{"id":387,"date":"2015-01-19T19:00:54","date_gmt":"2015-01-19T19:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adelenozedar.com\/?page_id=387"},"modified":"2024-12-19T09:24:06","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T09:24:06","slug":"sugar-rush-roadtrip-wales","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/adelenozedar.com\/index.php\/sugar-rush-roadtrip-wales\/","title":{"rendered":"Sugar Rush Roadtrip WALES"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roadtrip Wales (By way of Belfast. Kind of.)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"cadburys<\/a>
cadburys brochure, 1971, from the collection of Fred Bray, Merthyr Tydfil<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In which I discover, with a level of glee unparalleled by any news in the political or financial spheres, that Newport is the UK\u2019s premier exported of fart-flavoured sweets to the former Soviet Union.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kidwelly<\/strong>
\nThe Dear Old Lady of Kidwelly (Hen Fenyw Fach Kidwelly)<\/p>\n

An old woman from Kidwelly<\/em>
\n Was selling black sweets<\/em>
\n Counting ten for a ha\u2019penny<\/em>
\n But eleven for me<\/em>
\n Well that\u2019s the best news I\u2019ve had<\/em>
\n Counting ten for a ha\u2019penny<\/em>
\n But eleven for me<\/em><\/p>\n

Kidwelly, in Carmarthenshire, in Wales, is situated about ten miles to the north west of Llanelli. And the generous old lady referred to in this nursery rhyme is rumoured to be the beautiful and kindly Lady Hawise de Londres, who as a child had lived at Kidwelly Castle at some time in the thirteenth century. A popular Kidwellian legend describes how, returning to the town to reclaim her rightful place as Castellan (governor) of the castle, she disguised herself as a humble peddler of sweets in order to get inside the castle itself. The history of this noble Norman fortress, a grandly-imposing edifice bounded on one side by the Gwendraith River, is a chequered story of sieges, , sackings and restorations, and was at one point (in the middle of the thirteenth century, to be precise) taken over by the Chawise family; perhaps this was due to the efforts of the \u2018Dear Old Lady\u2019 who could have been a beautiful young heiress in disguise. The Chawises undertook to rebuild, re-vamp and improve the castle during their tenure there, although subsequent years would see further skirmishes, take-overs and make-overs.
\nCastles there are in Wales a-plenty; the same cannot be said, however, for the range of regional sweeties that still exist today. This in itself is something of a mystery, given that Scotland has heaps and heaps of them (as well as an abundance of castle, too). Perhaps the Welsh don\u2019t have such a sweet tooth? Or perhaps Scotland is unique in its adoration of all manner of wonderful sticky stuff? It\u2019s also likely that the sheer volume of sugar that tipped into Scotland is the defining factor. And although sugar came into Bristol in great quantities, the same cannot be said of Cardiff.
\nThe \u2018black sweets\u2019 mentioned in the nursery rhyme are likely to be \u2018Taffi Triog\u2019 (in North Wales) or \u2018Losin Du\u2019 (in South Wales). Essentially, this is treacle toffee, which appears all over Great Britain in various guises. The other sweeties which are documented as belonging to Wales include a paler toffee made with golden syrup, peppermint sweets, and a boiled-sugar confection called Lossin Dant (later, keen-eyed Welsh speakers will find out why \u2018Lossin\u2019, in this case, is spelled incorrectly). Of course the generic picture-postcard boxes of fudge proliferate in Wales as they do in any picturesque area, as do the boxes of the same sort of stuff aimed at a gift market (\u2018Thanks for feeding my cat\/dog\/aspidistra\u2019).
\nBut why is there such a small range of specifically Welsh sweeties? To try to find the answer, first we have to ask ourselves if there were enough of the right ingredients. The Port of Bristol was the biggest importer of sugar in the UK in the 18th Century, followed by Liverpool and London. Bristol, closest of course to Wales, had a thriving industry in sugar processing, and treacle is a by-product in the processing of sugar. So we can guess that the treacle used in the \u2018black toffee\u2019 would have been available. So, too, would golden syrup. The refined sugar which would have been used in the boiled-sugar mints and rock, we must assume, would also have been present. We know that toffee was made on domestic stoves in the industrial towns by housewives as a way of supplementing a scant household income. It was sold either from the home or on market stalls, and was known as \u2018cyflaith\u2019 or \u2018india roc\u2019 in the North of the country, and as \u2018taffi dant\u2019 or \u2018losin dant\u2019 in the South.
\nThere\u2019s also the possibility that unique local sweetie delicacies might have been lost during the time that the speaking of the Welsh language was frowned upon in the country, during the Industrial Revolution and beyond. After all, the nuances in the names of sweeties lend a lot to dialect in Scotland and we might expect the same to be true in Wales. To add insult to injury, in her excellent book \u2018Traditional Food from Wales\u2019, Bobby Freeman tells us that the main manufacturer of rock candy in Wales was established in Caernafon by a Yorkshireman!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roadtrip Wales (By way of Belfast. Kind of.) In which I discover, with a level of glee unparalleled by any news in the political or financial spheres, that Newport is the UK\u2019s premier exported of fart-flavoured sweets to the former Soviet Union. Kidwelly The Dear Old Lady of Kidwelly (Hen Fenyw Fach Kidwelly) An old […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-387","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P3oFln-6f","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adelenozedar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adelenozedar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adelenozedar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adelenozedar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adelenozedar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adelenozedar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1121,"href":"https:\/\/adelenozedar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/387\/revisions\/1121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adelenozedar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}