Doing my usual shilly-shallying about my entries. Is the casting too modern? (See next post.) Should I cook instead?
What I would cook: roasted small birds and flatbread, based on the Bayeux tapestry:
Possibly flatbreads cooked on a grill or griddle
Meat chunks and small birds on spits on some sort of firepit
I've experimented with cooking flatbreads already. Ann Hagen has some good information on bread and its preparation. There's a reference to kneading dough, although I have to wonder if the high-moisture "mix and let sit" method is more practical for cooking for literally an army. I could do both, not hard.
I looked up 'roast chicken over campfire' to see about that. Everyone said, cut holes through the spit and use a skewer to secure the meat. Made sense, but I didn't see it in the picture above. But then I looked at the other picture of bird-on-a-stick in the tapestry:
Skewers!
Skewers, right through the legs!
The other thing that bothered me was that the cooking image shows the skewers nearly vertical, not horizontal like I'm used to seeing spits. But - beer can chicken! People do roast chickens vertically. Some people think it's a better way to do it. Certainly seems sensible, logistically - put your meat on your skewers, stick them in the ground in front of the fire. No needing to find dozens of Y-shaped branches and set up giant rotisseries for the camp. Makes serving easier (as shown), lets you pull the done ones when they're done, and let the others keep cooking.
I'm looking into possible poultry now. I'm thinking game birds - quail, partridge, squab. Although it's not impossible (or even unlikely) that invading Normans could have knocked over someone's henhouse. If the birds are the same scale as the hand in the image above, quail might be too small. (But they'd cook quickly and be adorable!)
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