Congleton Food & Drink Festival

Now in its eleventh year, Congleton Food & Drink Festival attracts thousands of people to this Cheshire market town. I went along to the most recent event to sample what was on offer and to bring a nice little haul of goodies home too.

A couple of weekends ago, I’d been all set to go to the Macclesfield Food Festival. But, due to a forecast of torrential rain and not having been very well the day before, I’m afraid I had to wimp out. Sorry Macclesfield, I’ll try to make it next year.

Feeling disappointed and a little sorry for myself, it cheered me up to come across a post online saying that the Congleton Food & Drink Festival was to be held the next day.

In the east of Cheshire, twenty-odd miles south of Manchester, Congleton is only half an hour’s drive from where I live in the Staffordshire Moorlands. So, I quickly checked the weather forecast and found that the outlook was sunny. Bingo!

COMMUNITY

Usually held on the second Sunday in June, Congleton Food & Drink Festival is a not-for-profit event and is entirely free to the public. Doing a little research, I discovered that it’s organised by a fantastic group called Congleton Community Projects.

The group has been going for twenty years and was originally started by two shop owners. As in so many places, Congleton had been under pressure from out of town shopping centres and, more recently I’d guess, the growth of online shopping. Not willing to see their town go under, they started to make it more attractive with extra Christmas lights and hanging baskets, but also by organising activities and events.

Today, Congleton Community Projects has a committee of 13 volunteers dedicated to ensuring that the town continues to flourish. Judging by the crowds I saw at the food and drink festival, I’d say they’re doing a darned good job.

AT CONGLETON FOOD & DRINK FESTIVAL

There’s a number of car parks dotted about the town (free on Sundays), but there’s lots of free on-street parking too. Other half and I were able to park just a five minute walk from the action on Congleton’s main thoroughfare.

The Festival hadn’t even been open for half an hour when we arrived, but the town was already buzzing with folks browsing the more than one hundred stalls.

As well as food and drink producers from Cheshire, Staffordshire and further afield there was a huge variety of street food too – from Rushey Hey Farm free range Gloucester Old Spot sausage baps to entirely plant-based offerings from Wild & Wild.

Throughout the day there were kids’ activities and live music, plus demos in the Victorian Gothic town hall.

Actually, even if you’re not attending any of the talks in there, I think the town hall’s well worth stopping off at (and not just to use the loos). It’s a lovely grade II listed building with a fine stone staircase. On what turned out to be quite a hot day, it was nice to have a breather in the cool and shaded foyer, complete with quirky statues of the bear that’s the town’s symbol.

Faced with so much food and drink on offer, we decided to make a plan. We’d walk every inch of the Festival, making a mental note of anything we fancied, and then retrace our steps and get buying: stuff to eat right away plus goodies to take home.

STREET FOOD

With loads of street food available, other half and myself decided to share. That way, we figured, we’d get a taste of a few different things.

Typhoon Thai

First off, we shared some Thai dim sum (think appetisers or tapas-style eating) from Typhoon Thai.

Typhoon Thai has a restaurant in the town and for the Congleton Food & Drink Festival they’d set up stall with big range of tempting looking dishes. Confident of just how good their food was, the stallholder encouraged almost every passer-by to try a piece of delicious chicken.

We went for a tray of six siu mai minced pork steamed dumplings and two big fluffy bao buns filled with pieces of barbecue flavoured pork. We had the lot drizzled with hoisin sauce.

Working the Streets Burger

I’m more of a burger fan than my other half but, as we were sharing, he was happy to go with my suggestion from Working the Streets.

Besides a range of burgers including the Italian Job (with pesto and sun-dried tomatoes) and Touch of Spice (topped with chorizo and jalapenos), Working the Streets also serves up big Polish sausages.

But I fancied the Dirty Pig: a rather tasty sample of which was sitting on the counter, drawing admiring oohs and ahhs from passers-by.

Not for the faint-hearted, on top of its 6oz beef patty, the Dirty Pig was adorned not just with smoked bacon and cheese but also a golden hash brown. Layered among all that were plenty of creamy coleslaw, salad and pickled gherkins.

As we were planning to share this monster, it was a good job I’d brought along my new Moorlands Eater travel cutlery 😁. I’m not sure how we’d have coped without them, plus some last-minute packing of knapkins, in tackling this tasty beast. A pint of Madhatter’s Cider from their stall nearby went down very nicely with it.

