CAWL

With a history dating back centuries, if not millennia, cawl is a Welsh favourite that’s both easy to define and hard to pin down

-  REBECCA SEAL

Cawl is a Welsh classic. If you grew up here, chances are it was a staple school dinner, Friday supper or weekend lunch. Outside of Wales, however, it’s less well known.

This is a dish that’s at once highly specific and quite hard to define. At its simplest, it’s a slow-cooked meat-and-vegetable soup, usually served during winter or early spring and often made with potatoes, onions, root vegetables and leeks, but it’s also closely related to stew. “It’s a peasant dish — plain but wholesome — that wouldn’t have been written down, but would have been handed down from family to family,” says food writer Nerys Howell, author of Welsh Food by Season.

On one hand, the word ‘cawl’ can be taken to mean ‘soup’ or ‘broth’ (as in, for example, cawl ffa: broad bean soup), but ‘cawl’ also has a more particular meaning, with a cultural significance much like that of Irish stew or Russian borscht. It may have come from the Latin ‘caulis’, meaning ‘stalk’ or sometimes cabbage, or it could be related to another Latin word, ‘calidus’, which is the root of ‘caldo’ — a cawl-like soup made in Galicia, northwest Spain, and in neighbouring Portugal.