OTHER CULTURE, OTHER LIVES. CATERING FOR EVERY NATIONALITY

I left Camberwell School of Art in June 1977, spent 9 months being paid to renovate a five-story house in Pimlico, London, before heading off, with Jimmy Docherty on our dream trip, travelling around the world for the next two and a half years.   

We left Chester, early one morning in April ’78 and hitch hiked to London where we picked up a lift to Southern Spain, then caught a ferry to Oran from Alicante before hitch hiking one thousand miles across the Sahara Desert.  We ploughed through Niger on a diet of locusts and beer, skirted the top of Nigeria and crossed into Northern Cameroon.   

Ten weeks after leaving Chester, we were eating porcupine and snake, deep in the tropical rainforests south of Yaoundé, entertained by chieftains and being showered with gifts of fruit and meat for our journey down the uncharted river Nyong in a dilapidated Spanish ex-army dingy, to the coast at Kribi, 300 miles away. 

We did some deep, extensive travelling and met some wild, extravagant, dangerous and exotic people along the way, whilst chomping down equally wild and exotic, although rarely extravagant food.  Our budget was 50p a day for everything.  50p each that was, we weren’t delusionary.  In the middle of the Sahara in ’78, that would get you an ice-cold coke, whist in the middle of northern India, it would feed you handsomely for a day.  We returned home in the Autumn of 1980. 

At Bread and Flowers, we get enquiries from many British brides/grooms, marrying overseas grooms/brides.  Inevitably these clients want us to include something in the menu which nods in the direction of their overseas partner’s cuisine.  So we’ve catered for plenty of Italian, Spanish and French, but also stretched as far as Brazil, South Korea, Japan, Nepal, India and Ghana.  We’re regularly asked to cook recipes provided by an overseas bride’s mother; attempt to cook I should add.  We relish the challenge, they add to our repertoire, but are usually so personal that they are never repeated. 

One of those recipes however, was a Persian rice dish given to us by the mother of an Iranian girl marrying into a family living in the Chalke valley, just outside Salisbury, Wiltshire.  That was early on in our career and the phrase ‘bricking it’ springs to mind.  Remarkably we carried it off and cooked it with aplomb, receiving high praise from mum.  Of course we did, I wouldn’t have mentioned it had it not ended well.  That recipe we’re still using to this day, a traditional Iranian wedding dish and a hot favourite when topped with saffron, honey, hazelnut and rosewater roast chicken.