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For years, Wales has offered visitors wondrous sights unlike anywhere else in the UK. Tourists will experience anything from the retina-stretching mountainous ranges of Snowdonia and the otherworldly uniqueness of Portmeirion, to the wild and gloriously windswept Pembrokeshire Coast and the fabulously expansive golden beaches of the Gower Peninsula.
The great food traditions of Wales stretch back centuries and often reflect an alchemic talent for cooking up something memorable from meagre ingredients. The country also benefits from a prodigious natural bounty sourced from land and sea.
Find even more foodie travel guides, destination inspiration and restaurant reviews in our travel hub.
Don’t leave Wales without trying…
1. Welsh rarebit
Try making your own… rarebit toasts, bangers with Welsh rarebit mash or tasty rarebit muffins.
2. Glamorgan sausage
Try making your own… Glamorgan cheese sausage rolls
3. Bara brith
Try making your own… classic bara brith or our sugar-crusted bara brith.
4. Lamb cawl
With its bright, decorous use of daffodils, St. David’s Day may well be one of the first augers of spring, but let’s face it, it’s still teeth-chatteringly cold out there in March. Help is at hand courtesy of this classic Welsh dish, which has a history as hotly contested as anything in the great Welsh cookbook. Sharing its DNA with lobscaws from north Wales (and, it’s contested, anywhere else within a hundred square miles) and even the humble Irish stew, Welsh cawl (or soup, as directly translated) is a slow-cooked lamb and leek broth whose foggy provenance means that you can embellish it with your own ingredients and little personal touches. The crucial ingredients are well-sourced lamb, time and your patience, for which you’ll be rewarded handsomely. It’s best enjoyed on a cold night in front of a roaring fireplace with a three-piece Celtic folk band playing in the corner. Try even more lovely lamb recipes for every season with our recipe collection.
Try making your own… lamb broth
5. Conwy mussels
Try making your own… mussels in white wine sauce with garlic butter toasts.
6. Leeks
Try making your own… leek and potato soup or our leek & Caerphilly crumble tart.
7. Laverbread
Laverbread is known as either ‘Welshman’s caviar’, a luxurious seaweed dish that’s often mixed with cockles, or as that weird, slimy green stuff nudged grimly to the side of the plate when eating a full Welsh breakfast. The great ‘love it/hate it’ item on this list, laverbread encourages great passions either way, especially from diners expecting ‘bread’ of some description to play a part. Much like oysters, laverbread offers an intense taste of the sea, and healthy-eating-types should note that it contains blood-purifying levels of iron.
8. Crempogs
Welsh cakes are all the rage during St. David’s Day celebrations, as are the slightly more obscure Welsh oatcakes, bara ceirch. However, at the risk of being controversial, I’m leaving them out in favour of these wonderful Welsh pancakes. Made with buttermilk and much thicker than normal pancakes, crempogs tend to be served hot, piled into a stack and drizzled with butter and honey in a manner as pleasing to the eye as it is infuriating to your dietician. Moreover, ‘crempog’ is one of the most purely enjoyable words to say out loud in any language.
9. Sewin and samphire
Try making your own… sea trout with samphire, potted shrimp & lemon
10. Salt marsh lamb
The often miserably rainy conditions that bedevil Wales in the winter are paid for in part by an expansive carpeting of lush green countryside that feeds some of the most prized livestock in the UK. Welsh black cattle has its admirers, but the Elvis Presley of Welsh meat is salt marsh lamb. Grazing on coastal areas that are often waterlogged by seawater (Anglesey in the north and the Gower in the south), salt marsh lamb dine out as much on samphire as they do grass, and their constant free-range roaming makes them much leaner than their slightly more fenced-in compatriots. The meat is luxuriously tender and has an unmistakable sweetness. Unlike a lot of lamb that gets rushed into action in order to be ready for the dinner table come Easter Sunday, salt marsh lamb is allowed to age for much longer, generally being available between July and October.
Read more about… salt marsh lamb
Cai Ross is the manager of Paysanne Bistro in Deganwy, North Wales. He’s also a passionate cinephile and writes for HeyUGuys, Film Inquiry and Cinema Retro Magazine. He has yet to fully embrace laverbread.
Do you agree with Cai’s choices? We’d love to hear about other classic Welsh dishes we’ve missed off. For more rundowns like this, visit our travel section.