Welsh Food Stories

Carwyn Graves

This delicious book is a triple-decker sandwich, layered with memoir, travelogue, and tidbits of literature to celebrate traditional Welsh ingredients.

Welsh writer (and gardener) Carwyn Graves is one of the founders of The People’s Kitchen, a nonprofit that’s bringing cooking back to communities. He spent four years writing this book, traveling around Wales to meet local food makers — farmers, bakers, millers, fisherman, and other people devoted to real food. Touring farms and the seaside, he ate all manner of tasty things, and learned the often-moving stories of the people keeping traditional food techniques alive.

Each chapter is a sort of biography of one ingredient: bread, cheese, salt, butter, lamb and beef, chips, cider, leeks, and the slap-you-in-the-face with the taste of the sea trifecta of oysters, cockles, and laver (seaweed).

Carwyn’s writing deploys a rich food-vocabulary guided by his senses, so we see, hear, smell, and taste everything right along with him. Once he’s set the scene, we meet the food makers and learn the ins-and-outs of their jobs. You may be surprised to find yourself fascinated by how geology affects grain harvests — and riveted by stories of how cockles are harvested from the beach.

The first chapter is a banger about bread, or bara. The Welsh language offers a profusion of bread-words, poetic in their specificity.

Bara brith is a good one, a sweet bread made with dried fruit that’s been soaked in tea overnight, then transformed into a craggy, dense loaf. Sliced thick and slathered with salted butter, it’s earthy and sweet. And then there’s butter bread — bara menyn — words so essential, they ‘evoke homeliness in a way almost nothing else can.’

The chapter on butter is almost painfully alluring. It begins: ‘On a lazy July day like this one, when the air is heavy with the humming of insects and laced with the lightest of breezes, you can…you sometimes taste the herbs on the wind.’

Who wouldn’t want to taste herbs on the wind?

Throughout the book, Carwyn laces his own storytelling with bits of poetry, accounts from personal diaries, song lyrics, and snippets from folklore to illustrate that these foods have been on tables throughout the centuries. The whole endeavor is infused with a passion for Wales that’s infectious. It’s quite life-affirming to know these kind people — who love what they do and respect tradition — are out there, making delicious things that nourish body and soul.

As I bite into this particular loaf, I have good reason to pay full attention to the flavour. Lightly toasted, the crumb is immediately satisfying. I can tell this is bread that keeps its shape. It’s dark, chewy, malty; more like rye bread than any normal wheat loaf. It has structure and depth. There are those deep notes some grains have. It’s complemented wonderfully by the tangy, salty butter. It all tantalizes my tongue with a distinctive nutty wholeness that I turn around in my mouth for days after I’ve left [the farm]. The reason I am so interested in this slice of bread is that I am tasting the closest surviving thing to the breads eaten in Wales for centuries past. And I am eating it in the kitchen where the bread was baked, on the site where the flour was milled and only a few miles away from where the wheat is currently growing. — Carwyn Graves

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