Burr Eat Oh Jerk Chicken

The more restrained among you may be surprised to learn that we still had room for something else. This time, from Burr Eat Oh.

Burr Eat Oh describe themselves as serving up ‘a mix of the sizzling Caribbean, with a dash of Mexico’ (Burr-Eat-Oh = burrito. Get it?).

At the Congleton Food & Drink Festival, they were offering The Royal (brown stew jackfruit), Marley’s Mess (sweet sticky BBQ) or Kingston Killa traditional jerk chicken. We went for jerk chicken which you could have in a bowl with rice and peas or the whole lot in a wrap. Other half’s choice this time, we got the wrap.

We found it well-filled, the chicken hot and spicy with plenty of veg too. The rice and wrap mellowed the heat, but you were still left with a satisfying tingle on the lips.

Butterton’s Ice Cream

After that, what could be better than some cooling Butterton’s Big Brown Cow Ice Cream?

Butterton’s make some of the best ice cream I’ve eaten. They hand make it on their farm near Crewe with organic milk from beautiful Swiss Brown cows.

That day, there were six flavours available from the umpteen Butterton makes. We both chose deliciously creamy Pannacotta with Wild Fruits.

TAKE AWAY HAUL

Between all that eating, we went back to the stalls we’d picked out earlier to gather together the goodies to take home.

Brockleby’s Pies

Whenever I see Brockleby’s stall, I have to get one of their Melton Mowbray pork pies. Coming originally from Leicestershire, I still think Melton Mowbray pork pies are the best.

Melton Mowbray pork pies have EU Protected Geographical Indication which protects regional and traditional foods. This means that only pies made in a certain way (baked free-standing, giving the characteristic bow shape), containing specific ingredients (including uncured pork) and in a particular geographical area can be called a ‘Melton Mowbray pork pie’.

Made with free range pork, Brockleby’s are chunky and meaty with excellent pastry. There’s just the right amount of jelly too.

But they don’t just make pork pies. Their stall had an incredible range of pies, often with quirky names like Wild Beaver (steak and ale), Moo & Blue (steak, Stilton and ale) and Ali Baa Baa (lamb with apricot and ras al hanout spices). You’ll be relieved to know that their Penguin pie doesn’t actually contain any penguin, but smoked haddock, cheese and potato.

We opted for the Wild Deer pie: golden pastry made with locally milled flour and glazed with local free-range egg, packed to the gills with venison (the box even tells you the name of the deer stalker) all with a rich red wine sauce.

These pies are meant to be eaten as a generous single portion, but in an uncharacteristically measured decision (we’d a eaten a fair bit at the festival, remember) we shared one for dinner that night. It was lovely with seasonal English asparagus plus buttered and minted Cheshire new potatoes.

Burt’s Cheese

Next among our purchases at Congleton Food & Drink Festival was Burt’s Cheese. Handmade near Knutsford in small batches and using local milk, Burt’s Cheese has won a pile of awards, both national and international, including a Best Producer award from Observer Food Monthly.

Burt’s is probably  best known for Burt’s Blue which is a semi-soft cows’ milk cheese. But we decided to go for one washed in cider: Drunken Burt.

If you don’t like overly powerful cheese, you might be concerned that the dark ‘mouldy coat’ (their words, not mine) indicates a very strong flavour. But that wasn’t the case. I found the flavour complex but wonderfully creamy with no harshness at all. A few days later, it went exceptionally well with a chunk of Brockleby’s pork pie plus raw veg and apple for lunch.

Ultramarino / The Tinned Fish Market

Unusual to find at a food festival was a stall full of tinned goods. But this was tinned fish, which I’m a great fan of. You’ll always find stacks of sardines, anchovies, tuna and herring roes in my kitchen cupboards. Besides being delicious, they’re so useful for a quick, tasty meal – and nutritious too.

Ultramarino (which, as I write, seems to be in the process of changing its name to The Tinned Fish Market), specializes in quality tins from Spain and Portugal, inspired by the huge range of tinned seafood you find in those countries’ grocery stores. You can buy online, including a monthly box, or catch them at markets around the north west.

The enthusiastic young stallholder gave us a sample of tuna pate to try, which was delicious. But I make that sort of thing myself, so was more interested in the unadorned product. There was a huge range to choose from including sardines and mackerel flavoured in different ways, plus octopus, squid, roe and tuna.

