Books, Cooks and Looks : Great Wales! : At country inns, new chefs take Welsh cooking from stodgy to world-class

Only the sheep, bounding recklessly across the vertiginous mountain slopes, seemed to know where they were going. Hopelessly lost, we were trying not to cast our eyes downward, beneath where our rented car wheels clung to the unfenced road edge. Around a hairpin bend bordering a sheer heather-spun cliff, we spotted a pub and silvery mustachioed farmer exiting it to wend, on foot, his way home. True to the Welshman’s ancient reputation, ours proved as hospitable as they come.

Inhaling a great gust of mountain air, he proceeded to extol poetically upon the virtues of the valley in which we found ourselves. Then, as if reciting the verse of some national bard, he directed us through vale and hummock to hill’s crest and river’s edge. Forget road signs. The Welsh are as ingrained with topography as the French are with a taste for crusty bread.

Within minutes, despite the suicidally narrow roads, we were pulling into the splendid grounds of a fine stone Georgian manse-turned-hotel called Tyddan Llan. Set on an ancient stop of a former drover’s route at the foot of the Berwybn Mountains resides one of the country’s finest restaurants.

A few years ago, if anyone had told us that we would embark on a culinary tour of Wales, which would take us from the wilder regions of the Welsh-speaking north down to the urbanized southern coast, we would have laughed into our porridge.

This tiny peninsular country, tacked onto England’s western trunk, doesn’t exactly conjure up visions of glamorous food. On the contrary, when you think of Welsh food--in the unlikely event that you think of it at all--you think of Welsh Rarebit, that raft of soggy toast adrift in a puddle of syrupy processed cheese.

Until now, Welsh ingredients, wholesome and basic, have kept their humble place. But health consciousness and an awakened collective palate have spawned a new generation of enlightened cooks who have begun to prepare these ingredients in startingly original ways.

Nowhere is the stylistic change in Welsh food more pronounced than in the country house hotels that flourish from coast to vale across the varied landscape. These are not the self-aggrandizing stately homes of England, the seat of those invaders to the east, but, rather, hushed and comfortable dwellings built to a domestic scale and still lived in by their owners whose welcoming fires glow into the lingering summer evenings.

As represented by the cooking at a variety of farmhouse inns, including Ty’n Rhos, Plas Bodegroes and the Lake Hotel, the food is often steeped in French cooking style.

On our five nights in Wales last summer, my fiance and I stayed at a variety of places including houses listed in “Welsh Rarebits,” a booklet listing a rarefied consortium of country house hotels in which can be found some of the best food in Britain. (This selection is so discriminating that inns included in this year’s list may not make it in next year’s.)

One page showed a picture of two pioneers of the new Welsh cooking, Tyddyn Llan’s Peter and Bridget Kindred. Though English by nationality (Peter was a set designer for “Fawlty Towers”), the Kindreds are typical of the new breed of couples who are migrating to Welsh country house hotels.

Our room was a medley of antiques and deep armchairs. After a soak in our bathroom’s claw foot tub, we settled--sherry and menus in hand--before a fire in one of the drawing room’s cozy sofas to lazily place our orders. (The British don’t pamper you; they provide the setting in which you can pamper yourself.)

Menus at Tyddyn Llan change daily. That night’s food was prepared by David Barratt, 35, who took over the kitchen from Bridget last spring. Our meal, in the small but peopled dining room, did not disappoint our ambitious expectations.

For starters, a sharp, acidic Welsh goat cheese with a curd-like texture was baked in filo pastry (larded with lamb drippings) and served on an assortment of tender young garden salad leaves--rocket, lamb’s tongue, rossel, curly endive--with a flavorful walnut oil vinaigrette boosted by the addition of toasted sesame oil. Pigeon breast, like liver in its richness, was quickly pan-roasted, then doused with a ketchup-colored pomegranate sauce and toasted pine nuts--alas, not all ingredients were local.

Nor was the Gressingham duckling strictly Welsh, having been farm-bred in England’s Lancashire as a cross between a gamey wild mallard and rich farmyard duck. But the ancient, almost moldy flavor of its breast drenched in a silken sauce of black currants and fat, raw bilberries (the British version of blueberries) would have pleased the palate of any Welshman, from King Arthur to Tom Jones.

