Wales' gastronomic strengths lie in her raw materials: meat, milk, grains, berries, root vegetables (particularly carrots, leeks and brassicas). Her culinary tradition is to treat them with honesty and simplicity. The national dish is cawl, a variable one-pot meal much like France's pot-au-feu, always eaten with a thick slab of cheese. As is usual among the Celts, baking is the main area of culinary skill.

All of which should suit the Taste of Wales, an organization run out of Cardiff, the Welsh capital in the prosperous South. I came into contact with the group when researching my new book, "A Cook's Year in a Welsh Farmhouse." Already well aware that the kitchen habits of these sparsely populated uplands, shepherding country, were unlikely to yield a wide range of historical treasure, I thought it wise to look at culinary traditions throughout the land.

We eat well around here. When I first moved into mid-Wales some 20 years ago, most of my neighbors grew their own vegetables. Many had hens, and some still kept a milk-cow and fattened a pig on the whey from the butter-making.

Judging the Taste of Wales

When I accepted an invitation in 2005 to join the judging panel of the Taste of Wales, I expected to learn a lot -- and did, at least for the first three years. Our instructions were to award scores based on the quality of materials and the appropriateness within the category, as well as for flavor and appearance.

By far the largest group was meat (beef, lamb, mutton), which was judged before and after cooking. Second most popular were traditional Welsh pork products such as bacon, sausages, faggots (fist-size balls of offal wrapped in a thin sheath of pig fat), brawn (head cheese) and ham. Cream, butter, and cheeses comprised the third largest category, dairy. Cakes, breads and preserves also attracted a large number of entries. Winners, in the main, turned out to be small producers or local butchers working within their own regional traditions.

The true taste, scores for commercial viability

When I returned to the panel in 2008, things had changed. The Welsh Assembly, a regional governing body, has its finger in most of the nation's pies, and markets the notion of Welshness. The Taste of Wales (now renamed the True Taste) was evidently in its sights. Our jury foreman, the chief meat buyer for a major supermarket, explained that scores were to be awarded for commercial viability.  Price-sensitive items such as sausages were to be categorized according to value-for-money. And when I objected, along with a few stalwarts from previous years, that we were here to judge excellence rather than price, the meat buyer set us straight.

"Commercial considerations," he said, "are exactly why we're here."

Seaweed-flavored sausage

We sampled our way through the cheap-sausage category, including several fatty specimens flavored with laverbread, a jelly-like puree made by boiling edible seaweed. Laverbread sausages taste horrible, as though the pig had been fed on fish guts, but were favored by the rest of the judges as something to be promoted as truly Welsh.

We continued with baked goods, a category in which the home cooks of Wales excel. A perfect bara brith, Wales' traditional tea-bread, was dismissed the chief meat buyer as insufficiently cakey, so I took it upon myself to explain that bara brith (the name means "speckled bread") is not, as might be supposed, an inferior form of English fruitcake but a spiced raisin bread enriched with egg. It lacks shortening, the ingredient which would make it cakey. Which means that bara brith can only be judged authentically when sliced and spread with the missing ingredient -- salty Welsh butter.

"Authenticity," said the team-leader, "is not what we're here to assess."

New Age bara brith

So it was no surprise when the overall winner, a rubbery Victoria sponge sandwiched together with scarlet gloop, was declared.  "This is packet cake," I announced to universal eye-rolling from the commercial corner. "Packet cake has no place here."

"On the contrary," explained our leader. "Packet-cake has product reliability. It'll taste the same in Tokyo as it does in Cardiff." Naturally I registered my feelings with the organizers. Naturally I'm never invited back.

Regional diversity disappearing with tradition

Wales is by no means a homogeneous mass. Latitude and geography -- a long sea coast and relatively barren interior, mountain ranges which slope steeply east to west -- have kept the population in place for generations, fostering independence. What may be true of the cooking of cawl in one valley may not be true in the next. Divisions between the three regions -- North, Mid and South -- are exacerbated by a concentration of population, prosperity and political power in the South. 

Meanwhile, regional diversity in food ways, dependent on a vanishing way of life and on skills -- traditional butchery, butter-making, the use of the bake stone -- once passed down through generations, is vanishing as fast as snow in summer.

As the smallest nation within the United Kingdom, Wales has managed, in the 20 years since I first took up residence, to reclaim pride in her language and history. To lose diversity by reducing its gastronomic inheritance to a southern politician's marketing of an invented notion of Welshness -- stirring cranberries into Caerphilly cheese where no berries went before, adding laverbread to sausages in a region where laverbread's unknown -- would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And that, for a nation just finding its feet on the world stage in the wake of the recent royal wedding, would be a crying shame.

This week's Zester Daily soapbox contributor, Elisabeth Luard, is a British food writer, journalist and broadcaster specializing in the traditional cooking of Europe and Latin America, and its social, geographical and historical context.

Photo: Elisabeth Luard with grandchild Bonnie Rose Luard Lee. Credit: Clare Richardson

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Congratulations. You are absolutely on the right path. In my opinion - based on facts - very soon the real Wales food tradition - now openly being extinguished in Wales - shall appear as the intellectual property of one or other Middle East country...

a guest , August 03, 2011