The Spices in your Welsh Cakes
How the cultural history of the Welsh cake complicates conventional understandings of the role of Wales in the British Empire. Words by Yasmin Begum. Illustration by Keira Evans.
Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, Yasmin Begum uses the Welsh cake as a lens through which to examine the tangled inter-relations between the culinary history of Wales and colonialism.
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The Spices in your Welsh Cakes
Yasmin Begum explores how the cultural history of the Welsh cake complicates conventional understandings of the role of Wales in the British Empire.
One day, when I was a child, my father explained to me, ‘There’s loads of gora [white people] food that they don’t cook no more,’ gesturing to the wild garlic leaves around us in Roath Recreation Ground in Cardiff. Wild garlic, which grows abundantly throughout Wales, is an integral part of traditional Welsh cuisine, but until very recently (as its ascendancy among the middle classes has made it meme-page fodder) it had largely fallen out of wider use. There’s a joke about the British colonising the world for spices only to not season their food. Although it makes me smile, it’s an oversimplification, of course: as ingredients like wild garlic show, the history of British food is more complicated. A significant amount of culinary heritage (as summarised in Jane Grigson’s 1974 book English Cookery) has been lost, and many herbs and natural flavour sources native to the UK (like nettles, dandelion leaves, and sorrel) have fallen out of common usage.
Yet even those things viewed as traditional British foods are often intertwined with the history of empire – particularly when it comes to Wales. Think of the tea in bara brith, for example, or the tamarind in the Worcestershire sauce on Welsh rarebit. Or think of the Welsh cake, with its allspice, cinnamon, and tea. All three also also include sugar, which, although first introduced to Britain nearly a thousand years ago, remained a luxury item until the 1700s, when the combined effects of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade drastically reduced its prices.
Further complicating this picture is the positioning of Wales itself as the ‘first and last colony’, an interpretation of the theory of internal colonialism that started to gain traction in the 1970s. In the title essay of Wales: The First and Last Colony (2018), published the year he was elected leader of Plaid Cymru, Adam Price argues that the English conquest of Wales fulfils the criteria of colonialism, emphasising the historical and ongoing subjugation of the country. Implicit in this narrative is a separation of Wales from complicity in British imperialism, not to mention a weird exceptionalism positioning Wales’s current circumstances as distinct from those of the fourteen British Overseas Territories, or the people of Ireland. Similar schisms are also apparent in discussions of race and ethnicity in contemporary Britain, which tend to be centred on England, while conversations about Welshness and Welsh identity generally presuppose whiteness.
In the Welsh cake, slavery, colonialism, and Celtic identity all collide. Welsh cakes have long been a symbol of Wales, a symbol that has travelled around the world with Welsh diaspora communities. Yet this potent signifier of Welshness couldn’t have existed without British colonialism, as it relies on ingredients that cannot be grown in the UK. The history of the Welsh cake betrays a more intimate relationship between Wales, slavery, and the Empire than is commonly explored within British history and Welsh culinary heritage.
Although unspiced and unsweetened griddle cakes have been made for centuries, Welsh cakes as we now know them – flattened griddle cakes made with sugar, sultanas, flour, salt, butter, and spices – have been ‘teatime favourites in most parts of Wales’ only since the end of the nineteenth century, according to TheWelsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales. Despite their name in English, Welsh cakes have no one single name in the Welsh language. ‘Picau ar y maen’ (cakes on the stone), ‘teisennau gradell’ (griddle cakes), and ‘cacen gri’ (crying cakes) are just some of the twenty-three regional variations of griddle cake collected in Welsh Fare, a landmark 1976 text on traditional Welsh culinary heritage by the historian and anthropologist Sara Minwel Tibbott. Just over a century earlier, in 1867, Lady Llanover’s First Principles of Good Cookery – an odd cookbook claiming to feature recipes ‘communicated by the Welsh hermit of the cell of St Gover’, which can be viewed as an indicator of food in Wales at the time – featured none.
