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:
“The office of the prince and that of the writer are defined and assigned as follows: the nobleman gives rank to the written work, the writer provides food for the prince.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;” and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Thought product and food product are to me
Nothing compared to the producing of them.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)