss the duplicates along with the “main” grouping. In previous discussions, I’ve give the original text first, but in this group of discussions I’ll add it at the end.