I’m Master Cristoval, a Pelican Cook in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA).

A Laurel Cook does delightfully decorated, well researched dishes for about six people. A Pelican Cook can do something practical and economical for one hundred or more.

My first run as Feast Steward was in the Shire of Dark Skies in rural eastern Victoria, Australia, in 1984.

It was a group that grew out of a science-fiction club, and most of the membership was still at school. So the food had to be very cheap, the locals were happy to catch carp and rabbits, and someone’s mum had an excellent herb garden. We had to be creative, and were.

This was well before the internet, and medieval recipes were limited to photocopies from the two medieval cookbooks someone had in Sydney (12 hours away), Fabulous Feast and To The King’s Taste. There were odd recipes in the various SCA publications, and some stuff people “knew” was medieval, but that was it.

I was then living in Melbourne, which had a serious cooking school. I snuck into their library, found a few more books on historical cooking, and photocopied as many pages as I could afford. Copies of those sheets made their way all over Lochac (SCA Australia, then) and with my new dishes at SCA feasts the Crown gave me a Rose Leaf award for cooking, at the time the second-highest arts and sciences award after the Laurel.

Since then I have run a huge number of feasts, for Politarchopolis (SCA Canberra), Torlyon (Yass) and Okewaite (Goulburn). Mostly that was as event steward rather than feast steward, as my wife Mistress Alys Dietsch is better at running a kitchen than I am, and came to the SCA with commercial kitchen and catering experience.

I always assisted with preparation and suggested dishes. I was pretty good about tracking which dishes worked, and digging up the special recipe we did three years ago.

In recent years, I’ve been doing more of the kitchen work directly. This blog chronicles some of these adventures. Hopefully these pages will assist some of those aspiring to be (Pelican) SCA cooks themselves.