Feasting in the Street by Gillian Cross
We have a delicious blog from Gillian Cross about food, festivals and popcorn cannons!
Feasting in the Street
I’ve done a lot of cooking. I’ve roasted food and simmered it. Boiled it and fried it and grilled it. Made it into cakes and puddings, pies and stews and gratins.
But I’ve never exploded it.
I’d never even thought about that – until Alan Snow gave me the idea. He and I had just finished writing Ollie Spark and the Accidental Adventure (Alan did the pictures and I did the words) and we were wondering what happened to Ollie and Aunt Caz after that.
“They could go to a street food festival,” Alan said.
Burgers and ice cream? I thought. That didn’t sound very exciting. Then Alan said, “Popcorn Cannon” – and sent me a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqa3jOYI8XE
I’d imagined this popcorn cannon thing was a kind of household gadget. Something small enough to fit on a kitchen worktop. But the cannons in the video Alan sent were almost as big as real cannons. They had a real fire underneath – in the middle of a busy marketplace – and the popcorn came shooting out like a rain of tiny cannonballs. When I saw it exploding into the net, I thought, Aunt Caz would die for one of those. She wouldn’t be able to resist it.
So maybe she and Ollie would go to that festival…
I started making a list of street food, from all over the world. Noodles and doughnuts. Pizza and burgers. Chinese dumplings, Japanese egg cakes and Korean bingsu. Just reading about them made my mouth water. And it was exciting. Because street food isn’t just about getting something to eat when you’re hungry. It’s about the hustle and bustle of big cities, about nights out and treats and special occasions. It fills the air with delicious smells and the cooking is a spectacle happening right there in front of you.
Ollie and Aunt Caz were definitely going to a street food festival. But they couldn’t just cook popcorn. Aunt Caz was sure to invent some extra-special, extra-secret popcorn flavourings too – but this wasn’t going to be a cookery book. It was going to be a story and things happen in stories. There had to be a villain to defeat (I love a good villain!) and a mystery to solve.
OK, I thought. Suppose there was a competition. For the best food stall at the festival…
That was when the book took off. As soon as I started writing about the competition, I knew who the villain was going to be. And very soon I had the mystery too. Ollie Spark and the Exploding Popcorn Mystery is very different from Ollie’s first adventure, but one thing is the same. In both books, the villains aren’t just hurting people. What they’re doing damages the environment too. Ollie has to stop them – while there’s still time .
When Alan first suggested a street food festival, I hadn’t thought about green issues at all. But it’s not surprising the story went that way. We are all part of the environment and so is our food.
Even popcorn and noodles. Even waffles and candyfloss and yakitori skewers.