The market town of Abergavenny appeared to be the chef’s paradise this weekend thanks to 150 exhibitors, six venues and two days of trading, demonstrations, signings, workshops and live entertainment at the Abergavenny Food Festival. With many of the UK’s events on hold due to the passing of the Queen, the annual weekender commemorated the monarch with a flower display within the grounds of Abergavenny castle; hordes of foodies made the most of the good weather and independent businesses, both inside and outside the castle walls, even if an unspoken feeling of angst lingered in the air.
The festival, now in its 24th year, looks very different to its humbler beginnings. When it debuted in 1999, Britain’s farming sector was overcoming the upshot of bovine spongiform encephalitis (aka mad cow disease), with the government’s slow reaction to the disease impacting the industry exponentially; still, 180 guests sat within Abergavenny’s Market Hall to mark the occasion. Today, bustling groups of festivalgoers funnel themselves through the town’s small, medieval Market Street with chips, street food of every kind and cones of ice cream in hand.
This weekend Market Hall houses hanging art installations of farm animals created by Bettina Reeves and co., and live cooking demonstrations on the Robert Price Kitchen Stage by the likes of Kalpna Woolf, Bake Off’s Michelle Evans-Fecci and Masterchef’s Santosh Shah. Inside, books lined tables, maple syrup, cheeses, and sweet treats piled high off market stalls, artisans stood behind. Welsh Fudge company Fwdge traded ambitious flavours such as the mouth watering salted milk chocolate and cookies and cream.
A more conventional festival atmosphere took place on the grounds of the castle, with live musicians, cookouts over fire, and talks and debates concerning the future of the hospitality industry, nature and agriculture – the festival always being one for open conversations. For all its wonders, however, a divide between the ticketed areas and the rest of the town made the event feel exclusive for visiting foodies and locals who paid for access.
Celebrating the understated yet essential ingredient of salt, Halen Môn (Anglesey Salt), founded by the Lea-Wilson family, demonstrated Saturday afternoon in honour of their cookbook Sea Salt and 20 years of trading their award-winning product worldwide. The business uses pure, charcoal-filtered seawater taken from the Menai Strait around Anglesey, its earliest consumers perky seahorses from the island’s Sea Zoo.
The family were joined by chef Anna Shepherd, who also helped develop Sea Salt’s recipes. On the menu today, beetroot carpaccio with roasted lemon – a salad salted and sugared to create a sherbert flavouring, celebrating the ingredient within without letting it overpower. Salt can do a world of good, even in unexpected contexts: adding it to coffee and tonic water, for example, neutralises bitter aftertastes. For a sweeter side, a plate of ginger crunch slices were passed around, the balance of sweet and salt creating something incredibly moreish. The ginger lending itself to my favourite bite of the weekend.
“Salt makes food taste more like itself,” says Halen Môn’s Jess Lea-Wilson. “We’ve used traditional techniques and ideas that would normally be used for meat, and we’ve applied them to vegetables. With brining, it’s something that is used a lot in America. It means that things are really juicy and succulent – so whilst you might often brine a chicken or a turkey, there’s a recipe in our book for brining a squash, which is really delicious.”
Outside across Upper Brewery Yard, vegetarian traders The Parsnipship produced punchy flavours in the form of potato cakes, crumbles and roasts. Earthy beetroot bombs take pride of place, a combination of beetroot and carrot with a kick from toasted cumin seeds – “pressed down, the blood red pakoras are best served with lashings of horseradish,” according to founder Ben Moss.
It’ll be interesting to see how the festival evolves further and whether the same traders will return for 2023 with updated produce. There’ll always be a need for discussion within food and farming industries; right now, Abergavenny Food Festival is where those conversations are taking place.
Abergavenny Food Festival, Abergavenny town centre, Sat 17 + Sun 18 Sept. Info: here
words and photos EMMA WAY