Talk:Cawl

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Where's the cheese?
Surely the distinctive ingredient of cawl (as opposed to any other local stew from throughout England) would be the inclusion of cheese? This is generally unusual, characteristic of cawl, and regularly commented upon - particularly by English writers. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:58, 28 December 2009 (UTC)


 * The problem is that cawl is just the Welsh word for soup. The word only refers to something more specific when used in English, and I've never seen any evidence that this something more specific is anything other than "soup with ingredients that Welsh people in previous centuries would have had access to" or maybe "soup containing ingredients associated with Wales".  In other words, it's as traditional as a ploughman's lunch.  I'm sure ploughmen often did have bread and cheese for lunch, but the association of the name with a particular set of ingredients is an invention of modern pubs.  Similarly, I'm sure lamb, leeks and potatoes, and on occasion cheese, were common ingredients of Welsh soup historically, but the association of the word cawl with any particular recipe is a modern English-language invention.
 * That said, if you have any of these English writers to hand, they'd be a good source for what typically goes (or went) into soups in Wales; or at least what the English expected to go in.
 * garik (talk) 12:56, 1 March 2010 (UTC)


 * What's the oldest reference you have for "cawl" in the sense of a generic soup? While this is certainly how it's widely used these days, the history of cawl is as a stew with cheese added to it, sufficiently unusual as such to give rise to comment from English visitors right back to the medieval period (and maybe earlier?). Andy Dingley (talk) 13:32, 1 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Hmmm... I'll need to check the University of Wales dictionary to get a reliable reference. That said, I may be wrong about the history of the term&mdash;I'm sure you're right, for example, that it's been used for quite a long time by English writers.  If you have a good reliable source for cawl originally being a specific sort of soup (with cheese in it) then that would be very interesting.  We do have to keep the history of the word in Welsh clearly distinct from the history of the word in English, however.  In other words, do you mean that cawl originally referred to a very specific sort of cheesy soup in both languages, or only in one of the two?  Even if mediaeval Welsh people put cheese in their soup, that doesn't mean that cawl meant "soup with cheese in it" to them (though it might have done to the English observers), any more than cheese is an inherent ingredient of panini.  But I'm prepared to accept it might have been.  As I say, I'll try to take a look at the University Dictionary next chance I get.  I also have a history of food in Wales somewhere, which I'll take a look at. In any case, what this article needs above all are reliable sources. garik (talk) 14:51, 1 March 2010 (UTC)


 * So I just checked the online version of the University of Wales dictionary. It doesn't have as much information as the printed version, but it's been useful all the same.  It gives: "a) soup, pottage, broth; gruel, fig. mixture, hotchpotch, mess c.1400 b) cabbage, colewort, pot-herbs 13g [i.e. 13C]".  It then gives a list of collocations, which are mainly different sorts of soup, such as cawl cennin (leek broth), cawl cig (meat broth), cawl pys (pea soup), cawl erfin or cawl maip (turnip broth), cawl coch (red pottage).  These all date from various points between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries. Interestingly, two of the earliest collocations (c. 1400) are cawl coch and cawl gwyllt, which are translated as red cabbage and wild cabbage respectively. The only other reference as early as that is to cawl erfin (turnip broth). In other words, everything points to the word originally referring to soup cabbage, then to cabbage soup (or broth), and then to soup generally.  There's no mention of cheese at all.  That said, my history of Welsh food (which is an academic work in Welsh, so a reliable source) may say something more about the typical ingredients.
 * In English, of course, the word is only really used to refer to stews associated with Wales in particular. Nowadays, what's called cawl in English tends to contain lamb and leeks; in previous centuries, cheese (and toasted cheese in particular) were very strongly associated with Wales (hence Welsh rabbit). So it doesn't surprise me that medieval English writers took it as a standard ingredient.  And, as such stereotypes often have a real basis, perhaps it was a common ingredient of medieval Welsh soups.  But I would be very surprised to learn that, in Welsh at least, the word has ever been used in particular to refer to soup containing cheese. garik (talk) 15:11, 1 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Annoyingly, my history of food in Wales (Dysgl bren a dysgl arian: nodiadau ar hanes bwyd yng Nghymru by R. Elwyn Hughes) doesn't even have cawl in the index! So, if it is going to be useful for our purposes, it'll take more reading to find out how. I'll get back to you on that.  In the meantime, I think the Geiriadur Prifysgol data is relatively good evidence for the use of the word, historically, in Welsh (and let's bear in mind that Welsh was the language of most people in Wales until into the nineteenth century) – soup, originally cabbage-based.  But it would be really nice to have a good section in this article about the use of the word in English, for which you, Andy, sound as if you have the sources!  Annoyingly the OED is no help.  But I'd be really interested to know what mediaeval (and later) English speakers meant by the word, this being English wikipedia. garik (talk) 14:29, 2 March 2010 (UTC)