The call for recipes for Food to Feed a Crowd brought some interesting responses, including one recipe for a whole stuffed camel (not knowing how to get my hands on a camel, I did not test it, plus it’s a mite impractical for the Lone Star State). There was also a list of the quantities of food needed for a barn raising. Below are both of these untested recipes if you’re interested.
This list of the astonishing quantities of food needed to feed a host of hungry workers during a barn raising comes from Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative member Kayleen Vest.
“I never knew if it would take me longer to fix, bake, cook and roast all this food or to take the recipe and make it into a counted cross-stitch to hang in my kitchen,” she wrote. A few years ago at Christmas, one of her sons, an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, gave her a handmade cross-stitch featuring this list, complete with a frame made of wood from a family barn. “It will be one of my most treasured gifts of a lifetime,” Vest wrote. “I do believe this is enough food for a crowd.”
Food For A Barn Raising
115 lemon pies
500 fat cakes (doughnuts)
3 gallons applesauce
3 gallons rice pudding
16 chickens
3 hams
50 pounds roast beef
300 light rolls
16 loaves fresh baked bread
Red beets and pickled eggs
Cucumber pickles
1 large crock of stewed raisins
5-gallon stone jar white potatoes
5-gallon stone jar sweet potatoes
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Fannin County Electric Cooperative member Billie Venable may have the answer if you’ve got a spare camel lying around. “I never used this recipe because I never had a camel,” Venable wrote. “It came to me in a cookbook from Carboline International and was contributed by Eastern Trading Establishment, Dammam, Saudi Arabia.”
Stuffed Camel
1 whole camel, medium size
1 whole lamb, large size
20 whole chickens, medium size
12 kilos (26 1/2 pounds) rice
60 eggs
2 kilos (4.4 pounds) pine nuts
2 kilos (4.4 pounds) almonds
1 kilo (2.2 pounds) pistachio nuts
110 gallons water
5 pounds black pepper
Salt to taste
Skin, clean and trim camel, lamb and chickens and boil until tender. Cook rice until fluffy, fry nuts until brown and mix with rice. Hard boil eggs and peel. Then stuff chickens with eggs and rice; stuff lamb with five of the chickens and some rice. Stuff camel with lamb and more rice. Broil in large oven or near gas flare until brown. Spread remaining rice on a large tray and place camel on top. Place remaining chickens around camel. Decorate rice with boiled eggs and nuts. Will serve a friendly crowd of 80 to 100.
