#strawberry raid

I teach a class at Strawberry Raid (and indeed, have taught it at other camping events) most years. It's about how to cook a meal in a camp kitchen, including lighting the fire, managing the fire, selecting a recipe from a text, interpreting it within the limits of what ingredients you can buy and what you have on hand, and the process of cooking it. Everyone who's taking the class gets to do some of the work, whether that's chopping wood, chopping vegetables, carrying water, or stirring the pots.

It takes, of course, as long as it takes to cook the dish - usually around three hours. Several people noted this year that they'd never attended a class like it. Some of that was because they were coming from kingdoms where dry conditions mean that open flames aren't allowed at camping events, but the overall process of just involving people in the cooking was also new.

This is fascinating to me. I know that I could do theory classes in cookery, but I can't see them being much use. I reserve that for things like interpreting cooking methods from text and archaeological remnants, say. Cooking, like almost any other craft, is best taught by doing. Some of that is coming from my being brought up in a workshop, with my father teaching me and my brothers and all the various apprentices he had how to do things by... doing the things.

I suppose the one thing that turns just doing the cooking into a class is narrating what you're doing. This comes pretty naturally to me; getting me to shut up about cooking can be hard sometimes. My narration is very much stream-of-consciousness; it's going to include observations about how the fire is going, what kind of wood works best, what would work better if we had it, the ingredients and their quality, where I got them, substitutions I'm making on the fly, whether the dish needs salt, how very few Arabic recipes actually include salt, and so on and so forth.

People seem to enjoy it. Not everyone can hang around for the full three hours, but I do try to make sure that everyone who's there gets to eat the dish at the end of cooking too. It's a slow food sort of thing, by its very nature, and the process of hanging around in a kitchen tent and just plain talking about food makes it feel comfortable, from my point of view.

For the Laurel Sponsored Prize Display at Cudgel Wars last year, I wrote a set of triads. For the same at Strawberry Raid this year, I wrote a sestina. Sestinas are a slight step away from my usual sonnets, but still use iambic pentameter (although my metre isn't strong in any case). I find them to be an excellent form for exploring a concept - in this case, the feeling that the campsite changes shape, somehow, as it gets dark. This one is specific to the site at Sigginstown, with its rooks and herons, but I've felt the same about campsites elsewhere too.

The sestina is a medieval form, originating in Old Occitan in the 12th Century. The first English sestinas occur quite late, not until 1579, and it didn't really take off as a form in English until the late 19th century. Obviously, I'm writing in English here, as I am for almost all my poetry.

The sestina doesn't use rhymes, but instead has repeated end words. If the lines of the first six-line stanza end in words 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, then the second stanza's lines end in 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, and 3. This continues for six stanzas and then ends with a three-line stanza in which all six words occur, two per line. So:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, 3 3, 6, 4, 1, 2, 5 5, 3, 2, 6, 1, 4 4, 5, 1, 3, 6, 2 2, 4, 6, 5, 3, 1 (6, 2) (1, 4) (5, 3)

I haven't settled on a good name for this one yet, so it's just: Strawberry Raid Sestina

This isn't so much an event report as an index post, from which I can link more posts as I make them. You can expect posts on:

Thoughts on Camp Coordination

Teaching Cooking by Doing Cooking

The Medieval Poetic Forms Project

Sestinas, with one I wrote at the event

Being Present at Events

International Visitors

How To Grow An Annual Event

(Not even slightly in that order, and probably with some combinations)

(My kitchen/dining setup at night; photo by Princess Gwerful an Filí)

Overall, Strawberry Raid V went very well; we had 150 people booked, and I think only about five people couldn't make it, plus we had a few last-minute arrivals, so the numbers were pretty solid. This makes it one of the bigger events in the Principality at the moment.

