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Your wedding has to be the perfect day, simple as that; but the build-up, the cost, the in-laws, the guest-list, the uninvited, the weather, the food, the etiquette, the frocks — the list of things to worry about is seemingly endless. And if you’re in the food business, you’ve got to have the best wedding breakfast, too. Everyone’s expecting it and it’s top of your list.
So the pressure has truly been on Matt Rickard, one of the key members of Absolute Taste, the catering company that Gordon Ramsay entrusts to deliver his menus at outdoor events from Formula One parties to David and Victoria Beckham’s pre-World Cup bash.
This month he got married in Cornwall and, understandably, he didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Before the wedding, I joined Rickard, his bride-to-be, Reka Fabien, and Absolute’s founder, Lyndy Redding, on a visit to some of the best local producers and growers in the county on what can only be described as the foodie equivalent of a pub crawl. Their aim was to find everything from within a 50-mile radius, the best that Cornwall had to offer, before the executive chef, Will Gould, got to work on the wedding menu.
The previous day they had visited the Cornish Cheese Company in Liskeard, a couple of butchers to talk lamb and venison, and Buttervilla salad and vegetable suppliers in Torpoint, and that morning they had been out on a dayboat from Mevagissey to look for lobsters and crabs.
Catching up with them at the Camel Valley vineyard, I was met by the former RAF pilot Bob Lindo, who changed career 20 years ago. He said: “My wife and I dug 8,000 holes 18in deep and planted his and hers vineyards on this steep slope that faces due south and produced our first vintage in 1992. It won a bronze medal in the Wine of the Year Competition and every judge was a Master of Wine.”
Their 7ha vineyard now produces 80,000 bottles and they sell to Fortnum & Mason, Waitrose, Harvey Nichols “and just about every restaurant in Cornwall. It’s the first sparkling wine that Fortnum & Mason has sold that isn’t champagne.” The Camel Valley couple specialise in sparkling wine and have christened their bubbly Cornwall, so you really can have a glass of Cornwall when you visit the winery or any of the local hostelries. Camel Valley Brut has a crisper, fruitier style than champagne.
Lindo’s customers “don’t want fruit and flowers, they want toast, biscuits, brioche, yeasty flavours”, he says. “We have special things here in the soil that we capture in the bottle, like elderflower.”
Despite their success and their cut-glass reputation, expansion will be limited: “We’ve no desire to rule the world. Try not to go beyond the bubble or you’ll prick it; make too much and you can’t sell it,” Lindo said as we drained our glasses. The look on Rickard and Fabien’s faces said it all and, indeed, they did decide to drink Cornwall dry on the day.
We headed off to Rodda’s Dairy. It was a tall order, this wedding breakfast, as it seemed to encompass prenuptial grazing, post-nuptial tea, early-evening dining and midnight munching. How could teatime in Cornwall not include a clotted-cream tea? Should you put the jam on the scone first or dollop on the cream? Surely we would find out all at Rodda’s, near Redruth, where Nicholas is a fifth-generation member of the Rodda family to go into this happy business. Does anyone leave the dairy without a smile on their face? Naturally we adopted the Cornish method, of strawberry jam first, dollop of clotted cream second, on an embarrassingly large plateful of scones. “The Devonians are clearly ashamed of their cream; they do it the other way round,” Rodda told us.
It takes 100 gallons of milk to make 6 gallons of cream. First it is baked in a bain-marie for two hours before being left to settle overnight for the delectable crust to form. The method hasn’t changed since the family started making it in about 1890. A Rodda’s cream tea was served on the last Concorde flight, and 10lb of Rodda’s best was ordered for the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday lunch.
To finish the day we headed to Lynher Dairies, at Ponsanooth, to sample Yarg, a moist Cornish cheese. It sounds like a giant’s curse, it looks like a work of art and it tastes fresh and tangy like a Caerphilly. Scrumbly, I’d call it, scrumptious and crumbly. Cathy Mead’s family makes this unusual cheese, which is covered in young stinging nettles applied by hand, one by one, in true artisanal style. It is naturally mould-ripened and got its name from its inventor, Alan Gray. Yarg is his surname backwards.
When we went to inspect the maturing cheeses, Mead showed us a heart-shaped 2kg Yarg that would make the most beautiful centrepiece of any wedding cheeseboard or could even work as an original wedding “cake”. Rickard and Fabien were clearly impressed. They had visited butchers and bakers, farmers and dairies, fishermen and wine producers and when Gould sent me the final menu a few days later it was dazzling: pre-ceremony shots of gazpacho with Cornish crab; miniature Cornish pasties; Mevagissey mackerel with Cornish earlies (potatoes) and fresh peas and beans; Lanoy Farm lamb with apple mint pesto; Tregondale Farm beef; and late-night battered Cornish pollack with chunky chips. And, of course, scones and jam and clotted cream. A big day food sensation was assured.
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