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All’s Faire

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All the lusty merriment of Elizabethan England . . . with none of the pestilence and starvation!

That’s not the official motto of the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, weekends at the Glen Helen Regional Park in Devore through June 16, but it’s an accurate description nonetheless. And if you were thinking that starvation may actually be a better idea than English cuisine, you might have thought differently had you been at the faire’s annual Elizabethan Cooking Competition on Saturday.

Cooks participated in each of four categories: meat dishes and stews; vegetables and “sallets”; sweets, pastries and “savories”; and illusion foods. The only requirements were that recipes be derived from 16th century England (or its contemporary trading partners) and that contestants appear in costume.

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Foods ranged from simple gingerbread to a stuffed chicken covered with potter’s clay, formed in the shape of a hen and baked with an egg that the chicken “laid” upon presentation. Costumes ran the gamut from simple peasant garb to finer, more noble apparel, with corsets being the common thread: No, none of the contestants was male.

Competitors researched their dishes extensively to ensure that presentations and flavors were as authentic as possible. And as you might expect, the illusion foods, which drew on the tradition of delicacies being offered in the guise of other food items, were the most interesting.

The winning entry was Louise Jurgens’ Golden Apples of Meat, made of sweet potatoes wrapped in seasoned ground sirloin and short dough. The “fruit” was then molded into the proper shape, brushed with butter and saffron for color and baked. On the presentation table, it looked just like a bowl of golden delicious apples. Jurgens, whose other entries included a spiced fruit-and-salmon tart and Cornish hens with apricots and pine nuts, was also the grand prize winner.

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Outside the contest, the foods included both the traditional English (bangers and pasties, among others) and the more continental (Greek and Italian, for instance), all served up by the dozens of faire staff decked out in their period-faithful outfits and accents. And as you received your food from one of these people--many of whom volunteer for the whole nine-weekend run--or watched them carouse, you almost had to wonder how they get along during the week. Perhaps the Bard said it best. “ ‘Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.”

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