Growing up Welsh in America meant mincemeat tarts, Welsh cakes, beef kidney pie, shepherd’s pie, and, of course, cawl.

It also meant Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales,  Richard Llewellyn‘s How Green was My Valley, and learning to speak a little Welsh.

Growing up we celebrated St. David’s Day, prized leaks and leak soup, ate parsnips, ate lamb—lots of lamb served with mint sauce—and learned early on we’d gotten too dirty outside when Mom called us Mochyn Du (old black pig).

That’s just a start. What American boy begins his first year in school wearing short pants and a tie? But then what American boy could say he’d lived in Wales for a time and travelled through Europe, too? Those were the early 1950s that I only vaguely remember.

The food, though, I enjoyed well into the 1990s. If I disappointed Mom Continue reading “Mincemeat Tart” →