The slightly cheeky title I had given to my address to the Real Welsh Food and Farming conference last Novemeber was ‘Just leeks and lamb? Why Welsh food history matters for our future.’[1] But if Welsh food historically was wider in its range than leeks, lamb and those other tourist-pleasing dishes we tend to think of as ‘traditional Welsh foods’, what are those other foods? In particular, were there any foods widely eaten in Wales historically that we might consider surprising today?
Partly asking this question is just a bit of good fun. But it does also make a serious point about variety in diet, always a good thing for health, and about the interest inherent in a food culture. One of the most persistent and myopic assumptions made by advocates of the modern Western diet is that the diets of the past (and one suspects that the thought continues, the diet of those living in traditional societies today) were boring and monotonous. This is of course no different in essence than the argument that modern diets are boring and monotonous i.e. true when viewed from certain angles, and undoubtedly so when those with the least access to good food within the society in question are cherry-picked as representative of the whole. I explore these questions in more depth in Welsh Food Stories, and also here and here.
So here are some of the ingredients and dishes that have real tradition to them in Wales – or in some part of the country – but that are mostly or entirely forgotten here today. Most contemporary Welsh people would view these foods as alien, foreign foods, but in their time they were widespread and important parts of the food culture:
Sheep’s cheese
Ewe’s cheese and goat’s cheese (and sometimes a mixture of the two) were commonplace in the mountainous tracts of Wales from the earliest times until the 19th century. Thomas Pennant provides us with a memorable description of the way these were made in the summer dwellings people had in the mountains:
‘This mountainous tract scarcely yields any corn. Its produce is cattle and sheep, which, during summer, keep very high in the mountains, followed by their owners, with their families, who reside in that season in Hafodtai or summer dairy houses as the farmers do in the Swiss Alps do in their ‘sennes’….During summer, the men pass their time either in harvest work or in tending their hers; the women in milking or making butter and cheese. For their own uses, they milk both ewes and goats, and make cheese of the milk for their own consumption.’
The practice also existed in parts of Glamorgan – primarily again the hillier northern part that later became the coal tract:
“A kind of cheese is made in some parts of the country of all sheeps milk, or a mixture of sheep and cows’ milk, exceedingly rich and highly flavoured.; and when of a proper age, little if at all inferior to the boasted Parmesan.” (John Evans, 1804)
One of the most interesting aspects of this liking of sheeps’ cheese and goats’ cheese in Wales is the connection between this and the historical love of baked cheese or in other words, Welsh rarebit. Sheep and goats’ cheese can work better as a baked good than many cows’ cheeses, as the famous Cypriot halloumi demonstrates. The Welsh, famously, were so fond of baked cheese that this became a widespread stereotype of the country’s food. Why then did ewe’s cheese and goats’ cheese die out? In a word, fashion.[2] I explore this story more in Welsh Food Stories…
Oysters
This was an affordable source of good-quality protein for the poor and was commonly available in several coastal areas and near market towns for centuries. As early as 1603 they formed the basis for export from Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire, and were shipped to places as far afield as Worcester, Bristol and other towns in a broad swathe of Western England. They were also sold in Welsh markets including in inland areas: the price of 100 oysters in Carmarthen market in 1652 was a penny – the same price as a dozen eggs or 6 pears. According to an observer a century later, Tenby oysters in particular were noteworthy for their great size, with many as large as 7 inches in diameter, which he believed put them amongst the largest in the world. They shaped the town’s character – a traveller in 1807 noted how there lay about in heaps ‘Mountains of shells, the aggregate of many a century, occur in several parts of the town, forming a nuisance that would amply pay for removing’. Swansea Bay and the Menai straits were also areas with significant oyster fisheries in their day (hence the village name ‘Oystermouth’ near Mumbles), the former providing a livelihood to nearly 500 men.
Oysters were generally eaten fresh in Wales, but there also developed a tradition of pickling them for export – Lewis Morris, a member of the illustrious Anglesey Morris clan – described the size and ‘fatness’ of Penmon oysters, and how they were ‘famously pickled’ in his day. And were these Welsh oysters any good? The Pembrokeshire antiquarian George Owen was in no doubt about this:
“Were it not that the Walfleete and Gravesend oysters are better frinded in court then this poore country oyster of Milford is, no question but he would, and well mighte, challenge to have the cheefe prayse before them both: and I presume if the poet Horace had tasted of this Milford oyster, he would not have preferred the oyster of Circæi before this”
Part two of this piece to follow next week…
[1] Eironi mawr hwn wrth gwrs yw nad oedd cig oen yn hanesyddol yn rhan bwysig o ddiet y Cymry, a hyd y gwela i does dim tystiolaeth chwaith iddo chwarae rol diwylliannol pwysig chwaith. Ond mater arall yw hwnnw y bydda i’n cyffwrdd ag e yn fy llyfr, Welsh Food Stories.
[2] In a word means that it really isn’t just fashion – there’s a whole array of historical contingencies, economic factors, policy decisions etc – but it would take an essay in itself to explore that here.
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