Guild of Cookery

Our next feast will be on Monday, August 14th! We will be serving the Feast of Highgarden, one of our favorite summertime feasts. This will be a nine-course feast and will include pears poached in wine, hams baked with honey, and trenchers filled with venison stew! Tickets will go on sale tomorrow (8/3) at noon. Dinner is Coming!

Our Feast of King's Landing on Monday, July 17th is officially SOLD OUT!

We did some recipe testing today for our upcoming Roman Feast. We tested three recipes: 1) Shrimp Isicia (shrimp quenelles) in a hydrogarum sauce. These were pretty good, with a light firmness and fresh seafood flavor. The hydrogarum (a type of broth made with garum [a type of fish sauce], water, peppercorns, and celery leaves) was an unexpected success with a beautiful depth of flavor similar to a dashi broth. 2) Beef Isicia (fancy meatballs) with pinenuts served with oenoga...rum. Oenogarum is like a vinaigrette but with wine, passum (a sweet, fortified wine,) garum, and olive oil. This dish was oookaaay, but not really a standout. The sauce just doesn't stand up to the assertive flavor of the isicia. There is a different sauce a little later in the chapter which looks promising. We will try that next week. 3) Asparagus Patina (asparagus custard.) This dish is conceptually very interesting. We used a modern translation of the original recipe as a base to test ratios and techniques. The results were a mixed bag. The custard is made with asparagus steeped in wine, garum, passum, olive oil, and eggs. It is then baked. The texture was unbelievable! It was so silky and smooth and was visually quite beautiful. The flavor however left MUCH to be desired. The raw wine flavor mixed with the raw asparagus flavor made an unpalatably bitter herbaciousness. This dish has potential but we will have to reassess our techniques. Perhaps blanching the asparagus ahead and boiling down the wine will result in a better dish. This is why we do recipe testing so far in advance of our dinners!

Today we had a meeting to plan our next menu. We will be exploring the cuisine of Imperial Rome just in time for the Ides of March! The date, menu, and ticketing info will be coming soon.