Food History

Recipe testing is the name of the game right now. My SF convention may not be until October, but there are a dozen of us working madly on the menu for the banquet right now.

I’m still waiting for results on canapés, but I’m not too worried about them because they’re not really very complicated and I can rustle them up myself at the last minute if everything else goes wrong. I know the dish that goes after them and I know the exact flavour mix they need to achieve, and most of the recipes are surprisingly familiar. This means I won’t start worrying about canapés until everything else is sorted.

The soup is not sorted. The soup, in fact, is the gaping hole in the menu. We have one possible fallback recipe, but it’s complicated and took an experienced cook two attempts to sort it out. All the other soups so far, though, are just not good. I need to find out why, so I’ve asked all the soup testers if they would mind brining their tests a little forward. I need to find out if it’s the nature of the soups or if it’s the nature of the ones that were tested early on. One of them was the nature of ingredients in Australia, and all it needed was a bit of constructive thought about how to achieve a basic flavour. I’m, hoping the others will be that straightforward, but right now I don’t know, and right now I’m worried.

The main course still has to be selected, but it’s between good and better. I would still like at least one more vegetarian option before I make my final selections, but we’re in a good position even if nothing else comes through.

I’ve looked at sorbet recipes and decided that they only need testing if we’ve someone who yearns and longs to make sorbets. The main decision is flavour (sorbet recipes all look a bit the same – at least the ones I found), and that entirely depends on what comes before and what comes after.

We have two lovely dessert recipes that can’t go on the menu because they just don’t fit: one is my coffee custard and another is an amazing frozen dessert with glacé fruit. The coffee is too strong for the icecream and the frozen dessert is too icecreamy to contrast with the icecream. My latest dessert report (arrived a few minutes ago) is for a rather fancy stuffed apple. It looks quite possible, and rather elegant. The tester who produced it also came up trumps last year with the beef sirloin, so I’m beginning to wonder if the good recipes gravitate towards Stuart naturally.

To make up for the complications with the dessert, our icecream tester has done everyone proud. She has found the perfect French Neapolitan. I won’t tell you about it now, except that it is subtle and delicious and perfect for where it fits into the meal.

And that’s where we’re at. Very close to a solid draft of the menu. There’s still quite a bit of work before the final menu, but (except for the soup) life feels less insecure than it did a few weeks ago. When the menu is finalized (not until may or later) I shall give you one of the yummy but excluded recipes, as a little celebration.