For her team’s Bedouin feast, Broadview second-year Toby Schwartz has assembled one roasted duck, steamed fish, two boiled chickens, 30 or so fried frogs, and what she describes as a camel unicorn skull. If camel unicorns do exist, they have at least never been seen before in the wild, but Schwartz has done her best to prove the skeptics wrong with her creation. Constructed in large part out of baked bread dough with salt sprinkled copiously for structural support, the skull is covered with bacon bits, creating the effect of raw meat. Inside is the piece de resistance: a bread bowl filled with cooked corned beef hash to simulate the creature’s brains.
Schwartz provided chopped mint and parsely as pallet cleansers—sorely needed after a few bites of corned beef—and served cous-cous as well. Judges were asked to eat with their hands and, in keeping with Bedouin culture, the men and women sat separately. Like the B–J squad, Broadview bought most of its supplies in Chinatown, which unlike, say, Treasure Island, sells its animals whole, with heads intact (the judges award points for complete vertebrae).
This year’s scav has not been without its share of trauma for Broadview’s Top Chef. At yesterday’s contest on the Eckhart quad, Schwartz nearly lost two fingers in the knife-skills competition.
“The judges concluded afterward that it was a bad idea,” she says of their decision to have sleep-deprived students handle knives.
Schwartz holds up two bandaged fingers now as evidence of her trials. She avoided a trip to the emergency room only because one scavvie’s mother, a doctor, happened to be in attendance and was able to treat her on the spot.