We had some initial stresses I could have done without, wherein the guy who was supposed to mow the fields down from somewhat-more-than-ankle-height to slightly-longer-than-the-average-lawn did not mow before the setup weekend, did not mow the following Monday or Tuesday, and turned up to do so only once we had given up on him and started setting up tents and shelters. At that point he mowed semi-randomly around the already-in-place structures, and left some clear areas un-mown for reasons known only to himself. I would have been far happier had we been able to get more setup done in advance.

There were no disasters over camp layout, which was my job, ably assisted by Lord Farraige. Because of the mowing stuff, we didn't get the fencing posts and rope barriers in place before people arrived, so the layout was a little more chaotic than I would have liked. Specific household encampments were nice and tight - House of Green, Tír Riamh, Camp Waif & Stray, and the Pont Alarch/Flintheath camp - but there was a bit more sprawl among individual tents than I was keen on. Next year, I'll be emphasising "beside the blue tent, with your ropes overlapping as much as possible", and the like. On the current field, we can probably accommodate 70-80 tents. My own food plan, feeding about 20 people including the Coronet and the event's Special Trainer, went pretty well. We had four people cooking evening meals, all plausibly medieval, and everyone else contributed to breakfasts and lunches. I think next year I might do some more breakfasts myself; I am invariably awake by that time anyway because of the early daylight (and this year, the need to out a small dog). The limiting factor on how many people I can feed is now the size of the firebox, rather than the number of cooking pots; the acquisition of a big copper-alloy cauldron during the year made the difference. A second cooking surface - a large or small brazier - would scale things up more, but at an organisational level, I don't think I actually want to.

The campground needs to have a public area with some facilities: shelter, a firebox, some seating, and possibly a table. Otherwise people gravitate toward my kitchen/dining area in the evening, which I don't mind at all in the event, but which usually leaves a certain amount of cleaning up to be done in the morning. We had a shelter this year, but didn't get as far as the rest. Weather on the Monday made it more useful to start taking down on Sunday evening, and we got all the canvas down before the rain started, which was a great mercy. It did make for some intense work on Sunday, followed by more of it on Monday in order to clear the site, and as of time of writing on Wednesday evening, my body has not yet forgiven me.

In contrast to the vile weather we had for most of the first Strawberry Raid, in 2022, this year's weather was wall to wall sunshine, for the most part, but with wind. My kitchen tent (a modern bolt-together gazebo) worked fine, since it has a vent in the roof that prevents it from being a sail or a balloon, and for the first three days of the event, I managed to keep pretty much all modern stuff out of it, at least during the hours of daylight.

(On the fourth day, the heat and exposure to the vile daystar caught up, and I spent most of it asleep. Sadly, this meant I didn't get to try out my new cookware.)

I taught a class on the Friday afternoon, in basic camp kitchen management. I’ve taught this before; it starts with “here is how to light a fire”, and goes on to talk through the kitchen setup, interpreting a recipe from al-Warraq, and the cooking of that meal. Participants eat the meal at the end along with whoever else we’re cooking for at that camp. It’s always an interesting class to teach, and it’s always different, because people bring such diverse prior experiences and understandings. It also challenges my own assumptions as to what’s common knowledge. Things such as tree identification (for kindling), familiarity with how matches work, the fact that fire tends to burn upward, and identification of herbs and spices have all been assumptions I've had to work on.

I tend to use one specific recipe for this class; the first mulahwajah from al-Warraq. It's a simple dish: meat, onions, leeks, oil, some spices, but it almost always comes out well. I did two versions, one with celery instead of onions, although the celery version was not as successful - it seems like pepper and celery interact oddly, and the dish was much pepperier than intended as a result. Or possibly there was more pepper in it, but I'm fairly sure the division was even.

Dame Lissette contributed a butcher's block/table to the kitchen, and it was immensely useful. Having more or less sorted out the storage issues I had last year - by acquiring dozens of period-oid jars and containers and baskets in the meantime - I'm now looking at some flat-pack furniture, and some alterations to the gazebo to, over time, completely replace it with more medieval materials.