Food
Although intended to imitate a meal that might have been served during the Middle Ages, the food at a madrigal dinner is often regional and will vary from show to show. Courses usually include a wassail or drinks course, salad, a main course and dessert. Although the Boar's Head Carol is the most popular madrigal song to announce the main course, the most popular meat for the main course is chicken, often specifically Cornish game hen.
During the song which accompanies each course, a symbolic object may be carried to the kings throne by two or more ceremonial guards. A boar's head is the universal symbol of the main course. However, since the head is not actually part of the meal and will be used for many years, most madrigal dinners use an imperishable head. Sometimes this is the head of a real boar, pig, or javelina, preserved by taxidermy and sometimes it is a replica, made from papier-mâché or plaster. The Boar's Head Carol equates the presentation of the head with the presence of Christ in the festivities.
Read more about this topic: Madrigal Dinner
Famous quotes containing the word food:
“To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.”
—Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)
“To give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence, a credit system in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of liquidation. We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is such a thing as food and such a thing as poison. But the damage done by those who pass off poison as food is far less than that done by those who generation after generation convince people that food is poison.”
—Paul Goodman (1911–1972)