Nothing, however, could have been more Welsh than sea bass fished from the cool waters off the isle of Anglesey, once known as Mon, the last haven of the Druids, who were slaughtered on its shores by the Romans in AD 59. Our bass was steamed with ginger, covered with a creamy ginger sauce and served atop stir-fried, spaghettini-thin vegetables caramelized in a treacly sesame-teriyaki sauce, a reminder of the British love of confection.

As memorable as dinner was, the next morning’s breakfast worked even harder to make us true converts to Welsh country house cooking: a slice of black pudding (which our waitress nose-wrinklingly admitted to never having tried), full-bodied corned beef hash with an almost chocolaty flavor and Manx kippers (from the Isle of Man), oak-barrel smoked and crowned with a hefty slab of butter melting dreamily along the fish’s spine.

From the startlingly original food to the tastefully decorated interior, we found Tyddyn Llan to be a world-class experience.

Climbing into our rented Ford, we headed off to navigate the treacherously narrow roads and find Plas Bodegroes, another country house hotel, tucked into the meadows of Criccieth, a lazy town on the southern edge of the LLeyn Peninsula.

As in all coastal areas of this country, there were vans parked at water’s edge selling the meat of ready-to-eat shellfish, a Welsh passion. Salty golden nuggets (cockles) at about 50 cents for a waxed paper bag full, chewy curls of sea flesh (whelks), sea snails (winkles) still enshrouded in their shell homes--all waited to be picked out by plastic cocktail forks.

Near at hand were supplies of black pepper and malt vinegar for sprinkling over the catch. And seaside grocers, who in other parts of Britain seem to concentrate on selling potato crisps, do a healthy business in Wales selling dressed crab--tendrils of the sweet meat mashed with butter and put back in their shells, the better for easy scooping.

The land, too, was teeming with culinary bounty. Everywhere we looked, between the ruined castles and abandoned farm cottages, was a reminder of what awaited us at the table: wild, round-bellied guineafowl pecking at roadside, fluffy-tailed rabbits ducking beneath hedgerows, stately pheasants scudding over fields, woodcocks, grouse and sheep, probably the single most important food in the Welsh diet.

There are more sheep than people in Wales. Welsh hillsides from Snowdon to the Brecon Beacons are polka-dotted with the pink-hued creatures boxed in scraggly woolen coats and munching chlorophyll meals or scampering from camera-laden tourists.

Of all the things the Welsh are proud of--the resonating scales of their baritones, their long line of poets including Dylan Thomas--it is, perhaps, their lamb they prize most, claiming it to be the best in the world. And right they may be.

It is the Welsh mountains with their plentiful rainfall (for growing the profuse Welsh grass) and steep slopes (the better for cloven-hooved scaling) that contribute to the sweet lean flesh which has made Welsh flocks famously delicious since ancient times.

Indeed, one of the dishes for which Plas Bodegroes is most acclaimed is its lamb. Even before we arrived, we had decided that it was what we would have. And this despite the fact it was early summer and that Welsh lamb is considered at its peak in autumn.

Plas Bodegroes is a pretty white Georgian house with a slate patio whose wicker furniture overlooks an avenue of beechwoods. The interior walls are decorated with photographs of local scenes taken by owner/chef Chris Chown.

The rest of the house, including the guest rooms, has been seen to by his statuesque Danish wife, Gunna, with typical Scandinavian starkness. Each table in the green and pink dining room with its blond oak floors and floor-length windows contains a token rose in a simple vase and a lonesome candelabrum.

What the Chowns avoid in ornament they make up for on the plate. Our meal was certainly worthy of the red Michelin “M” awarded them, one of the only two such Welsh awards. Except for a stint as a sous-chef at London’s Dorchester Hotel and at Riesbachlie in Zurich, Chris Chowns--a former accountant--has had little formal training. He prefers to rely upon his own inventiveness and the profusion of indigenous ingredients.

