Our last experience of cooking curry in an unfamiliar kitchen for lots of people, in a school kitchen in Shropshire, was a success and was the largest number of people either of us had fed in one go. It was hard work, but good fun. So when Cath’s best friend asked if we were interested in catering for his friends’ wedding (the very lovely Ben and Emma, whom we’d met many times) we thought “why not?”…
…Admittedly, we did then think of several reasons why not. The scale of it, at 100 guests, was twice that of the Shropshire curry – that means even bigger saucepans and even more uncertainty about how long things will take to cook. (I once accidentally cooked enough rice for 70 people, and I’m pretty sure the water only hit boiling point around the time the rice was fully cooked, which took a lot longer than a pan of rice for, say, 7 people would have needed.) The wedding was at a campsite. But on the plus side, Ben and Emma wanted a curry buffet, so the cuisine was in our comfort zone and there was no expectation of precise, tweezered plating. (And while I didn’t need any excuse to avoid jubilee celebrations beyond my refusal to herald the perpetuation of an outdated class system, it was nice that I would get to spend the long bank holiday celebrating love rather than avoiding celebrating subjugation.)
The campsite was in fact a residential activity centre. Large parties of schoolchildren stay there, and there was an accordingly large kitchen (I’ve not done much cooking on a campfire, and cannot conceive of how this would work for 100 people; having a workhorse cooker designed for large-scale catering was very welcome). We had the use of the kitchen for the whole day before the wedding as well as the day itself. Between the big gas burners and the big industrial fridge, we could get things up to heat at a usefully fast rate, and keep them safely cool overnight.
We tested recipes on a smaller scale, and multiplied up the quantities. We got this just about right – we could have done with more of a couple of the dishes, but nobody went without. The kitchen’s big pans were full, though, so the logistics of cooking more would have been an extra challenge.
The original plan had been to serve from the kitchen using the heated trays of a serving station, but on the day it was decided that it would be better to serve in the yurt where everyone was seated, so we could serve people table-by-table and not have a giant queue; this meant we couldn’t keep the curries warm, but a combination of quick service and goodwill on the part of the guests at the later tables meant it wasn’t too much of a problem.
Huge thanks to our friend Ellie, who assisted on the day and was an absolute trooper and a cheerful and calming presence – we couldn’t have done it without you. Huge thanks (and congratulations) to Ben and Emma. And huge thanks to all the guests, who were lovely and who shared our excitement about what we had cooked.
Spoilt Broth 