Welsh food is farmhouse food, built on lamb, dairy and the sea. It has come a long way in recent decades, with good producers and markets, and a crop of restaurants cooking local ingredients.
The dish everyone should try is cawl, a slow broth of lamb or beef with leeks and root vegetables, best eaten with bread and a piece of cheese on the side. Welsh rarebit is cheese melted with ale and mustard on toast. Salt-marsh lamb from the Gower and the estuaries is a speciality.
The coast adds laverbread (bara lawr), seaweed cooked down to a dark purée and traditionally fried with oatmeal for breakfast, and cockles from Penclawdd on the Gower. Halen Môn sea salt from Anglesey is sold all over Britain.
For something sweet there are Welsh cakes, small griddle cakes with currants that are sold warm in markets, and bara brith, a tea-soaked fruit loaf. Caerphilly is the classic Welsh cheese, crumbly and mild. Glamorgan sausages are a meatless version made with cheese and leeks.