Last time I started sketching five of the key considerations that need taking into account should anyone come to write a food history of Wales. Here I want to outline six more; incidentally, my eleven considerations are not put forward as an exhaustive list (after all, food intersects in important ways with all sorts of other domains in life), but merely as a starting point:

  • A rounded food history of Wales would pay attention to ingredients and to dishes. This can be a thankless task due to the scattered nature of the evidence, and is of course all the more difficult the further back we go; but is nevertheless illuminating inasmuch as people’s experience of food tends to be framed around meals (of some sort) composed of dishes (of some sort). Here we necessarily touch again on social differentiation within food; sumptuous dishes prepared at Elizabethan or Georgian gentry houses compared to much more meager fare in labourers’ cottages. In either setting, and all in between, dishes illuminate lived experience; we know that there are multiple references to both cawl and potaes in Welsh before 1600, as well as to llymru (‘yng Nghymru llymru a llaeth’ – ‘in Wales [people eat] llymru and milk’; llymru being a fermented oat dish) and to pies and pastries containing both fish and bird-meat. Dishes, for the most part, are how we consume food and Wales historically is no exception. But these dishes are composed of ingredients, and the evidence for ingredients – whether in the form of regional staple grains, imports from abroad or local dairy production – is more widespread than for dishes. To get a full picture, we need to apply both lenses.
  • Food preparation is equally important, and throws further light on the question of dishes, ingredients and their use. For this we need to consider the kitchen space – or hearth as was the case in all but the richest dwellings. Cottage and farmhouse hearth layouts and implements have been well studied in Wales for the early modern period and there is some documentary and archaeological evidence to take us back further. Something as iconic as the humble Welsh cake can only really be understood within the context of widespread and long-lasting bakestone baking, which in turn calls for an understanding of fuel use within the household economy, in a country where coal, peat, wood and gorse all found their way onto cooking fires for centuries. Can we arrive at a nuanced understanding of womens’ strategies in opting for different fuels, that is nested within an entire way of life and goes further than mere economics?
  • As is implicit in the two points above, the historian of Welsh food needs to accept the need to rake through an enormous variety of evidence in order to paint our multi-layered picture. An interdisciplinary approach is essential, taking onboard insights from literature in at least three languages (Welsh, English and Latin), archaeology, travellers’ and geographers’ accounts, recipe books, tax returns, religious writing, folk songs, port books, personal diaries and letters, government reports, newspaper articles and much else.
  • Similarly, food needs to be located within the landscape; both the farmed, foraged and fished landscapes. Place-names from berllan to bryn haidd do this implicitly within the Welsh language, but an understanding needs to be brought to bear that the ruined lluest on a hilltop was indelibly associated with summer butter-making, or that the (now empty) chapel vestry was also the location of sociable eating. On a deeper level, geology and climate influence foodways; from the prevalence of cider-making to the drier east of the Cambrian watershed in Wales through to the mid 20th century to the popularity of diodgriafol in more mountainous districts due to the presence of mountain ash trees.
  • Food is also a seasonal and social phenomenon. From the wedding feast to harvest supper, food has punctuated the memorable occasions in Welsh life, and to squash people’s experience of food to their daily fare is to ignore the way food functions. If in the spring after a run of poor harvests there is little to be said in favour of food, so the carousing is justified when the pig is slaughtered in the autumn of a good year after a stroke of luck. Even within the testimonies collected by Tibbot and Freeman in the 70s, many foods are associated with particular times of year or occasions. This is of course no less true of a kebab after a Six Nations match in Cardiff in the late 90s than of mid-winter feast in 13th century Abergwyngregyn.
  • Sixthly and finally for this list, we need to foreground the social place of food and the cultural view(s) of food in sway during different periods. Were the poets of the nobility singing against the medieval Zeitgeist in praising fleshly feasting? Or is the ubiquity of this praise within a Welsh context – so different in timbre to the poetry of their northern French counterparts during the same period – a sign of a different cultural atmosphere? At another juncture, what influence did Welsh nonconformity have on attitudes towards food? Did personal piety and an emphasis on learning and improvement tend to downplay the place of food – or merely displace it? Above and beyond this, the social place of food preparation and consumption as being the domain of women and to some extent family life needs to receive full and detailed treatment (as I intimated in Welsh Food Stories) or our history will remain unforgivably myopic.

There is of course much more to be said; we can usefully divide Welsh history into periods when it comes to food, and the past decades of intense commodification and globalization probably deserve their own treatment. But I think I have been implying by means of these two pieces that food within Welsh history writing has generally been neglected, and where it is touched upon, historians have been perhaps a little too quick merely to assume peasant poverty and thereby monotony of fare. There can, and should be a little more texture to the narrative than that. In fact, I think that a food history of Wales, written along these outlines would give scope to usefully evaluate areas of universal relevance, or at least emergent themes that shed light on the trajectories of food within Western societies over the past few centuries.

Those trajectories include what are in my view some major wrong turnings and blind alleys. The question for Welsh food futures is whether intentionally or not we manage to address some of those.