It seems surprising that, nearly 5 years after starting this blog (in January 2014), and with 102 posts under my belt, so little of the food I’ve written about has had a regional emphasis. Whilst many of the texts have a strong sense of place, the food is often less regionally-specific.
Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, however, provides a timely corrective. Thomas’s play was commissioned as a radio drama by the BBC and was first broadcast posthumously in 1954, two months after Thomas’s premature death at the age of 39. The play was later adapted for the stage, and subsequently made into a film (in 1972) and a TV drama (in 2014).
Under Milk Wood takes place over 24 hours in a small fictional Welsh fishing village, Llareggub (Bugger all in reverse). The 24 hour structure was one that Thomas had been toying with for over twenty years, inspired by James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses which also takes place over 24 hours.
Opening in the middle of the night, an omniscient narrator takes the audience into the surrealistic dream world of Llareggub’s inhabitants. These include Captain Cat, the blind retired sea captain who dreams of his seafaring days and is haunted by the ghosts of his drowned shipmates; the twice-widowed Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard who dreams of nagging her husbands; the lovers Miss Myfanwy Price and Mr Mog Edwards, whose courtship is carried out through letter writing alone; and the unhappily married Mr Pugh who dreams of killing his wife.
As morning dawns, the characters wake up and embark on their daily lives: as night approaches, they return to their dream lives.
The dream world of the play is further emphasised through Thomas’s poetic inventiveness with language. He takes clear pleasure in playing with words and sounds, to create almost a soundscape of life in this fictional Welsh village. Nouns are transformed into verbs – ‘Gossamer Beynon high-heels out of school’ – adjectives accumulate – ‘the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea’ – and the script shifts between prose and poetry. The local preacher, Rev Eli Jenkins, greets the dawning day with a poem, which the narrator terms his ‘morning service‘: opening ‘Dear Gwalia‘, an archaic name for Wales, the poem provides a geographical tour of Wales, taking the reader through its mountains and rivers but ending with the speaker’s beloved ‘Milk Wood‘.
And so to food. Whilst reference is made to ‘sago‘, ‘bread pudding‘, ‘broth of spuds and baconrind and leeks‘ only one food item is mentioned more than once – that local speciality, Welsh cakes. They first appear in the dream of Evans the Death, the undertaker, who dreams of a snowy childhood day fifty years previously:
Evans the Death…runs out into the field where his mother is making Welshcakes in the snow, and steals a fistfull of snowflakes and currants and climbs back to bed to eat them cold and sweet under the warm white clothes, whilst his mother dances in the snow kitchen crying out for her lost currants.
The association of Welsh cakes with childhood is made again in the second reference where at the end of morning school the schoolchildren bully a boy, Dicky, who refuses to kiss the girls in Milk Wood because his mother has told him not to. Fleeing their bullying clasp, Dicky runs home ‘howling for his milky mum, for her cawl and buttermilk and cowbreath and Welshcakes‘.
Welsh cakes date back to the late 19th century. The cookery writer Elizabeth David in her English Bread and Yeast Cookery (first published 1977), quotes from the second volume of Mary Vivian Hughes’ memoirs, A London Girl of the Eighties, in which she describes a tea she enjoyed in in the Welsh market town of Machynlleth in 1888: ‘The main dish was ‘light cakes’. This famous Welsh concoction is a kind of pancake, made with flour and eggs and buttermilk. You eat then hot, with sugar and butter, the very thing for a winter tea after a long tramp.’
Modern recipes don’t tend to use buttermilk, but I found it made the cakes extra light.
LLAREGGUB WELSH CAKES
Ingredients (makes 12-14):
225g self-raising flour (or 210g plain flour and 1 tablespoon baking powder)
½ teaspoon ground mixed spice
80g extra sugar, plus extra for sprinkling over the warm cakes
100g salted butter, chilled and diced
40g dried fruit (I used a combination of currants, raisins and finely chopped glace cherries)
1 egg yolk
4-5 tablespoons buttermilk (if no buttermilk to hand, use milk to which you add ½ teaspoon cider vinegar or lemon juice and leave at room temperature for 10 minutes)
Method:
Sift the flour, baking powder (if using) and mixed spice into a large bowl. Stir in the sugar.
Add the butter and, using your fingertips, rub into the flour mixture until it resembles breadcrumbs.
Stir in the dried fruit.
Mix the egg yolk with 3 tablespoons of the buttermilk and pour into the mixing bowl. Stir into the dry ingredients with a knife, adding more buttermilk if necessary, until the mixture comes together to form a soft but not sticky dough.
Lightly flour the worktop and turn the dough onto it. Using a rolling pin, roll out to about 1cm depth. Cut out rounds using a cutter – or if you don’t have a cutter use a sharp knife to cut the dough into small triangles.
Heat a griddle or frying pan (lightly greased if non-stick but otherwise do not grease) over a high heat. Cook the cakes in batches for about 2 minutes on each side until they are golden and puffed up. Remove from the pan and sprinkle liberally with the remaining caster sugar. Best eaten warm.
