Welcome to the first of a short light hearted look at British food. I'll be doing classic dishes from around the UK that people actually do eat. I won't be posting recipes because you can easily google them.
This week we start with the welsh national dish cawl.
WHAT IS IT?
It's a bowl of soup that makes no apologies for its simplicity. The main ingredients are lamb, carrot, potato, parsnip, swede, and leek in roughly equal amounts. There is some variation between families, for example, I add a little garlic and parsley.
The welsh word for soup is cawl, so potato soup would be "cawl tatws" and carrot soup would be "cawl moron". However, if you just ask for "cawl" everyone not only in Wales but the whole UK knows what you mean, cawl is cawl.
In fact, some grumpy welshies refuse point blank to refer to any other type of soup as cawl.
MEANING OF NAME
There are two schools of thought on this,
1) It comes from the Latin"caulis" meaning a cabbage or cabbage stalk.
2) It comes from the Latin "caldus" meaning warm.
I think the second theory is true. While AU in Latin often turns to AW in welsh as in the first I'm not convinced of the cabbage connection. True early Roman accounts mention cabbage but that seemed to be eaten with everything. More importantly, caldus is also the root word for the Spanish dish "Caldo". I think that's more than a coincidence. (fun fact 81% of welsh people have Spanish DNA ancestry.)
The Vulgar Latin "caldario" from where you get "cauldron" means "hot bath" which I think adds weight to the second theory.
HISTORY
The first written recipes date to the 14th century but let's be realistic, it's only soup so is likely to be far older. The Romans introduced both leeks and whopping big cauldrons so it's likely this is when the dish first started to form. Over the centuries as new veg like potatoes arrived they were added and the cabbage stalks thankfully disappeared.
CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE AND POPULARITY
When you consider the UK is cold and wet it's easy to understand why our ancestors would be more attracted to a huge cauldron of soup bubbling over a roaring fire than a salad.
In modern times cawl has retained its popularity thanks to being a cheap meal that any idiot can make. When money is tight, cawl is often the go-to meal for struggling families. Similarly, when winter arrives then out comes the cawl.
Although there are millions of soups, many far more sophisticated, cawl is what you remember from childhood. Stick a lot of people from the UK, not just Wales in a kitchen with no recipe book and ask them to make soup and many will instinctively make cawl.
BUYING CAWL
Pop to the supermarket and you'll see dozens of types of soup but it's unusual to see a tin of cawl. Some small retailers, particularly butchers, do sell tubs of it they make themselves. Cawl is often found on menus in cafes where it is often overpriced and aimed at tourists. This tourist cawl is a far cry from homemade as it's often just a bag of frozen veg reheated with a stock cube. Most people make their own and some shops sell the ingredients together as a pack.
GOOD V BAD DISHES
School dinner cawl scared many a child. Half-cooked root veg floating in a bowl of dishwater stock with undercooked fatty grisly mutton. Some chefs spoil it by trying to make it more sophisticated, for example by cutting the ingredients into tiny cubes. Cawl found in pubs and cafes is often found wanting in generosity, more broth than veg, and the lamb scarcer than a Swansea virgin riding a unicorn.
A good cawl is slow-cooked to extract flavour from the lamb bones and veg. The pieces are large, plentiful and ideally of mixed size. Many say the last bit, after three days of reheating is the best.
POPPY'S OPINION
British food is often criticized as being bland and tasteless which is why I started this series with cawl. What can be more plain and boring than a bowl of root veg with no exotic spices?
Yet there lies its popularity, a carrot tastes a carrot, a potato like a potato. Each spoonful is different making a bowl an adventure rather than a homogeneous mass. The ingredients complement each other rather than hide behind a mountain of spice.
In a world where so many don't recognize basic veg or can't remember what a dicarrot tastes like, is that really a bad thing?
The chef is forced to bring out the best of each ingredient and sadly that's where a lot fail. Cawl takes two days to make, one to make the stock and pick the meat off the bones the other to cook the veg very slowly. Tossing everything in a pan with a stock cube for a 10-minute boil simply won't do.
Cawl is not something you'd normally order in a fancy restaurant, although I know of one hotel that has it on its wedding menu. But neither is it something you'd be ashamed to serve at home to guests.
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