With Welsh Food Stories finally out I am planning to briefly address some of the bigger questions the book raises but wasn’t able to deal with head-on; questions around culture, food history, food futures and more (as time permits!). I also have an announcement to make over email fairly soon on what I am writing next – the link to my very occasional newsletter is below.
Today’s question is very simply this: why is there no history of Welsh food? One of the things that the book set out to do was to present several of the key strands in Welsh food history to a broad audience, and the thing that surprised me most as I started researching in 2018 was not only that no History of Welsh Food (or History of Food in Wales – more on this below) had ever been written but that no academic had ever included this even as one of their research interests. This is surprising when you consider that there are multiple histories of Irish food in print and works covering every imaginable aspect of English food history, often under the title ‘British’ but containing treatment of England only. One my hopes therefore for the book (as with Apples of Wales for a much more specific field) is that someone might pick up the strands and the broad narrative I have presented and do much more detailed work in the field, as it deserves. The fact remains; until the book came out, a presentation of Welsh food history was more or less unavailable to an English-language audience, and the situation in Welsh wasn’t much better.
Not that there is or was a scarcity of sources or material available within the field. As the general bibliography to the book shows, if you want the history of cheesemaking, cider, inshore fishery, baking and much else in Wales, there are volumes available in both languages. Traditional Welsh ‘peasant’ cooking received belated but heroic attention from Minwel Tibbot and Bobby Freeman in particular, who published between them the key recipe books in the field of Welsh food and rightly foregrounded the central place of women and women’s experience in this story. Tibbot in particular published academic pieces on several aspects of Welsh food during the early 20th century, not least in her wonderful volume on Domestic Life in Wales, now selling for £100 a copy. That and the introduction to Freeman’s First Catch your Peacock is the closest to a history of (modern) Welsh food available in English, and they sit alongside the sole volume in Welsh, Dysgl Bren a Dysgl Arian by Elwyn Hughes.
Though a valuable and scholarly collection of articles covering the topic from a helpful range of angles from foraging through early-modern alcoholic drinks to medieval calorific intake, this is also a disappointingly myopic view of Welsh food history. In short, the range of sources Hughes (a nutritionist at Cardiff University) draws on is admirable but his interpretation of the material leaves much lacking. I have written a brief rebuttal to the book’s main argument here, but in short it is a product of its time and consistently assumes that pre-modern actors on the whole had no agency, and what agency they had, they didn’t use. In this Hughes also departs from the tradition of portraying food found within the Welsh literary tradition, where a line of commentators from Gerald of Wales and the late medieval bards onwards to Dafydd Thomas in the 18th century and a growing chorus of bards, novelists and autobiographers in the 19th and 20th centuries are united in describing food in Wales, and the diversity of it, both regionally and between classes.
In other words, people have been commenting on Welsh food for a while, and the material is there for a wide-ranging study of this field. And yet this work has not been done, which is tantamount to saying that there have been no historians of Welsh food; which moves the question up a level but leaves us with the same quandary. Saying that there have been and are no historians of Welsh food (when in the last seventy years there have been numerous professional historians of every aspect of Welsh ecclesiastical, sporting, literary and political history) is itself, I think, tantamount to saying that no-one has considered this to be a sufficiently interesting field of study for them to work in it. If that is so, surely that tells us something significant about the place of Welsh food in the collective imagination (which I write about in the book’s post-script).
There are undoubtedly some practical obstacles; it is impossible to do any work on Welsh food history without a good grasp of the Welsh language. The sources needed to do the field justice are diverse in nature and scattered; from throwaway references in travellers’ accounts or poetry to newspaper articles, cookbooks, wills and housekeepers’ notes. But above and beyond this, I think that a certain romanticized and politicized flattening of Wales has much to do with this.
One way to unpack what I mean by that is by returning to the very salient distinction between ‘Welsh food’ and ‘the food of Wales’. By the former, we usually mean a perhaps essentialized (but nevertheless based in reality) group of foods prepared by people in Wales into the present day using methods handed down the generations. So cawl, welshcakes or laverbread. But by the latter we denote all the foods consumed in the country, whatever the provenance of the ingredients or the recipes; today it means oven pizza, curry, chicken nuggets and chips. Both of these are valid and helpful viewpoints to take when approaching Welsh food history (for a variety of reasons, environmental, social and scholarly I have deliberately chosen in the book to foreground the former) but until recently, it would I think have been hard to acknowledge this without suffering wanton accusations either of nationalism or of being anti-Welsh.
In other words, without a civic conception of Wales (and Welshness, very much including the language), it is difficult in an enlightenment-influenced cultural sphere to talk about ‘Welsh food’ without dragging in a romanticized conception of a tribal Welsh people living in hillside cottages, eating their time-honoured dishes and listening to harp music. And without a civic conception of Wales, talking about ‘the food of Wales’ becomes an exercise in foot-note making to the only relevant discussion, namely that of food in Britain (today or historically). Where food is involved – the woman’s domain, subject to changing fashions and fads and symbolic above all else of prosperity or poverty – all this is accentuated. And perhaps precisely because of the (exaggerated but again present) polarization within Wales between an anglicized gentry and Welsh-speaking peasantry, a history of Welsh food becomes (as in Hughes) a history of a downtrodden peasantry’s meager fare, while a history of food in Wales ignores anything Welsh about it.
All that amounts to the flattening of Wales, a complex place, in multiple directions depending to a great extent on one’s pre-existing political commitments. I don’t pretend that the history of Welsh foods I have presented in Welsh Food Stories entirely overcomes this; but it tries to do so, and tries at least to be honest about presuppositions and sources. Nevertheless, a full History of Food in Wales it is not – and in the next post, I’d like to sketch what such a history might look like…