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 Part the Eighth Portioning and Budgeting The menu is set, the timings in the kitchen are sorted, so it's time to get serious about portions and the budget. Portioning and budgeting go hand in hand; balancing the overall quantities with the quantities of the expensive items is needed to make sure that everyone gets fed and that the budget is not exceeded. I've not planned for any truly expensive ingredients - proteins are usually the highest ticket items, and chicken, pork, and eggs are all relatively inexpensive, so I should have some room to work. For budgeting, I prefer to work on a per person basis and scale up. This means that I can get the amount of money I have per head, plan per head, and not worry about the actual number of people I'm feeding until later in the process. This means that I also plan on portioning per person rather than per table or some other basis. This is where a spreadsheet comes in handy. (For actual plating and service, I like tables of eight ...) I, like most feast cooks I know, tend to make too much food. I'm better at it now, but it's still a thing. There's also a tension between how much people will actually eat, and what my friend Morrigan calls 'the look good factor' - does it look like enough to eat. What often trips people up when planning portioning is that you need to provide enough food in the meal, not per course. That is to say, if you have a three course meal, and you portion as if each course was a meal, then you'll have three times as much food as you need. This can be hard to wrap your head around when you are looking at a dish and thinking to yourself, 'that's not much food at all.' And that particular dish may not be. In this feast, however, I'm rolling out twelve dishes, so ... The other budgeting guideline that I tend to observe is to serve the less expensive food first, in larger portions, with the more expensive to follow in smaller portions. This is why if you look at my historical menus, chicken is often the first protein to go out. What are appropriate amounts to serve is a tricky question. For the whole meal, I tend to think that a couple hundred grams of protein is about right, with maybe twice that in veg and starches. That's something like four times the recommend daily amount of protein for most people - the NHS dietary recommendation is something like 50 grams/day for adults. Their recommendation is also for roughly 250-300 gm of carbs, and maybe 75 gm of fat. This would be a total of, at the top end, maybe 400-450 gm total, roughly 1 lb in old money. But this is a feast, right? My target figures are more like 700 gm per person. Those numbers are good to keep in mind as a ballpark figure, though. In this feast, the first protein to go out is, yes, chicken. I like leg quarters for feasts, and simply allow one per person. That's roughly 300 gm per person, but a good chunk of that is bone. The last protein to go out is pork, and I think that by that point, an allowance of 60 gm/portion. To be honest, since I'll be serving in tables of 8, I'll probably just round up slightly and aim for half a kilo per table, but for the budget I'll use 60 gm. Cheese is also expensive, but I need it for the tart, again about 60gm. I'll want one egg per person for the sawgeat, and another 1/2 per person for the cheese tart. Moving on to veg, pulses, and starches. I start by aiming for roughly 60 gm of each per dish. That's 60 gm each of chickpeas, spinach, bulgar wheat (for frumente), turnips (for rapes in potage), rice (for rissoles), and cheese for the tart. 30 gm each of leeks and onions (for blaunche porree), and of apples for rissoles. 15 gm for dates. That's another 465 gm, and it will look larger since there is water in the soups, and the rice and bulgar will bulk out a lot as they cook. For the salat, I'll aim for one large head of greens per table. Maybe a third of that in greens for the cheese tart. For pears, 1/4 per person. That's a rough cut. Starting from there, I can round up and add extra quantities for 'the look good factor.' Which is to say, it has to look like enough food, even if that means there's really too much. As an aside, you can work around that if you have servers actually putting individual portions on feasters' plates, since the arrangement on the serving dish is hidden. But I digress. On average, assuming my budget allows for it, I'll tack on another 20-50% for most of the dishes. In this case, not leg quarters since that's already portioned, but most of the other stuff will get upgraded at least a bit. By portioning things out individually like this, I can just plug everything into a spreadsheet along with unit costs, and work out how much of the various items I need and the rough total cost. From there I can build the actual shopping list. Next ... the aftermath! PS - apologies if this sounds a little rushed. It is, I got so caught up in doing the feast, I forgot to write this up in a timely manner.

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