Practice...

Part of this project requires a certain amount of practice

I have been practicing pastry and jelly though have only attempted one soused brawn, of course, I don't know that I shall being having a winter meal or not. Season would be of great importance. Regardless, practice does not go to waste, so am considering picking up a few more pig heads in order to practice de-boning them without mangling the face. Should I end up doing a winter feast, I would very much love to display a beautiful boar's head that didn't take me all day just to get it off the bones.

This, I find, is one of those great difficult things with learning to prepare food somewhat differently than most of us do now. This being the fact that we are somewhat unprepared and can not always reproduce things easily on a larger scale. The other issue is finding enough people to staff a kitchen who can work on their own. Being pretty much separated from the opportunity to practice and learn with other cooks that may be able to, or wish to, work with me on such a project, creates challenges from the beginning! This prematurely takes me from head cook to acting as master cook, only I am left to try and master my art on my own and separated from much of the SCA community.

So practice I must, and even more so. Of course, the reward is knowledge and that's far more than just being able to pull off this project. I even considered writing about it all but in a not so modern, or SCA, typical style but also re-creating a contemporary time piece

seeing if I can find a snapshot I took of a cover I dreamed up (about a year old, I think, so may tweak it further, dunno)

obviously I could not fit the whole cover in when I took the snapshot

it sounds a bit grand and pompous, but it was just how things were written, it would be wrong to inject modesty I think in this case...