While it is difficult to pinpoint the ‘first’ recipe for Welsh cakes, the relationship to the culinary trends informed by the British Empire is clear. In the aftermath of the British Empire taking over Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from the Dutch in 1796, spices became more and more affordable, even for working-class people. As a result, spices (cinnamon in particular), which came into Britain through ports like Liverpool and Cardiff, began to be more widely used in British baking. During the industrial boom of coal and slate in nineteenth-century Wales, when the nation underwent a huge period of transformation, spiced griddle cakes became an increasingly common part of daily Welsh life, with workers taking them to the quarries and mines every day. By World War I, the Welsh cake as we know it today had claimed its place in Welsh kitchens.
The Welsh cake’s relationship with colonialism is not unidirectional. As the Welsh language went into decline in the nineteenth century, various organisations emerged that viewed imperial expansion as a way to keep Welsh culture alive. In 1865, a boat called the Mimosa set sail from Liverpool for Patagonia with 150 Welsh-speaking settlers on board. Among their number was Lewis Jones, who was a prominent member of the Colonising Society. This society had been founded with the express purpose of establishing a Welsh-speaking settlement overseas to safeguard Welsh language, culture, customs, and food – in essence, a new Welsh nation, free from the influence of British rule.
Jones had extensively organised across north-western Wales and Liverpool to secure prospective settler-colonists. He also corresponded with the Argentinian government, who gave them permission to settle Patagonia. The colonists may not have had an army, but the arrival of the Welsh (and other European) settlers was pivotal to expanding Argentinian influence in the region. It coincided with the so-called ‘Conquest of the Desert’, a genocide of the Indigenous people of Patagonia led by future Argentinian president General Julio Argentino Roca. Trelew, the capital of the Patagonian province of Chubut, is named for Jones.
Although the Mimosa was not the only attempt to create a Welsh-speaking colony, it was the only one that achieved its stated aim – there are still an estimated 6,000 Welsh-language speakers in Patagonia today. The settlers were familiar with farming difficult landscapes and irrigated the area in which they found themselves. But because of the different ingredients available in Patagonia, the Welsh settlers were forced to adapt their cuisine – including the Welsh cake. One food of the Welsh diaspora that is still well known in Argentinian cuisine is la torta negra galesa, or the black Welsh cake, made with brown sugar and a heavy amount of rum in which the dried fruit is soaked.
Rum, of course, was not a traditional ingredient in griddle cakes – the climate was too cold to enable its brewing in Wales – but the history of rum production in the Caribbean and South America, and the associated histories of slave plantations and exploitation, are inextricably linked to Wales. The rum used in la torta negra galesa came from sugar plantations in Argentina, which had been farmed by enslaved people until the 1850s. And the eponymous Captain Henry Morgan – the brutal former governor of Jamaica and slave master whose name and likeness are still used to sell rum – was born in Llanrumney (in what is now east Cardiff), and named one of his plantations after the area Llanrumney.
Someone else with ties to both Llanrumney and Jamaica is Leroy William. William was born in Cardiff to a Welsh mother and Jamaican father who loved to bake and cook. Noticing a lack of Welsh–West Indian fusion food, Leroy started The PattyMan, a food business and social enterprise, to honour his late father’s legacy. One of his signature dishes is the patty cake, his version of a Welsh cake: ‘A lot of people make Welsh cakes, but nobody makes a Welsh cake like I make my patty cake. I put in a hell of a lot of mixed spice, and a few other spices from Jamaica,’ Leroy tells me. ‘I used to soak the fruits in rum and spices. With my Jamaican heritage, I wanted something different.’
Both Leroy’s patty cakes and la torta negra galesa incorporate fruit soaked in spices and rum, but with hugely different histories. Although these histories are distinct, they both complicate the passive role that Wales often assumes in relation to the British Empire. The rise of devolution and the creation of the Senedd (Welsh Parliament) in the 1990s consolidated a nation-creation myth of Celtic exceptionalism from the British Empire; this remains a bedrock of Welsh identity, which is grounded in contemporary ideas of Wales as a tolerant nation.
