Watching the BBC’s chef competition, split into regional finals, we come to two chefs, both working in London, who’ve been jemmied into representing Wales. They both agree that they have a problem in that Wales doesn’t really have a cuisine to speak of. One goes for laverbread, a gooey and horrible derivative of seaweed; the other plumps for cockles. My grandfather liked cockles - he’d take me down to the Pembrokeshire coast to dig in the rippled sand when I was young and we’d return with a heavy bucketful, which my grandmother would prepare and which I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. My grandfather smothered the cockles in vinegar and pepper before wolfing them down.
Dour Welsh Methodism was suspicious of all pleasures, including good food. I didn’t taste garlic, for example, until I was 17. There was even a tradition of onions being a foreign food imported by Frenchmen on bicycles, each called the Johnny Onion Man, or in Wales, the Shonny Onion Man, Shonny being either the Welsh version of John (Sion) or a Welsh attempt at the French Jean. Onions were exotic. This was Wales.
