Dine We Must

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of serving as sous chef/research assistant for the Fort's second annual "Dine We Must" gala dinner. The main courses were catered, but our intrepid group of volunteers once again put on a full line-up of period desserts prepared in the historic kitchen.

Ready for Service: boiled puddings, baked puddings, cakes & every good thing.

This year's bill of fare included boiled lemon pudding with a stiff sauce, spotted dick with brown sugar sauce, chocolate pudding, baked cherry pudding with cherry sauce, charlotte aux pommes, and cream cakes. 

This year we had a team of five: Quin (cook), me (assistant), E. (bake oven/summer kitchen), M. (kitchen maid), and A. (scullery maid). Over eight hours we prepared six different dessert recipes and three sauces, using a wood-burning stove, clay bake oven, and open fires; by 8pm we'd plated 10 dishes and served three-dozen diners.  

My main accomplishment for the evening was finding source citations for all the ingredients. Serving the public has a very stringent set of ingredient restrictions (and this is the only event were we do more than small samples) so finding an array of dishes with different flavor profiles that use the different available cooking surfaces, meet the health department requirements, and aren't a repeat of the previous year is quite the puzzle. This year, I was also able to document all of the ingredients to our location and mid-1850s time period (including chocolate, lemon juice, and cherries). Head-cook Quin not only did the bulk of the menu-planning, but also successfully made choux paste on a wood-burning stove.