NEW BIG HAIRY LEARNING CURVE ALERT!  I've volunteered to be feastcrat/head cook for Glynn Rhe's combined A&S/fighting event, Convivium Collegialis/Wine List, held next February.

As faithful readers of this blog will guess, I've had a Big Idea about how to organize my effort planning.

Imagine that you come into the event, and somebody has a camp kitchen set up, with several dishes cooking.  You can stand around and take perhaps a couple of hour-long classes (on the tools and the recipes) and get copies of the recipes that are being cooked.  At the end of the day, everybody sits down to feast, and through the magic of hidden modern equipment and precooking, fifty people get to eat what they've been smelling all day.  Or maybe eighty.  Haven't decided yet.

This illusion of the loaves-and-fishes variety has been growing out of the interest that the Viking and I have in period cooking equipment, and our desire to cook in camp using techniques that are period, for an integrated experience.

(Although it was fun to run around giving away catfish at Gulf Wars, it would have been cooler if the pot hadn't been stainless steel.)

So right now I'm collecting more information about cooking pots, about various cuisines that used them, and I am coveting this book:

Whose author apparently has quite the collection, with guides to use, sources to buy, and "traditional recipes".  (Though any recipe that purports to be "older than the Lost Continent" shouldn't have tomato paste in it, right?  Just checking.)  

Next step after laying my hands on this one, is to hunt up the archeology and try to corrolate pot types.  I have a guess as to which area/time I'm going to land on, but I need more data!