We were particularly pleased to see mussels from the Rias Gallegas – our old stomping ground in north west Spain, which is famous for them. The stallholder, from Andalucia in the south, said he’s always baffled by Brits who go to Galicia which is notoriously rainy. (Answer: it’s the rain that gives the north west it’s moniker of ‘Green Spain’ so perhaps we feel more at home there).

We finally opted for a tin of Portuguese smoked sardines in a beautiful looking tin. We haven’t tried these yet, but are planning to eat them as part of a tapas-style feast.

Cafe Cannoli

After all those savoury treats, of course we had to get some sweet ones too.

As soon as we saw the Cafe Cannoli stall (complete with ‘Carlotta’, thought to be the UK’s first and only cannoli cart) we knew we’d have to take some home.

If you haven’t tried these sweet ricotta-filled, fried pastry tubes originating in Sicily (canna means cane or tube) then you really must. Fans of The Godfather films will know that in part III, Don Altobello (played by the always-fun-to-watch Eli Wallach) is murdered with poisoned cannoli while watching Cavalleria Rusticana at the Palermo opera house. And you can’t get more Sicilian than that, can you?

Aiming to create the authentic product in Britain (happily, without the poison), Cafe Cannoli imports its main ingredients, including sheeps’ milk ricotta, from Sicily.

From these, they create some wonderful flavours, including the traditional one of chocolate chip with candied orange. Pistachio cannoli, in this case flavoured with Sicilian Bronte pistachio paste, is another classic. But these were snapped up as soon as ‘Carlotta’ could turn them out. So, for our box of three, we chose traditional, lemon with raspberry, and hazelnut made with Sicilian hazelnut paste and Sicilian hazelnuts.

The crunchy, but not crumbly, tubes were lovely and light. The fillings sweet but not cloyingly so, allowing the flavours to shine through the creaminess.

Marshmallow & S’more

I first came across Marshmallow & S’more when I returned to BBC Radio Stoke’s foodie show ‘The Takeaway’ for their Christmas special. Away from the studio, the special gave the opportunity to mingle in a party style atmosphere, meeting people we otherwise might only have known online or heard on the show.

One of those people was Monique with her handmade gourmet marshmallows and Scottish tablet.

I’d only recently discovered that I actually liked marshmallow. Familiar with the tasteless, pink & white phoney variety, I couldn’t previously see the point. But when you taste the real thing, it’s a million miles away. Monique had brought along a range of flavours to the Christmas special, including a maple marshmallow that I probably had more than my fair share of.

So I was incredibly pleased to see Marshmallow & S’more at the Congleton Food & Drink Festival. I bought some of their Coconut & Pineapple and it was full of flavour. With real coconut (and coconut liqueur) and delicious pineapple curd, they tasted incredible. I love the texture of proper marshmallow too – none of that fake rubberyness, but slightly crusty on the outside and with an interior wobble.

I couldn’t resist Monique’s Scottish tablet either, which is much nicer than fudge, I think. We went for some flavoured with wonderfully smoky Laphroaig single malt whisky. This cut through the natural sweetness of the tablet and gave it a very grown-up, complex flavour.

REBIRTH OF THE HIGH STREET?

In recent years, the high streets of many of our towns and cities have been struggling. Faced with high business rates, the growth of out of town and online shopping, small independent businesses were being squeezed out.

But perhaps the popularity of farmers’, artisans’ and makers’ markets, along with events like the Congleton Food & Drink Festival, indicates that the tide is turning. Together, these show that not everyone is entirely in thrall to the big supermarkets. Organizations like Congleton Community Projects and, in other towns, Totally Locally, have played a huge part in producing this positive change.

It seems to me that there’s little point in trying to replicate on our High Streets the same old range of big national and multinational stores you’ll find at every out of town shopping centre. There just isn’t the footfall and those companites aren’t interested.

Anyway, I think we need something different. Proper, independent shops with good value local meat, bread, vegetables and fish, supplemented by markets and events like this where small producers can flourish.

Yes, most of us will use supermarkets at some point. They can be convenient and sometimes cheaper (but by no means always). But shopping at small, independent business means that more of our money stays in our towns and helps them thrive.

As Totally Locally says: if every adult in the UK spent just £5 per week in their local shops and businesses instead of online, at the supermarket or with the huge multinationals, it would be worth £13.5 BILLION going directly back into our towns.

Isn’t that worth being a part of?

MISSED THIS YEAR’S FOOD FESTIVAL? Congleton Makers Market is held on the last Saturday of the month. Upcoming dates are 29 June and 27 July 2019.

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