The long story of global Welsh food

Carwyn Graves

“There’s more variety and quality than ever before these days – the bolted coriander from the corner store is a thing of the past,” explains Yasmin Begum, writer and social researcher from Cardiff.

With communities from different parts of the (then) British Empire settling in Cardiff from the 1850s onwards and global influences and ingredients on food in Wales stretching back much further, Global Welsh food is no new phenomenon.

But this is a story that covers heritage just as much as freshness…

Minority Ethnic Cuisines?

Despite receiving comparatively little attention, the influence of diverse ethnic and cultural groups on food habits in Wales has long been significant. “When Michael X visited Cardiff in the 1960s he was amazed at the fresh red peppers he found there,” Yasmin goes on to explain.

Those peppers were the tip of a much larger food world which owed its existence to the docks and the various communities of Tiger Bay. The dynamics were comparatively unique for post-war Britain, including ingredients imported into the docks that continue to be mostly absent from supermarket chains today, such as cassava and yams.

But those ingredients were being brought into Cardiff because of the local demand – which was diverse.

One of the first significant minority ethnic communities to establish roots in the nascent Tiger Bay was Yemeni in origin, with a strong sailing culture.

“When sugar was hard to get hold of during periods of rationing around the wars, the sailors brought in plenty through black market shipping links. So everyone knew you could go to the mosque and get a good cup of tea.”

As Yasmin describes, there was already enough of an established global food culture locally for these things to happen – along with well-frequented local institutions like Mr Ali’s Bombay Restaurant (the first Indian restaurant in Wales), Cairo Café (serving camel milk) and local religious parades in Butetown featuring curry and rice – all of which to varying degrees were sustained by the area’s mixed culture.

Some of this is likely to have been the case in other port areas of Wales, even if to a lesser extent. Swansea docks had a black community from the 1700s onwards and the city saw a large influx of Russian Jews in the 1880s.

And of course, by this point black tea, sugar and “Welsh” cakes with ingredients and influences from across the globe, entwined with colonialism, were already becoming emblematic of the nation.

I put it to Yasmin that even if we haven’t talked about it this way, global Welsh food culture has clearly been a lived reality on the ground for a long time.

Global Welsh food culture

On a warm Wednesday morning in inner city Cardiff, a Syrian-born local mother strolls past with two toddlers in the pram – full bag of fresh vine leaves in tow. As Poppy, coordinator at Global Gardens tells me over tea, there’s a constant coming and going of people and food influences from this urban oasis.

“We had an Iranian chef here recently, teaching loads of us about how to use rose petals in cooking. Then the other week, a guy from Nigeria harvesting pumpkin leaves to cook – which I had no idea you could eat!”

Behind a nearby old apple tree, huge and wizened, a group was sat discussing how to revive traditional Welsh fabric crops.

This mix of old and new, global and hyperlocal, is clearly representative of a food scene that has been developing on the ground in our communities for decades – one where a Welsh curry is just as much a relevant concept as Welsh lamb cawl, and just as familiar a dish to boot.

As Yasmin muses, “you can see the different waves of settlement here reflected in eateries, and a really noticeable increase in quality at these places as people compete for custom.

I noticed the other day a new Kurdish-run place called ‘Shawarma Today’ – the point being to tell locals that the shawarma there is made fresh!”

And as new areas of Wales in recent years have become Home Office dispersal areas for refugees, the local food scene often develops too – as witnessed in the case of Aberystwyth’s recent profusion of new places.

Entwined

All these food stories are ultimately individual – but perhaps the tale of Olive Salman from the Rhymney valley encapsulates the deep roots of Global Welsh food as well as any. Born in 1921, she met her soon-to-be husband while slightly lost in Cardiff and asked him for directions. Married by 1938, for decades they ran the Cairo Café together – an institution with a Muslim prayer room out the back, serving both Yemeni and ‘British’ food to a varied clientele.

That places of this sort now exist from Tregaron to Trearddur and Treherbert has become a platitude.

What is less widely appreciated is that, largely unsung and unrecognized for its contribution, this fruitful interweaving of food influences has been growing away in Wales for eight generations or more.