Breakfast Like a King

Jon Gower

Extolling the virtues of the Great Welsh Brekkie – standing out from the rest with a nautical twist

©Brendan Gogarty In the village of Pwll where I grew up there was once a man called Clocsi who would hammer nails into the soles of his wooden clogs and walk out across the Loughor estuary at low tide, catching, or more accurately nailing at sh with every step he took.

On the same sands we gathered cockles, following the tradition of washing them and then leaving them to stand in water for the duration of three tides to get the sand out. Even now, when I buy a measure of these edible bivalves at Swansea market, sprinkling them with malt vinegar and white pepper I can taste my childhood. For me it is one of the key ingredients of the Great Welsh Breakfast.

For one of the great artery-clogging joys of life is a full breakfast and it can be a matter of national pride. In Scotland it might feature Ayrshire middle bacon, the Lorne square sausage and even a curious fruit pudding or sausage. Ireland includes soda bread as a variant and of course there is the Full English, sometimes know as the Full Monty, a er Supreme Allied Commander Earl Mountbatten’s habit of always starting the day with a tactical feed.

e Welsh, meanwhile, are a coastal people, at least numerically, with the majority living in towns, villages and cities only a seagull’s hop from the coast, so cockles and laver bread on the breakfast plate celebrate the fact that hardly anyone in Wales lives more than y miles from the sea. us the Great Welsh Breakfast naturally has a maritime tang.

Describing one key element of the GWB, being laver bread, a.k.a bara lawr or bara lafwr calls for chewing gum words, ones which ll the mouth rather. It is a gelatinous, mucilaginous, oleaginous green-black gloop but it is also downright delicious, a perfect foil to both the saltiness of bacon and its crispy texture. Little wonder that one of our nest actors Richard Burton called it “Welshman’s caviar.”

Seaweed gathering was written about by Wales’s rst great travel writer Geraldus Cambrensis and latterly by the English antiquarian William Camden in his 16th century bestseller Britannia:

Near St Davids, especially at Eglwys Abernon, and in many other places along the Pembrokeshire Coast, the peasantry gather in the Spring time a kind of Alga or seaweed, where they made a sort of food called lhavan or llawvan, in English, black butter. e seaweed is washed clean from the sand, and sweated between two tile stones. e weed is then shred small and well-kneaded, as they do dough for bread, and made up into great balls or rolls, which some eat raw, and others fry with oatmeal and butter.

Later on, Pembrokeshire laver bread was commonly dried over thatched huts before being sent to places such as Penclawdd for processing. Nowadays laver bread is given protected status by the European Union alongside Pembrokeshire New Potatoes, Welsh Caerphilly Cheese and Carmarthen Ham.

Its preparation involves a long boil of up to ten hours in the pot, during which the thin black, green and purple strands of the seaweed – back-breakingly harvested by scraping it o the rocks – transmute into a sticky black mulch. It’s a food that won’t win prizes for attractiveness but its taste is the very essence of the sea and chock full of marine goodness.

Seaweed contains more iron than a steak, more calcium than a hunk of cheese, and more bre than a dose of prunes, not to mention plenty of iodine and potassium. To boot, seaweed is the only plant source of vitamin B12. Breakfast laver is usually made into a patty or cake using a mop of oatmeal which is then cooked in le over bacon fat.

So what else makes up the Full Welsh? Sourcing local is, of course, key. e bacon should come from Wales and splendid butchers from Conwy to the Gwaun valley now o er online services to complement your local supplier, o en curing the meat in secret ways.

For bread to toast or fry we’re increasingly spoilt for choice, with a growing clan of artisan bakers who make ne loaves and cobs, from the Alex Gooch in Hay-onWye through Conwy’s Tan Lan to Cardi ’s Pettigrew Bakeries. e eggs should come from happy hens, with freedom to roam and range.

So, as my own variation on the Great Welsh Brekkie theme, try this. Press a hole in the middle of the slice of bread with a sherry glass then fry the bread in butter. When you’ve ipped over to the second side crack an egg into the hole and also start frying the little le over bread disc. Turn once again then serve, maybe with a garnish of shibwns as some of us call spring onions. Serve with cockles, laver, a crisp of bacon and maybe a sausage or three. Not forgetting brown sauce. You see, even long traditions have to start somewhere.