Here's to the home cooks
Bara Gwenith recipe
I was at a restaurant near the town of Tineo the hills of Asturias in Northern Spain back in the summer, being fed (fattened up) with copious hearty dishes including pote, a slow-cooked stew, among other things. I was there to interview the owners and cooks, mother and daughter Mayte and Blanca, who are both part of the lauded Club de Guisanderas (an all-women association dedicated to preserving the traditional dishes and recipes of Asturias). I asked them about how their kitchens and practices differ from the region’s equally lauded chefs and their Michelin stars. “They couldn’t do what we do. They wouldn’t be able to,” said Blanca, “They need to measure everything and time everything. We never do either. It’s all up here,” she continued as she tapped the side of her brow, while her mother nodded along, tapping her chest above her heart. You can read my Guisanderas article for National Geographic Traveller magazine here.
Almost none of the guisanderas I spoke to on my travels had any sort of formal training, they’d simply learned by eye, hand and taste. It’s what home cooks do all the time.
Even if you’re a strict recipe follower, you’ll still know how your particular oven cooks something, so that you maybe give it an extra five minutes. Or perhaps how much salt you add to your tastes. It’s why I love reading second-hand cookbooks where their previous owners have pencilled notes in the margin or stuffed a hastily written recipe on the back on an envelope, with titles such as “Easy chocolate cake” or “Aunty Edna’s blackberry jam”.
I have no formal training. I consider myself a home cook and I learned much of what I know – everything from preparing a Sunday roast, baking a sponge or simply washing up – from other home cooks, namely my grandparents.
My grandad used to joke that he knew what day of the week it was when he sat down to dinner. My Nannie Gwen had somewhat of a schedule of meals – out of ease and sometimes necessity – even though she could cook nearly anything, having been both a home cook and working in catering kitchens.
This newsletter began nearly five years ago now with a recipe for Welsh cakes or bakestones as we always called them. My now legendary Great Auntie Den always made them in our family. She’d make hundreds at a time, and she even shipped me off to university with a batch to help me make friends with my new flatmates. She’d worked in kitchens and dining rooms, and had done her silver service training, so any buffet at her house always featured sandwiches graced with fancy twisted slices of cucumber. She was a fantastic home cook and would try out anything in the kitchen from classic rice pudding (she loved the skin on the top) to pressing ox tongue. Sadly, we had to say goodbye to Great Auntie Den last week, not long after we celebrated her 95 extraordinary years. She’ll forever remain the doyenne of the Welsh cake in our family and I promised her I’d keep the tradition alive.
Here’s to all those wonderful, practical, inventive, nourishing home cooks that have gone before. And here’s to the memory of my fabulous Great Auntie Den.
The Recipe
Bara gwenith
I’ve been nosing in my old Welsh cookbooks again, and a version of this recipe appears in several of them – often baked in a pot oven. Bara gwenith simply translates as wholemeal bread, but I think it sounds so much nicer in Welsh – and not just because my nan was called Gwenyth. I don’t often make bread but I enjoy it when I do. The process of kneading and then the science (and magic) of watching it rise. This makes a classic wholemeal loaf, which on occasion I find quite boring, but you can easily liven this up with some seeds or flavour it with something like caraway – another ingredient that appears a lot in old Welsh recipes.
Ingredients
500g wholemeal flour
7g (one sachet) fast-action yeast
1 tbsp soft brown sugar
1.5 tsp salt
20g softened butter
275ml warm water
Method
Place the flour in a large mixing bowl (or a stand mixer if you want to do it the easy way), along with the yeast, sugar and salt, and then mix.
Make a well in the middle and place the softened butter, and most of the water, and begin to mix together until you form a soft dough. Keep adding water bit by bit until you think it feel about right.
Tip it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 10 minutes until smooth and elastic (you won’t need this long if doing it in the mixer).
Place in a large well-oiled bowl and cover with a damp tea towel. Leave to rise for an hour.
Tip the risen (hopefully) dough out and gently knead again and form into a round loaf shape. Place on a baking tray lined with oiled parchment paper. Cover with the tea towel and allow to rise again for an hour. After 30 minutes, preheat your oven to 200°C/180°C Fan/400°F/ Gas Mark 6.
When the dough has risen, pop it in the oven for around 45 minutes until golden. Leave to cool on a wire rack. Serve with lashings of salty Welsh butter and dip it in cawl or use as the base for rarebit.
If you try the recipe out, don’t forget to tag any photos with #mywelshkitchen.
The Playlist
To me, cooking and music go hand in hand, whether that’s singing at the top of your voice using a wooden spoon as a microphone while waiting for pasta to boil, or dancing around with the oven gloves on as the oven timer counts down. Here are some ideas for your Welsh Kitchen playlist.
This week we have Petula Clark who celebrated her 93rd birthday last week. Her ancestry is Welsh on her mother’s side and, while she was born in Surrey, she spent many years at her grandparents in Pentrebach near Merthyr Tydfil to escape the blitz in London.
Second up is the group Pedair made up of some of Wales’s best folk singers, Gwenan Gibbard, Gwyneth Glyn, Meinir Gwilym and Siân James.
My Happiness by Petula Clark
Y Môr. by Pedair
Time for a tipple?
Ross on Wine: Christmas Crackers
Come along to my wine tasting at the London Welsh Centre on Thursday 4 December. We’ll be tasting my picks of the best supermarket wines for Christmas, from festive fizz to tipples to go with your turkey.
I also spotted that my friend Joe from Rogue Welsh Cakes is doing a masterclass and workshop at the London Welsh Centre on 14 December in case you fancy learning how to make them.
From the archive
Handwritten recipes
For the past week, I've been testing recipes for some work I'm doing for a well-known supermarket magazine (watch this space). Testing is a tricky business, especially for the type of cook that I am. I shake a bit of this in here, add a bit more of that in there, cook it a bit longer of I think it needs crisping up. But when you're recipe testing, every…
Returning to my trees
I’ve been out in my kitchen balcony garden this week. It’s no bigger than a phone box, but it allows me to grow a few herbs and vegetables to use in my kitchen. I harvested the last of the cherry tomatoes, and finally planted my daffodil bulbs. The parsley, mint, rosemary and sage are still going strong but I’m not sure if they’ll survive the colder wea…
A tour of Welsh London
“At one time, there were 700 Welsh dairies in London”, my guide Caroline tells me as we wind our way from Farringdon Station to the London Welsh Centre on Gray’s Inn Road. I’m on a Welsh walk of London – of the many Caroline has done over the years. Usually, they take place around St David’s Day, and you amble through The City learning of Welsh societie…