First Catch Your Peacock: The Classic Guide to Welsh Food - Softcover

Bobby Freeman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0862433150 ISBN 13: 9780862433154

Publisher: Y Lolfa, 2006

Synopsis

This guide to Welsh food combines authentic, proven recipes enjoyed over many centuries with cultural and social history written in an entertaining and demystifying style.

About this title

Review

A loving look at the food of Wales. -- The Guardian

An absolutely fascinating book. -- Birmingham Post

The first comprehesive guide to Welsh food. -- The Ovserver

About the Author

Bobby was born and brought up in Bury, Lancashire, though her
maternal grandparents were from North Wales. She qualified in Industrial
Design at Manchester and after a short spell in teaching she spent 16 years
in advertising and press relations, becoming the first woman advertising
executive in the Midlands. She has two daughters, both interesting cooks,
and four grandchildren. Now aged 72, she lives in Cardigan, Ceredigion.
Bobby Freeman's interest in traditional Welsh food began in the early
1960's when she was running her restaurant, part of her Compton House
Hotel, Fishguard, Pembrokeshire. At that time there was no interest and no
support from within the trade for the concept of offering traditional Welsh
dishes for tourists.
Nobody, in fact, thought it was a good idea, but Bobby had turned to
catering from a career in advertising and publicity and she felt she knew a
winner when she had one. Although at first the going wasn't easy, in the
end she was proved right, because the restauarnt, already on the way to top
listing in the major food guides, soon had its Welsh dishes featured
prominently in the entries and was drawing an international client?le.

It was the difficulty in obtaining authentic Welsh recipes which eventually
led to Bobby's post-restaurant serious research into the traditions,
resulting in 1980 in the first, and only, authentic study of the economic
social and historical background to the traditions: First Catch your
Peacock, which sold worldwide.

There followed eight more titles: A Book of Welsh Bread, A Book of Welsh
Country Cakes and Buns, A Book of Welsh Bakestone Cookery, A Book of Welsh
Country Puddings & Pies, A Book of Welsh Fish Cookery, A Book of Welsh
Soups & Savouries (these six small, pocket-size books of uniform design are
sold separately or as a set, and are intended for the tourist market in
Wales); Welsh Country House Cookery (for Mid-Wales Development), and Welsh
Country Cookery. These titles are published by Y Lolfa. She edited Lloyd
George's Favourite Foods, which included a number of traditional Welsh
dishes as well as the great Liberal leader's favourites, and later edited
and published Enid Roberts' Food of the Bards - the very first Good Food as
the Bards were describing the food encountered on their visits to the Welsh
nobility.
A recent contribution has been a 6000 word introduction and explanation of
the eccentric Victorian cookery treatise - The First Principles of Good
Cookery, by the Rt Hon Lady Llanover, a rarity in its original edition,
published in facsimilie by Brefi Press in 1991 - for Bobby the realisation
of a 20-year dream: "the more I sought an explanation of the book and
delved into her life, which was not only fascinating, colourful, romantic
but extremely valuable to Wales, the fonder of her I became. The book was
so hard to come by and I wanted it to be more widely available."

In addition to books, Bobby wrote on Welsh food and related topics for the
Birmingham Post, The Western Mail and South Wales Magazine during the
1960's and 70's, and for Y Faner the Welsh language weekly, for two years,
and broadcast regularly on Welsh radio and TV on Welsh food and restaurant
reviews. In the 1970's she spent two years with the Wales Tourist Board
which increased her knowledge of Wales and the Welsh. One of her regular
jobs there was devising celebration Welsh dinners for special events - such
as St David's Day and for visiting foreign journalists. She devised two
successful 'Welsh Weekends' of food, drink and cookery demonstrations at
Portmeirion, the Italianate fantasy village in North Wales.
During this time there was still little interest in developing Welsh food
professionally as there were very few skilled and innovatory Welsh chefs,
unlike today.
In 1982 Bobby returned to west Wales after 10 years in Cardiff to found her
Welsh Cookery Centre just outside Cardigan at the foot of the beautiful
Teifi Valley where there was a good deal of Welsh production going on -
restored water-driven corn mills, cheese-making, organic vegetable-growing,
and so on, and she devoted much of her time and energy to helping make
these activities better known, both inside and outside Wales. The Cookery
Centre offered a Welsh cookery holiday, perhaps too far ahead of its time.
These years were in any case dogged by her increasing disability, forcing
her to give it up before it had been fully developed.
The year of her return to west Wales (1982) was marked by participating in
the first ever film about Welsh food traditions - a historically accurate,
very evocative and superbly filmed production for S4C.
In 1981 she gave a paper on Welsh food traditions to the Oxford Symposium.

Edition details

• Publisher: Y Lolfa
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0862433150
• ISBN 13: 9780862433154
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 332