Conflux Banquet 2008
Conflux is on and I’m not round. What do we do? Well, I was prepared for this. Starting from today, there’s a series of pre-posted blogposts about the banquet. All the background you ever wanted. The last post in the series will be the cocktail recipes, so hang in there. One a day until we’re done. I’ll be back at my desk in a few days, so ask all the questions you like!!
How I developed the menu. First, I read a lot. I read cookbooks and menus and guides to manners and table setting. The decade of the banquet was a terrific decade for this sort of publication. What I loved in particular were the technical manuals for setting up restaurants and how to cost meals and what sort of food was suitable for what sort of catering service. So many instructional manuals. So much good stuff. So, I read thousands of pages.
Thanks some timely and good advice from the “The Old Foodie” I read a lot of menus, too. The example menus from books were the ones I used for the structure of the banquet, and the printed menus in collections were my formatting guide. Garamond was my font of choice, because it appeared in more than one elegant dinner menu of the day.
I put together a dream-list of recipes for testing. Things that fitted the season and the region and were not impossibly expensive (I had to revise the impossibly expensive later on – beef and lamb are dearer than turkey these days – the relative prices of meat have changed significantly over the last few decades in Australia). Then the testing began, and was reported here.
When the dream list of great recipes was down to a reasonable number, Karen (the Conflux chair) and I had our first meeting with the chef. We had the table settings and service background sorted, so that staffing issues could be discussed and we had a really good diagram for table settings. I love the instructional nature of a class of cookbooks from that period – table setting wasn’t an issue this year at all because of the nature of US culture.
Leave a Reply