Vigil Cooking

A few weeks ago, I took on a last minute project of cooking period food for Fiamma the Unquenchable’s well-deserved Vigil. She got became a Laurel due to her incredible passion for period cooking, and she deserved to have a full period spread at her Vigil, but this was the first time I had taken on such a large task and with her right there able to critique it! I decided to not go with everything having period recipes, due to lack of time, but at least limit it to things that could exist or that I found similar recipes for but had to make an appetizer version of. Here is what I came up with as a plan. Unfortunately, I don’t believe anybody took any pictures of the food, so that is lost to history, but, I did learn a few things!

My favorite dishes were the mini meat pies, which I made a couple different versions with the help of a couple friends of mine due to the labor intensive nature of making mini-muffin size pies. These were based on this recipe, so I ended up making pork, pea, and currant based version and a chicken, cheese, wine, and yellow raisin version. I used different porportions than the recipe called for to make sure that each tiny pie got a bit of every flavor. One thing learned for next time: cut up the raisins/currants before putting in the filling because they oddly resemble eyeballs when cooked, according to my husband.

The other thing that went really well were the fig, date, and goat cheese tarts that I made roughly based on this recipe. For both the pies and tarts, I cheated and used store bought pie crust, but that was mainly because I was on a time / labor crunch. The tarts were just circles of dough with a little bit of the filling put in the middle, fold the dough in half and pinch along the seam several times to make them stay closed and look pretty. The one thing I should have done with them and didn’t was poke holes in them so they would stay closed, but that’s my lack of baking experience showing!

I would like to do a small demo for the tarts at least this coming weekend at a private household event, just because I know of at least one person interested in learning that particular recipe. I will attempt to take pictures this time though!

Note: Here is an article I may want to read before the next time I do something this drastic!

*This was initially published on a different blog and moved here 10/2/25