If you've been to your fair share of horse events (one day events, pony club, regular riding club days) in Australia, then you'd know that the standard fare is bacon and egg roll for breakfast (or its exotic cousin egg and bacon roll) followed by sausage sizzle for lunch.
However when you come to the UK's biggest horse event, the Badminton Horse Trials, you're in for a whole new scale of junk food! [I should point out early on that I use the term "junk food" affectionately, meaning food you eat when you're out on the go and so convenience and forbidden fattiness triumph over nutritional balance and moderation].
So the aim of this blog is to spread the word about what's good (and what's not) food-wise at the Galactic Headquarters of the eventing horse world and I hope encouraging our hard working event committees in Australia to consider being a tad more adventurous on the catering front.
The main Four Star event is preceded by the lower level Grassroots competition. On Thursday morning at the Grassroots, we spotted a Welsh caravan extolling Welsh Beef and Lamb and promising "Welsh Dragon sausage".
(The extolling of the British origin of meats is very fashionable at the moment, given that dastardly foreigners are contaminating their beef with, of all things, horse!).
Dragon (an emblematic Welsh icon) is sadly very light on in the dragon sausage but nevertheless it promises pork, chilli (dragon allusion implying fieriness) and leek (another Welsh icon). But blow me down, when I asked they didn't have any!
So I opted instead for a Celtic (i.e. pork) sausage on a hotdog bun. Pork sausage: not too shabby, say 7 out of 10. Bun: not fresh, 3/10. Tom sauce and mustard: added some welcome zing, overall 5/10. Not a good start but definitely edible.
Their coffee was literally* nothing to write home about and reminded me that Tea culture definitely rules in GB and so to be more selective in choosing purveyors of coffee.
* Short digression on the English language:
Sadly, here in the UK, "literally" has become debased and is commonly used as a synonym for "really" as in:
Me: we're here in the UK for five weeks and need SIMs for our phones**
Phone guy: so you're literally here for five weeks
Me: (struggling to work out how "here for five weeks" could be used figuratively) umm, yes.
So I suppose here you could try writing "the coffee was literally literally nothing to write home about"
** Not so short digression on digression on triumph of marketing over technology in the phone business:
The technicians in the mobile phone world have developed these marvellous devices that work seamlessly worldwide enabling you to be contacted via your mobile number and for you to click on your contacts to call them direct from your phone wherever in the world you and they are. You can also access the Internet and all the capabilities it gives you from maps to navigation to news - and even blogging.
So what do the guys in Marketing do? Effectively break all this by charging between 10 and 100 times the local cost for calls and data when you roam internationally. Result: the only way to avoid bankruptcy is to buy a new SIM and spend hours deciphering deliberately obscure phone plans for every country you go to; you're no longer contactable on your regular mobile number; the UK pay-as-you-go phone plans for some reason make it almost impossible to both call internationally and access the Internet at decent rates -presumably they believe that no one could possibly want to do both.
One outfit gives you cheap international phone calls but only after you call an access number first, you then have to manually key in your contacts' numbers - farewell "point and click" and back to memorising numbers or writing them on your hand. To roam I'd be happy to pay double what I do locally but 10x or 100x? No thanks: Marketing, great job stuffing up a truly mobile phone system.
Day 0 Lunch: our friend Sylvia had provided us with a picnic box for lunch, and while not in any sense junk food, it is worth a mention because it was so good.
Most items were wrapped in foil so on opening, each was a pleasant surprise: cheddar cheese and Branston Pickle sandwiches, hardboiled eggs, chipolata sausages, tubs of yogurt, carrot sticks, strawberries, (my wife reported raspberries but I never scored any), chocolate McVities and an apple all accompanied by a welcome flask of hot tea. Definitely 10/10. Perhaps consider same for future equestrian outings.
Day 0 Afternoon: we explored the Festival of Food and the Food Walk marquees - lots of interesting goodies in there: we bought some unpasteurized goats cheese, our friends bought some black pudding sausage and some rare breed pork pies.
Not sure if the world is ready for lamb prosciutto yet.
Day 0 Evening: We left the eventing world briefly to visit a local pub for dinner on a gloriously sunny Spring evening. Had classic pub meals: ham eggs and chips (8/10) and fish, chips and mushy peas (9/10 - one point off for the peas being fluorescent green).
Day 1 Brunch: Friday was the first of two dressage days. I'd gone easy on breakfast so I could have a decent brunch (all for the cause of this blog). So on arrival I launched into a much anticipated roast hog baguette, complete with apple sauce and stuffing. First bite: massive disappointment! The baguette was stale - not a trace of crunch, no remnant of fresh light bread inside.
The slow roasted pork was tender and juicy and there was a well judged amount of apple sauce and stuffing so that they didn't overwhelm the pork. Score 6/10. No crackling was provided and I'd neglected to ask for it, so don't make this mistake in future.
Day 1 morning coffee: we tracked down a dedicated coffee van, Café de l'amour next to the scoreboard.
Coffee in the UK has definitely improved over the last decade. Latte is a milky coffee and cappuccino is frothy. I tentatively asked if he'd know what I meant if I asked for a "flat white" - a distinctively Australasian term - and to my delight he did!
No distinction between normal and skinny as both get 2% semi-skimmed milk. Result: brilliant! Best coffee I've had this trip: 9/10.
Day 1 Lunch: I had rotisserated chicken - leg, thigh and wing with coleslaw, stuffing and salad with an olive oil and lemon juice dressing. Lovely and tender but somehow missing the tang you expect from a rotisserie. At the risk of being as hard a marker as the dressage judges, I'm afraid I'm going to have to award 7/10. Meanwhile back at the actual Horse Trials, after day 1 of dressage, Australians Christopher Burton and Sam Griffiths are placed first and second with New Zealander Andrew Nicholson third.
About Phil Diacono
There's more to come from our eventing foodie blogger Phil as he and wife Jose of CrossCountry App continue their grand tour. While Jose will be glued to the horses and working on virtual guided course walks at Badminton, Houghton, Tattersalls, Bramham and Luhmuehlen, Phil will report on the food at and around horse events
Phil recently retired after 30 years in the computer industry so he and Jose are taking their trip of a lifetime, touring Europe by rail. Having worked and travelled for many years on business in Western Europe, they are exploring further east - Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Budapest interspersed with some wwoofing (willing workers on organic farms) in the countryside.
