Like every beginning feast steward, I ran a feast with four courses. Nobody eats anything after the second, and the feast runs for too long. These days, I will only have one main course, and another with a few delicacies in small pieces, or a dessert course; not particularly historical, but people will wait for it.

We’re a country group, with older demographics, so we normally serve the first course at 6.30 or 7, and the second at about 8.30. If you serve food after 9.30pm, nobody will eat it.

You should set up a spreadsheet for the event, listing the dishes and major ingredients, the gear you need to cook them, and the dishes you’ll serve them in. Compare this to your cooking facilities and bench space! What can be prepared beforehand, and what can be served cold? Do you have six dishes in the oven at the same time?

I generally plan on 200g of meat per person.  I’ll always have at least three meat dishes. The bones don’t count, and chicken is cheap enough that you can be generous.

Right now (2022), pork and chicken are cheap.  Beef and lamb are expensive, except as mince. The reverse was true once, within my SCA memory.

Fancy meats like partridge and venison are really out of the question, except maybe for a Fine Food feast where you can charge more and use these meats in small quantities. Minced venison pasties are kinda cheating and not worth bothering in my experience (Alys disagrees).

You want at least as much non-meat as meat.  The practicalities of serving means you tend to have more than that, and that some vegies will come back to the kitchen at the end.

When Alys is chief cook, she’ll go to a lot of effort to produce multiple versions of dishes to cater for different allergies. I’m not so patient, so I generally rely on having a wide range of dishes so everybody should be able to find things they like.