From Swig Day to Wow Wow Sauce
Via Samosa Chaat, St David, Welshcakes, The Mabinogion & a Cabinet of Taste
Dearest Gentle Reader,
I hope I find you all well as you can be. This is a strange time of year and I have found myself without motivation or excitement in the kitchen. I am still cooking as my budget doesn’t run to daily takeaways but I am mostly making simple things or things I have made for so many years that they require little thought and even less effort. I have tray roasted a lot of vegetables and made leftovers meals. I’m still enjoying eating very much and I have tried two new takeaways to great effect and developed a ridiculous lifelong love for Samosa Chaat which is exciting in flavour, texture and colour, a fabulous find in one dish.
I still love reading about food, food history and food folklore and if I’m honest this has happened before. I think it’s a seasonal thing. When new items for Spring start appearing I’ll fall in love with cooking again. In the meantime I will manage with pasta with simple sauces, baked beans & cheese on toast and the occasional order from our local Nepalese restaurant. No-one can be sad when they have momos.
It’s still an exciting time for folklore as it is St David’s Day on Wednesday 1 March. The patron saint of Wales who is well known for his miracles, St David has a birthday somewhere between the 5th and 6th century. He’s an interesting saint to talk about in a newsletter which is mostly about food as he was an ascetic and only ate bread and drank water. He founded his own monastery and one of the miracles was surviving being poisoned by some of his own monks who were sick of this dull diet plus hard labour.
He is believed to be the son of a King of Ceredigion and a nun who was also later sanctified as St Non. There are lots of stories of David and the miracle storm that ensured he was born safely. A cathedral was eventually built over the site of the original monastery which means that St Davids is the smallest city in the Uk. His symbol was the leek and it also the symbol of Wales as well as the daffodil and both will be worn to celebrate St David’s Day which was the day of his death. It is also believed that a welsh regiment wore leeks in their hats during a battle so the could be differentiated from the enemy, the Saxons.
There are certain traditional foods that will be eaten in celebration of this day, the most popular being Rarebit, Cawl, Bara Brith, Glamorgan sausages, Laverbread (made from seaweed that grows along the welsh coast) and welsh cakes. Rarebit is toast topped with a thick rich cheese sauce sometimes made with beer then grilled until bubbling. Cawl is a stew/soup made with lamb (sometimes beef), leeks, potatoes, swede, carrots, and other seasonal vegetables. Glamorgan sausages are a meat free sausage made from cheese, used to be Glamorgan, now more likely Caerphilly, leeks and breadcrumbs. Bara Brith is a delicious dried-fruit filled tea bread often sliced and spread with butter. Laverbread is a puree made from soaking and then boiling seaweed, Richard Burton called it Welshman’s caviar. Welshcakes are made from a similar recipe to a fruit scone but are smaller and flatter, griddled on a bake stone rather than baked in an oven.
I will almost certainly not be making any of these, see above but I will be buying delicious welsh cakes and bringing them to work for my colleagues in honour of my Welsh middle name and the Welsh surnames of one of my sets of grandparents.
If you are interested in another side of Welshness, you wouldn’t go far wrong if you were to look into the red Welsh dragon, at least one tale of which can be found in the Mabinogion (a free version is available at archive.org). The tale in question is known as the Legend of Dinas Emrys. The Mabinogion is a collection of Welsh Myths & legends bundled with some Arthurian tales which were translated in the 19th Century by Lady Charlotte Guest. These are based on an amalgam of two much earlier manuscripts: The Red Book of Hergest and The White Book of Rhyddyrch from the 12th Century which collected much older oral tales. It is such a significant collection and their importance as records of early myth, legend, folklore, culture, and language of Wales are almost immeasurable. If you just want to hear Welsh myths and legends and ghost stories told to you you by an incredibly talented storyteller I can heartily recommend Time between Times, Storytelling with Owen Staton. He is also available on YouTube
I have one more slightly strange ritual that took place outside Wales but always on St David’s Day. It was apparently known Swig Day, where an immense silver gilt bowl, containing ten gallons, which had been presented to Jesus College, Oxford by Sir Watkin Williams Wynne, in 1732, was filled with “ swig ,” and handed round to those who were invited to the ceremony. The recipe for Swig is as follows:
Swig - Put into a bowl half a pound of Lisbon sugar ; pour on it a pint of warm beer ; grate into it a nutmeg and some ginger ; add four glasses of sherry and five additional pints of beer ; stir it well ; sweeten it to your taste; let it stand covered up for two or three hours ; then put into it three or four slices of bread cut thin and toasted brown, and it is fit for use. A couple or three slices of lemon, and a few lumps of sugar rubbed on the peeling of a lemon, may be introduced. Bottle the liquor, and in a few days it may be drank in a state of effervescence .
It’s another week without a story but I think Owen will do Welsh tales more justice than I would (plus you now have the whole Mabinogion to read). It’s also another week without a remedy but I think you deserve another week’s rest without me giving you cautionary warnings. I have also provided you with an additional recipe and it gives me the chance to tell you about the cookbook author Dr. William Kitchiner (d. 1827) who’s birthday was last week. The author of Apicious Recidivus, or, The Cook’s Oracle in 1817, Kitchiner was an optician, inventor, and notorious eccentric. It was highly unusual for the time for a man of his class to enter the kitchen at all, but not only did he cook and entertain with enthusiasm, he did all the preparation and washing up himself (although he had a hand with the cooking).
He had a folding box which he called his Cabinet of Taste, in which he stored all of his prepared condiments, sauces, and flavouring essences. He also locked the door and refused to admit late dinner guests no matter if they were family or close friends. I so want to spend time considering the Cabinet of Taste with you all. Perhaps we could create one together at some future moment, virtually at the very least. Dr Kitchiner was independently wealthy enough that he didn’t need to work, which was lucky because it is perfectly possible that he did not achieve the medical degree from Glasgow that he claimed.
I think you may forgive him when you find out the he invented the crisp (or at least the first written recipe for them in the Cook’s Oracle. He also invented ‘Wow Wow Sauce’ for which I have provided the recipe below.
I was definitely drawn to it because of the name of the sauce which I only know from its other iteration in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld where it is a favourite of Archchancellor Ridcully. There is is described as "A very potent and highly unstable condiment ... with a tendency to turn into an explosive when mixed with charcoal." It’s definitely a far more powerful sauce in that world and I’d definitely want to add in those extra flavourings mentioned in the original. If you’d like to try the Discworld version you can always try the one in Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook.
Here is his recipe for pickled walnuts, just in case you can’t find any, as well as his recipe for crisps (you didn’t think I’d leave you without sharing it with you did you?):
So with that, Gentle Reader, I must bring this letter to a close. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch via the comments or via any of my social media profiles/my website . If you have enjoyed this and would like to read further such nonsense and have not yet subscribed, please don’t hesitate to subscribe for free at the button below. You’d be very welcome and it would be a joy to write to you.