The culinary glasnost of postwar England is a familiar story. Thanks to Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, we opened up our hearts and minds to tomatoes, garlic and ginger, and we’ve tasted the benefits ever since. Less well known, perhaps, is the parallel embrace of another exotic cuisine: Welsh.
The late Bobby Freeman grew up in Manchester, and fell in love with Welsh food when she opened a hotel in Fishguard, Pembrokeshire. She liked to tease her English customers by serving vichyssoise (a cold leek and potato soup) as “chilled cawl cennin”. Undeterred by the many people who told her “there’s no such thing as Welsh food”, in the early 1960s she collected recipes from cooks living and dead, becoming a formidable social historian. She was particularly indebted to Lady Llanover, a Victorian who, as part of her drive to revive Welsh folk culture, wrote an idiosyncratic cookbook called The First Principles of Good Cookery (1867). In it, a hermit (Welsh and wise) gives elaborate instructions to a traveller (English and slightly idiotic) for preparing mutton stew, chicken and leek pie, or – the dish that Bobby Freeman made famous – salt duck, all made delicious by use of the ffwrn fach, or double boiler.
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