Food To Get Your Feet Moving

For too long music festivals have been subjected to carcinogenic chip vans and kebab atrocities. So, while working as self-styled ‘food czar’ for Livestock, a pint-sized Oxfordshire music festival which runs from August 13th to 15th, I have endeavoured to assemble a cast that will make a spit-roast pig producer seem positively pedestrian.

Of the musical acts, I am hardly qualified to speak. Suffice to say they are many and varied : far-flung sounds collide with downhome country music, and this year’s line up includes artists from Scotland to Sudan, by way of Senegal and Armenia, Madagascar and Peru. Regarding the pleasures of the palate, I feel a little more qualified to hold forth.

Livestock has been in existence for the last three years and, as a friend of the director, I have previously been involved in ad hoc culinary preparation. It has, though, been recognized that the increasingly 30-something catchment require more than mere bacon butties, and that lovers of world music have equally eclectic palettes.

For want of loaves and fishes, last year it was decided by the director that a French Onion Soup would serve as a ‘great hangover cure’. I had proposed a more straightforward broccoli and stilton but he was determined that this ‘loathsome abomination’ should not be visited on the assembled guests. The weepy prospect of peeling a wheelbarrow of onions loomed, but I was assured that many hands would make light work.

Alas, vegetable chopping is no glamorous task so I began the job of dicing the required ten kilos in sulky solitude. Miraculously, a willing collaborator emerged who perhaps hadn’t countenanced the resulting vale of tears or the prospect of having his hands smell like a compost box at the height of summer. Once I accepted his preference for slicing over dicing, we settled into a rhythm, and the task was forgotten as conversation flowed through the lachrymose strain.

The multitudes lapped up that soup, along with Gruyere toast, like so many cats and their cream, but this year, aside from a complimentary breakfast surprise, I am retiring from the fray to allow acknowledged culinary virtuosos to weave their magic.

The first such eminence who takes to the festival field will be Nikita Gulhane, owner and director of Spice Monkey cookery school and a former journalist for the Food Programme. I met Nikita at another cookery school where I was experiencing distinct alienation from the obsequious fawning of some fellow scribes towards our hosts. It was quite refreshing to encounter a kindred spirit bemused by the love-in.

Nikita will be getting his true love-in from Saturday night as weary revellers gather around the campfire to croon their tunes. Beer peas, a chilli hot sauce with a fish base, homestyle onion bhajis and other delights are all likely to move the spirit to laudatory song.

After Saturday’s soupcon, it is on Sunday that the gastronomic extravaganza will start in earnest. An enhanced Sunday crowd will converge on our field site as the festival opens its doors to day-trippers.

Nikita will broaden his range and be joined by two chefs operating stalls that couldn’t be more different from one another.

First, there will be Diego Silva, the white heat of whose welcome I have previously evoked in these pages, asado chef of A La Cruz in London, one of the leading Argentine restaurants this side of the Atlantic.

Four specially-fabricated crucifixes are presently under construction for the slow-cooking of whole Argentinian lamb. Diego must rise early on Sunday to begin this process, and fortunately there will be other barbecued delights to whet the appetite like the rolled, stuffed ‘matamabre’ of beef, and chorizos with chimmichurri, the delicious blend of herbs and spices that typically accompanies an Argentine asado.

At some remove from the carnivorous indulgences Richard Wilson and his daughter Amanda will create dazzling vegan food. The best introduction I can give is that an extended period sampling Richard’s cooking prompted me to renounce meat altogether; I might add that it was an Argentine asado that brought me back to the meat-eating fold.

Richard’s cuisine is remarkable for the intensity of flavours that generally converge in painstaking salads the like of which I have never encountered. The dressings alone are worthy of rapture, and his evangelical nature will ensure that the sheer alchemy of his tarragon dressing and other sundries will be tried by all.

Richard’s boundless energy belies his advance towards a ninth decade, so it is no surprise that he places most emphasis on the energy which his food imparts. You may even see a pendulum swinging back and forth as he measures what he refers to as the life force of his food. Festival attendees could find their feet dancing involuntarily soon afterwards.

Throughout the festival there will also be plenty of opportunity for beer swilling or whatever happens to be your tipple. Firstly in the Red Lion pub in whose garden the concerts on the Friday and Saturday will take place, but also at the field site where Sunday’s entertainment is held. Here Bicester Beers will be dispensing their renowned brews that will include a commemorative Livestock ale.

So, if you’re free between the 13th and 15th August, do come along. Livestock will assuredly lift your soul, fire your palette and move your feet!

For tickets and further information visit www.livestockfestival.co.uk.