Yet this narrative of Welsh identity – and the associated culinary traditions – continues to exclude the long histories of non-white communities, who are integral to the fabric of Wales. Cardiff is home to Butetown, the second-oldest Black community in the UK (after Liverpool), which was settled by Black sailors as early as the 1860s – the same decade as the Mimosa leaving Liverpool docks. After Butetown, the docks of Barry and Pillgwenlly (Newport Docks) were formed – predominantly non-white communities that directly developed via seafaring linked with imports and exports related to the Empire. Both Pillgwenlly and Cardiff became flashpoints for race riots in the summer of 1919, with David Lloyd George (still the only Welsh person to ever hold the office of Prime Minister) advocating for the repatriation of sailors to Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. A hundred years on, Wales is only just beginning to have conversations on multiculturalism and anti-racism that truly address these legacies.
The docks maintained a link between historical migrant communities in South Wales and the rest of the world until well into the late twentieth century. Leroy recalls his father and aunt getting rum and drums of vegetables from the boats at Barry Docks, and people arriving back from Jamaica with ‘suitcases full of yams’.
My dad used to tell me a story about a man who came to Cardiff Docks as an Indian, went abroad as a Pakistani, and came home as a Bengali. His dad, my dadaji, came to Cardiff on a banana boat in the 1960s. The locals loved the food he cooked at K2 ‘Indian’ takeaway, but his wife, my dadima, would never eat it. The flavours that they both cooked with – allspice, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg – are also the flavours of the Welsh cake. Two generations later, my Welsh is much better than my Panjabi, but this feels like just as strong a connection to the Welsh cake as the fact that Gladys, my Welsh–Jamaican great-grandmother on the other side, made her own versions with grated apples to help them keep. Or that my other great-grandmother, Doreen – who used to run pubs in the Cardiff docklands and would tell amazing stories of fighting the colour bar and my great-grandfather’s legendary jazz nights – would order Welsh cakes each Friday from the local bakery.
The food of my dadaji and dadima, or any of the other minority ethnic communities of Wales, are not recognised as part of Welsh heritage. Minwel Tibbott’s book did not feature any recipes from Mr Ali’s Bombay Cafe, the first Indian restaurant in Wales, or the legendary Cairo Cafe (which served Yemeni and British food and Arab coffee back in the 1930s), and it doesn’t contain la torta negra galesa either. Minwel Tibbott’s ‘traditional Wales’ is resolutely white and distinct from the British Empire. The relationship between Wales and colonialism is never discussed, even as the pages of her book abound with references to the spoils of imperialism.
As Stuart Hall famously said, ‘People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries … I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea.’ Hall argues that there is no history of English that isn’t also the ‘other history’. In 2020, I asked a friend, ‘Can we decolonise the Welsh cake?’ While at the time I was being facetious, it’s a question I’ve returned to as efforts of Welsh history fall short time and time again. Some of us are the sugar and spices in the Welsh cake; some of us, like Leroy, are remaking the Welsh cake in our own image, and more of us are the cup of tea itself. It’s hard to be inspired by a Welsh nationalism that emphasises its own colonial origins without acknowledging this multiplicity or Wales’s own participation in British imperialism.
Credits
Yasmin Begum is a writer, researcher, campaigner, and creative practitioner based in her hometown of Cardiff, Wales. She works in English and Welsh, and runs a substack called Decolonising Wales. Yasmin is on Instagram and X.
Keira Evans is an illustrator based in Cardiff, Wales. If she’s not busy annoying her cat, then you can find her making earrings, sewing, or drawing. Keira is on Instagram @keiraeillustration.
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Special thanks to Amanda Herbert, Carwyn Graves, Nerys Howell, and Marion Loeffler for their insights.
Excellent writing, and so many intriguing possible sidebars worth exploring. Thank you.
This is an incredible piece of writing. Thank you very much. Deserving of a very wide audience.