Our handsomely char-grilled loin of lamb was singed expertly and laden with a heady wild garlic sauce. (It reminded us of the morning’s drive along the coastal woodlands, where the air was perfumed with wild garlic.)

We tried our lobster in a frothy bisque spooned over a saffron orange turbot mousseline with a sorrel leaf pasted on top. Floating therein were strands of samphire, a green crunchy seaweed that is exposed on local shores at low tide. But the greatest surprise was the glistening laverbread stuffed within the mousseline’s heart.

Laverbread, a feathery green seaweed, is a kind of spinach of the sea, or as native son Richard Burton described it, the Welshman’s caviar. A diet staple to Welsh shore-dwellers in times past, it is hand-gathered on the Gower and Pembrokeshire coasts and boiled to a gooey pulp for six to 10 hours.

Sold from seaside fish vans and market stalls, traditionally it is rolled in oats, seasoned with black pepper and fried in bacon fat before being eaten with cockles and bacon as a breakfast treat. “Cold, it’s extremely disgusting,” according to Chris Chown and most others who have ever encountered it in its basic state. Rediscovered by the new Welsh chefs, laverbread has been raised to ethereal heights. Because of its high natural saltiness and overpowering presence, new Welsh chefs, including Chown, use it sparingly as an accent rather than as the central feature of a course.

Next day we headed for the Lake Hotel, tucked in the bucolic countryside on the site of a wildlife sanctuary. Though we arrived too late, owners Jean-Pierre and Jan Mifsud held dinner for us; much of it was grown or raised on the grounds.

Jean-Pierre boasts the largest Bordeaux list--more than 80 kinds--of any Welsh restaurant. Turning the pages of the list, we were surprised to see organic wines from New Zealand and even more surprised to see a Welsh wine. Apparently wine has been made in the sheltered valleys of South Wales since the Romans planted vines. We opted for the Welsh Monnow Valley 1987. Made from the Muller-Thurgau grape, it was light, fresh and fruity, just the thing for our buttermilk-laced soup and sea trout (called sewin in Welsh), a pink-fleshed cross between salmon and trout that spawns in Welsh rivers.

The Lake Hotel was the only one on our tour that was actually built as a hotel. Located on the site of a famous barium spring--the only one in Wales and one of two in Europe--it was built in the middle of the last century as a spa to which patrons came from afar to take the waters. In the grandly appointed public rooms, you can almost hear the polite murmuring of antique evenings. Kaiser Wilhelm, it is said, slept here.

Our supper’s sea trout, we discovered, was fished from the lake waters. “We incorporate into our food whatever is indigenous,” said Jean-Pierre, leading us to an elderflower tree. As we stood beneath its fragrant boughs, he told us how he forages for many of his ingredients.

From this tree alone he gathers fresh elderflowers for syrup and white wine. For adding to bread, he dries the flowers. The berries yield him red wine. The woods are filled with mushrooms: cepes and chanterelles. And his kitchen garden is ripe with produce. He even makes sorbet from rose geraniums.

In the morning we woke at dawn and ambled alone through the property. In our sneakers, we waded across a narrow, glassy river and sloshed happily through fields of cows. The breakfast waiting us on our return was alone worth the visit to this isolated haven: lamb sausages flecked with mint, eggs, grilled tomatoes, sauteed laverbread and bacon fraize, a whole-wheat pancake freckled with bacon and mushrooms and served with homemade marmalade.

But soon it was time to head south. We were going to Laugharne, the home of Dylan Thomas. And we would be staying at a simple rectory-turned-restaurant nearby.

A modest 19th-Century stone house (but not a member of the “Welsh Rarebits” country-inn group), the Old Rectory is the home of Redver and Susan Williams. Upstairs is an extra room that is sometimes let out for the night to paying guests. It is basic lodging, and we had to share the family’s bath. But we were pleased. So friendly were the Williamses, we felt as if we’d discovered long-lost Welsh cousins. (The Welsh are as famous for their hospitality as Americans are for their ingenuity.)

