Serve it Forth!

Serve it Forth! is the Durham University Treasure Trap catering collective, dedicated to providing authentic medieval food for banquets and society events. It follows in a long tradition of medieval cooking from such Treasure Trap worthies as the Banqueting Club, and Ian and Tim.

The group was formed in 2011 to cater the 2012 banquet, with the society’s 30th anniversary celebrations in 2013 very much in its sights.

Serve it Forth! members are currently:

• Dom Rowney – Benevolent Dictator, possibly for life
• Phil ‘Iasus’ Dennis – “You’re eating what?”
  Phil is the group’s fish and game guru. He loves all of god’s creatures, and spends long hours working out how best to kill, roast, ferment, pickle, salt or smoke them. He is probably best known for his love of suspicious Scandinavian fish products, eating the bits of animals no-one else will, and garlic. Especially garlic.
• Tom Hinds – Pastry Wizard
  Tom is a pastry wizzard. There’s isn’t much more to say. He’s the guy who found us our Greate Pie and taught us to make pastry the medieval way. He is also responsible for the world’s most controversial cheesecake, a 12″ dish of brie-based confusion that caused many hours of argument. Was it an accidental stroke of genius or a cheesy catastrophe? We don’t know – but it became the one that’s on the 2012 menu, and we can all agree that one *is* delicious.
• Will Thorley – Chop all the things!
  Will has been a stalwart of the team since the beginning, providing excellent note-taking and general support, as well as being a first class minion simulator. Without his assistance, we wouldn’t be much good at making use of sous-chefs, and we would have had to do a lot more chopping ourselves. We’re also relying on his engineering skills to get our Gantt charts into order for the big day. In addition, he produced some excellent recipes which sadly didn’t make the final cut – although look out for Beet Soup and Butter Beer next year!
• Stuart ‘Panda’ Watson – Webchef
  We didn’t know that sweet shrimps were a medieval thing, but Stuart convinced us otherwise. He’s also been invaluable as our chief allergy-wrangler, collating allergy information and trying out variations to suit people’s needs. He also introduced us to the concept of apple muse, which once paired with baked pears became a very interesting and different sweet. He also produces mince pies, containing meat, according to a medieval recipe. Probably most importantly, he runs our website.