Snails Converge on Ludlow, Shropshire, England This September
Ludlow, England's gourmet capital, is ready to stage the eleventh annual food and drink festival in the 800-year-old castle around which the town was built. Slow Food and Cittaslow (Slow Cities) will both be playing a major part in the three-day event, September 9-11.
Ludlow, England, (PRWEB) July 8, 2005 -- The snail logos of Slow Food and
Cittaslow will be meeting in Ludlow’s castle this September at the eleventh
annual Ludlow Marches Festival of Food and Drink.
The weekend festival
that celebrates quality food and drink takes place between 9th-11th September,
and guarantees a host of new taste experiences as well as a fun day out. Full
details are at http://www.foodfestival.co.uk/
For the second
consecutive year we have local company Tyrrells potato chips as our lead sponsor
– and they are launching a brand new flavor of hand-fried potato chip at this
year’s festival: Ludlow Sausage flavor. They will be joined by around 150 small
producers of quality food and drink showcasing their wares and offering free
tastings to around 17,000 visitors, who are expected to the Food Festival this
year.
Ludlow is the first Cittaslow or "slow town" in the UK, which means
it is part of a growing international network of towns "where it is good to
live." Ludlow has also built a major reputation for gourmet food, so no
surprises that it has an active Slow Food Convivium that will be organizing
Taste Workshops at the festival, essentially tutored tastings of a wide range of
traditional English foodstuffs from perry to black pudding.
A full
program of free talks and demonstrations will be running in Ludlow Castle
throughout the Festival as well as "fringe" activities involving butchers,
bakers and pubs in the town. The food festival is not all about high-end,
gourmet food and drink, even though it is centered on the town that has won
acclaim as the UK’s capital of food and drink.
Sure, Ludlow’s gourmet
reputation has been on the up ever since Ken Adams and Shaun Hill set up shop in
Ludlow years ago. Michelin Stars have fair cascaded into the town - last year
Claude Bosi was awarded a second Michelin Star for his Corve Street restaurant
Hibiscus, which was recently named Restaurant of the Year in the UK by Egon
Ronay.
But Ludlow is not all about high-end, gourmet grub – as the
founders of the Ludlow Marches Festival of Food and Drink (the original, and
still the best) fully appreciate. They are a team of volunteers, with links to
the Slow Food and Cittaslow movements, who make sure the food festival stays
with its feet on the ground, anchored among small, quality food
producers.
Take just one example. There are still four traditional
butchers trading in Ludlow, all producing quality meat and meat products like
home-cured bacon and hand-raised pork pies, made in much the same way they have
always been. Locally-reared animals, slaughtered locally and processed locally
using traditional, craft skills. That’s what leads to quality butchery, not
factory farming and factory processing.
What leads to quality bread?
Traditional, slow fermented dough, argues Peter Cook, which is how his firm,
Price’s Bakers on our market square, still produces bread. That’s why Rick Stein
made Prices one of his ‘Food Heroes’. Of course, we also have Walton’s, Swifts,
and DeGreys using their hot ovens to create quality alternatives to steam-baked,
factory-made, lorry-delivered supermarket bread.
Ludlow has remained
unspoiled by progress – it has retained a natural, traditional way of life and
its location, about an hour’s drive from the nearest motorway in any direction,
has surely helped. But Ludlow is still very much a working market town – not a
museum. We haven’t turned our back on technology either: for instance, these
days, there is http://www.theludlowsausage.co.uk to help take our butchers’
Ludlow Sausages to new places.
The Food Festival is as much a celebration
of local beers and local sausages as it is a celebration of gourmet fare. 1,600
people take the Sausage Trail, sampling four new festival sausages on the first
day of the Food Festival, and not a celebrity chef in sight.
Instead of
TV ‘faces’, you’re much more likely to find exhausted, small-scale producers of
delightful foodstuffs at the Food Festival. Producers who have been taken by
surprise by the demand for their products on the first day, and who have stayed
up all night to make more in time for the even busier Saturday. Only to repeat
the process for Sunday.
Which goes a long way to explaining the
popularity of the Food Festival – visitors always find new surprises, new
producers and new flavors as well as their old favorites.
Quality food
and drink produced by local companies that care about their crops and tend their
animals with heart rather than with a permanent eye on the balance sheet that is
what is at the heart of the Ludlow experience.
CONTACT
Graeme Kidd,
food festival press officer
44-1584-877946
e-mail protected from spam
bots
Graeme can email high resolution copyright free versions of images
in the gallery at http://www.foodfestival.co.uk/gallery/index.html.
http://www.cittaslow.org.uk/
http://www.slowfoodludlow.org.uk/
http://www.foodfestival.co.uk/
http://www.ludlow.org.uk/
http://www.tyrrellspotatochips.co.uk/
http://www.theludlowsausage.co.uk
# # #
Source : http://www.prweb.com/newsbycategory/900/2005-07-19/80/index.htm