I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on t he PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Feast Planning During Plague Years In December of 2021, during a lull between spikes in infection rates, our local group, the Shire of Flintheath, was able to have something resembling our traditional Yule Ball. It was not particularly large, around eighty people, we required negative tests from attendees and masks indoors, and did our best to ensure social distancing. This meant that the feast, in particular, looked very different than it did in the Before Times. Gone were the long tables and crowded halls. Instead we spread out across a much larger area, and arranged tables for smaller groups, allowing diners to eat with those in their bubble. It worked remarkably well. Optimistically, we are hoping to do it again next year, and my wife has volunteered to steward, and I have volunteered to do the feast. So I have begun the planning. The Concept My first thought was simply to do recipes from Chiquart's Du Fait de Cuisine, because I'm rereading it after having purchased the lovely new edition. That's not much of a theme or a concept, though. I rather quickly moved on to the more interesting idea of the humors. This is appealing since it can be tied to a theme for the event in general. It also appeals to my sense of humour, since I can play around with humoral theory in the menu planning. I like the idea of presenting a menu which purports to help people balance their humors. I try to always give recipes and ingredient lists early in the process, and put printed copies on the tables. This is intended both to help those with dietary concerns to make intelligent choices about which dishes they can safely eat, and to give some insight into the medieval recipes themselves. I intend to simply add to that information about the humoral qualities of the foods. Because I think it is interesting, and kind of funny. First Steps There are four humors: blood, black and yellow bile, and phlegm. These lead to four corresponding temperaments: sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic. Each is related to a combination of two sets of opposed characteristics. Blood is hot and moist, black bile is cold and dry, yellow bile is hot and dry, and phlegm is cold and moist. To correct an excess of one humor, one can eat food which has opposed qualities. So if one is feeling extra choleric, caused (obviously) by an excess of yellow bile, one can eat cold and moist foods to restore the balance. This means I'll need to work in sets of four, since I'll want to offer food to correct each of the four possible imbalances. I also don't like to go overboard on either the total number of dishes, or the number of dishes per course. Twelve is good for the total number of dishes. I first thought that perhaps I would do four courses, one per humor. Something along of the lines of having a first course which was designed for the sanguine, second for the melancholic, and so on. That would mean only three dishes per course, and that felt a little restrictive, so I think that instead, I will aim for three courses, and one dish in each course for each humor. I will, naturally, be pretty sloppy about what constitutes a 'dish' and exactly how many there will be. However, that seems like a pretty good starting point. I will also aim for sufficient variety in each course to please most palates, as well as to provide enough food overall to satisfy those with a couple of common dietary restrictions: vegetarians and those with gluten issues. One course will feature pork, because I like pork. One course will feature chicken, because I like chicken. (And both chicken and pork are relatively inexpensive proteins.) One course will be either vegetarian, or have some fish, because I like vegetables and fish - although fish at feasts can be tricky to pull off. Pork, according to the Tacuinum of Liege, is warm and moist in the first degree. Roasted meat, in general, is dry. Roosters are already warm and dry, say the tacuina of Paris and Casanatense, to the second degree. Chickens are probably less so, but still warm and dry. So each is appropriate for a different temperament, unless their nature is changed by cooking - eg the roasting I mentioned. Fresh fish, unsurprisingly, are cold and moist ... So the general outline of the meal is in place. Next, a trawl through some cookbooks for recipes. As an experiment, I'm linking to a Diaspora posting for comments and such. Comment thread on PlusPora

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