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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Food for Musicians I've volunteered to run the kitchen for another event - this one is a music focussed one which will happen in Sep. 2024. The event sounds like it will be similar to one that I cooked for a few times a decade or so ago in the East Kingdom, called Musicians' Day. It was unusual for a State-side event in that it ran from Friday night to Sunday morning with on-site lodging. This is, of course, pretty standard for events in Drachenwald, but was vanishingly rare in the East at the time. (And probably still is.) The upcoming event, Baht 'at Bardic, will be about the same size as Musicians' Day, around thirty people. That is just about my favourite number to cook for, since it's small enough that you can experiment with some more labour intensive dishes that are hard to do for eight or a hundred and fifty. Since I'm going to be doing nothing but running the kitchen, I can indulge myself a bit and go for at least notionally medieval food for all the meals - including breakfast! I will, of course, provide for coffee and tea, since I value my life and sanity, but will provide some medieval alternatives to some of the usual breakfast foods, even if they wouldn't have been breakfast foods in the medieval period. (What medieval breakfast would have been is a whole separate conversation.) Many years ago, April 2000 I believe, I played around with a recipe for Votte lombarde for a shire meeting, and it seems like a good time to have another go at it. I also wanted to do Sawgeat again, in a more traditional way than what I did at Yule Ball last year. The recipes are: [7. Votte lombarde] Pour faire une votte lombarde: prenes oes frais, fin fromage fondant, gratte ou hachie menu ou par dez quarez, cresme douce et vin, canelle et chucquere; batez tout ensamble; puis ayez bure fres fondu chault, mettez dedans en retournant dilligamment qu'il n'arde.('The Vivendier', ed. Terence Scully) Scully's translation is: "To make a Votte Lombarde. Get fresh eggs, fine runny cheese, grated or chopped finely or cut into cubes, with fresh cream and wine, cinnamon and sugar; beat everything together. Then get hot melted fresh butter and put this in it, stirring attentively so it doesn't burn." and: Sawgeat Sawgeat. Take sawge; grynde it and temper it vp with ayren. Take a sausege & kerf hym to gobetes, and cast in a possynet, and do þerwiþ grece & frye it. Whan it is fryed ynowȝ, cast þerto sawge with ayren; make it not to harde. Cast þerto powdour douce & messe it forth. If it be in ymbre day, take sauge, buttur, & ayren, and lat it stonde wel by þe sauge, & serue it forth. ('Curye on Inglysch,' IV:169, Hieatt and Butler) We had our local Flintmoot aka Super Shire Meeting, and for the past few months I've been cooking with the kids in the kitchen at the village hall. (Which as an aside, has been great!) I thought we could take the recipes for a test run and try a few variations to see what we could come up with. In advance, I made some fresh, unsalted cheese for the 'fin fromage fondant'. I left it unsalted, since I wanted a sweet flavour profile for it, rather than the more savoury one I did a couple of decades ago. I also made a batch of sausage seasoned with ginger and sage, which I think is a good mix for a breakfasty sort of sausage. I used quite a bit of sage, since the sawgeat should be pretty sagey. On the day, we made several small batches of both recipes - rather my crew of mostly pre-teen cooks did while I mostly watched. The sawgeat was pretty straightforward. I hadn't put the sausage in casings, so we simply fried up some sausage, and then added eggs and scrambled them. This isn't quite what the recipe calls for, since I added the sage to the sausage rather than the eggs, but it worked a treat. A sprinkle of sugar and cinnamon, my usual poudre douce mix, brought out the flavour nicely. I'll leave that on the side at the event, though. The votte took a bit more tweaking. I skipped the wine completely, both since I was cooking with kids, but even for the event, leaving it out will make it accessible to more people. Our first few tries were not sweet enough so we kept adding sugar in subsequent tests until we got something we liked. It can be easy to overdo the cinnamon, so we'll have to keep an eye on that. Both worked out just fine, though, and will make lovely breakfast dishes on Saturday. Since there aren't that many people, the hassle of scrambling eggs won't be overwhelming. So two egg dishes, one vegetarian. A good place to start!

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