Britain and Ireland · Volume 33, The Bakestone, the Broth and the Salt Marsh
Cawl
South Wales (Dowlais, Merthyr Tydfil)
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 2 hours
- Researched
- No outside sources linked
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
The national dish, in its best-documented form: an industrial South Wales recipe from Dowlais, Merthyr Tydfil, archived by Amgueddfa Cymru.
As tradition built it
About 1½ to 2 hours in total.
Ingredients
- 1 beef leg joint
- 1 lamb best end of leg
- 1 small swede, chopped
- 3 carrot, chopped
- 2 leeks, sliced
- 6 medium potato, chopped
- 1 tbsp flour, mixed with a little cold water flour and water, for the thickening paste
- 1 small bunch parsley, chopped
- to taste Caerphilly cheese, to finish, optional
Method
- Put the beef leg joint and lamb best end of leg into salted water and boil together for an hour.
- Add the root vegetables, swede and carrot, in stages according to how long each takes to cook.
- Add the leeks and potato once the meat is tender.
- Thicken the broth at the end with a flour-and-water paste stirred through.
- Add the parsley only in the last few minutes, to keep its colour and freshness rather than let it cook down to nothing.
- Cook for a total of roughly an hour and a half to two hours.
- Serve as two courses from one pot, the broth first, then the meat and vegetables together, often finished at the table with a wedge of Caerphilly cheese crumbled in to soften in the heat.
Notes
This is honestly a South Wales, industrial-economy version of the dish; North Wales has its own upland pot, lobscows, a thicker beef and root vegetable stew documented as farm lunch fare across Gwynedd and as "quarry supper" in the slate-quarrying villages of Llŷn, but no source found in researching this chapter gives lobscows real quantities and timings to match, and this chapter will not invent them.
What a modern chef changes
Two proteins sous vide to their own doneness, and a clarified broth poured tableside
Rung 2
Method
- Cook the beef and lamb separately and sous vide: the beef at 58°C for 36 hours, the lamb at 56°C for 12, rather than boiling both together to a single point of doneness. Each protein reaches its own correct texture rather than a compromise between the two.
- Clarify the combined braising liquid through a gelatine and agar raft and pass it through a chinois for a genuinely clear broth.
- Cook a small dice of root vegetables separately to retain bite.
- Pour the clarified broth tableside over the meats and vegetables.
- Finish with a Caerphilly cheese foam, made in a whipping siphon from the same cheese traditionally crumbled in at the table, rather than the wedge itself, keeping the flavour but changing how it meets the broth.