CityLife

MIF: Free Festival Feast attracts top cookery experts

Levi Roots - what's the secret?

FESTIVAL Feast is one of the true melting pot occasions in the Manchester International Festival line-up.
 

On the final day, Sunday, July 19, in the Festival Pavilion 2,000 folk will get the chance to taste for free dishes designed by five of the UK’s most respected culinary experts.
 

And yes, excitingly, we mean experts, not the usual over-familiar TV faces, the rent-a-chefs who crop up in rotation at food festival across the land.
 

The fabulous five are Fuchsia Dunlop, who will create a Szechuan dish, Levi Roots (Caribbean), Claudia Roden (Middle East), Paul Heathcote (representing the Red Rose) and Camellia Panjabi who along with her sister, Namita, will cook Indian.

Rabbit heads

Fuchsia Dunlop’s Shark’s Fin & Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China (Ebury Press, £16.99) was an instant classic of travel writing to match her similarly acclaimed cookbooks on the spicy cuisines of Szechuan and Hunan provinces.

Oxford-educated Fuchsia went native, determined to eat whatever was offered her in that vast nation. Scorpions, rabbit heads and the ovarian fat of the snow frog were all grist to the gut.

See what surprises she may have in store for Albert Square!
Equally acclaimed veteran cookery writer Claudia Roden was born and brought up in Cairo.

She finished her education in Paris and later studied art in London. She was drawn to the subject of food partly through a desire to evoke a lost heritage – one of the pleasures of a happy life in Egypt. 
 

Michelin-starred

This resulted in authoritative classics such as A Book of Middle Eastern Food, The Book of Jewish Food and Arabesque.
 

In contrast one particular book has made Camellia Panjabi’s name. Her concise 50 Great Curries of India ( I’ve cooked at least 40 of them) has sold over a million copies.
 

She currently runs six London restaurants, including the affordable and hip Masala Zone chain as well as the Michelin-starred Amaya, with the emphasis on regional foods.
 

Levi Roots (born as Keith Tanyue in Jamaica, 1959) is an equally colourful visitor. A close friend of Bob Marley, he has won plaudits as a MOBO-nominated reggae musician. He performed "Happy Birthday Mr. President" for Nelson Mandela in 1992 on his trip to Brixton, where Levi is based.
 

Grandmother's secret recipe

Equally at home  as a chef, he  gained widespread fame after appearing on the Dragons’ Den looking for funding for his "Reggae Reggae Sauce", a jerk barbecue condiment made to his grandmother’s "secret recipe".

Shortly after his appearance, Sainsbury’s announced that they would be stocking the sauce in 600 of their stores.
 

If our own (Bolton-born) Paul Heathcote seems less exotic, his track record suggest he is the man to uphold our own native culinary traditions against bthe’opposition).

Though he has recently put his flagship Longridge restaurant up for sale and shelved plans to open a fine dining establishment off Deansgate, he still runs the excellent Spanish eaterie, Grado, in the city centre and the growing Olive Press chain.

For a reminder of the style of cooking, using north-west ingredients that has won him Michelin stars, find a copy of his Rhubarb and Black Pudding, co-written with the Guardian’s Matthew Fort.
 

The Festival Feast, Festival Pavilion, Albert Square, Sunday, July 19. Several sittings throughout the day. Free. Tickets available from May 1 though www.mif.co.uk or 0844 815 4960.