We were about to venture into the town that was the setting for Thomas’ play “Under Milk Wood” when Redver, unable to contain himself, emerged from the kitchen, wiped his hands on his apron and beckoned us to have a look at his afternoon’s delivery: a glistening sea bass that had been fished out of the bay that morning. How would we like it cooked, he earnestly pleaded?

By the evening, when we returned to the Old Rectory, we were thirsty for the cool Welsh ale that runs from its tap. And we were hungry for Redver’s meal that owed more to the old Welsh school of cooking than the new. It was inspired nonetheless. Take Redver’s preparation of sea bass.

Lamb may be the predominant Welsh food, but it is only one-third of the famous Welsh culinary triumvirate, all “L” words, along with laverbread and leeks. The national symbol of Wales, leeks sprout forth easily from Welsh soil. They are the soul of many a Welsh soup or crawl--an old-fashioned stew made also from other root vegetables, herbs, lamb and sometimes oats, and cooked in a pot hung over the fire. New Welsh chefs bake creamy leek tarts or make ribbon pillows of them to rest lobster salad on.

The bass arrived in a shimmering sauce of parsley, mushrooms and leeks. It was nothing fancy, but it was superb, much as were the crusty, home-baked white rolls and the succulent lamb, roasted on the rack, then split and served simply with a light pan-roast gravy, currant jelly and a medley of vivid vegetables. Dessert was a hazelnut meringue and apricot sauce.

Redver’s food was unpretentious enough to satisfy the locals who were in attendance that night, yet compelling enough to entrance the most sophisticated palates. The Old Rectory is typical of the wonderful yet humble food available in Welsh farmhouses where you can get dinner, along with bed and breakfast.

Our last stop in Wales was at Egerton Grey, a glorious country house only recently transformed into a hotel, near the Cardiff airport. The grounds, verdant with 31 species of trees, rival the antique-filled interior for civilized elegance. Before dinner we toasted Wales--its natural beauty, hospitable people and food--by clinking glasses of Swn y Mor (Sound of the Sea), a mellow Welsh whiskey made at the Brecon Brewery. Whiskey, we were told, has been made in Wales since the 4th Century.

Our dinner--a frothy chicken-liver mousse, chocolaty rich; a terrine of tender leeks with an oyster vinaigrette; pan-fried collops of monkfish on a mattress of julienned turnips; an array of roasted vegetables grown at nearby Fonmon Castle, and potatoes with sage butter--was a testament to new Welsh cooking.

But it was the farmhouse cheeses, of which there are now more than 60 made, that left a lasting impression: Penceriog, a molten, oozy, Brie-style cheese made from the milk of Anglesey cows; Pen-y-Bont, a crumbly ewe’s cheese flavored with garlic and chives that tastes like a smooth, dry pesto; Llangloffan, orange as a tangerine and flecked with chives, and llanboeid (or llanboidy), hard and sharp as a dart. Textured neatly like wax shavings, Caerphilly is Wales’s most renowned and probably most bland cheese, but its smoked variety is a delight.

Welsh cheeses are as homey and unpretentious as the new and enlightened Welsh culinary trend to which they owe their comeback. The New Welsh food may, in fact, owe much if its sophistication to foreign influences, but it is as Welsh as a chapel choir.

GUIDEBOOK

Finding Food in Wales

Tyddyn Llan Country House, Llandrillo, near Corwen, Clwyd; doubles about $115-$125 per night; fax 011-44-49084-264.

Plas Bodegroes, Pwllheli, Gwynedd; doubles about $125-$170; 011-44-758-612363, fax 011-44-758-701247.

Lake Hotel, Llangammarch Wells, Powys; doubles about $145-$205; 011-44-5912-202, fax 011-44-5912-457.

The Old Rectory, Llanddowror, St. Clears, Dyfed (near Laugharne); doubles about $50; 011-44-994-23-0030.

Egerton Grey Country House, Porthkerry, Barry, South Glamorgan; doubles about $125-$185 per night; telephone 011-44-446-711666, fax 011-44-446-711690.

For a free copy of the booklet “Welsh Rarebits,” contact the British Tourist Authority, 350 S. Figueroa St., Suite 450, Los Angeles 90071, (213) 628-3525.