Working for your dinner

The alarm went off very loudly - I'd accidentally turned up the volume - this morning and I fell out of bed. Sitting on the edge of the bed I said, 'Where am I going?'

Gradually I came to and remembered that people had dropped out at the last moment of a workshop Younger Son was leading so he'd invited me. I set off excitedly but ill-prepared. My decision to wear shorts wasn't really thought through.

In a small wood next to a stream we gathered to make cawl spoons (llwy cawl). Cawl is the traditional Welsh soup/stew of lamb and root vegetables. Younger Son was cooking us a vegetarian version over the fire while we carved our spoons in readiness.

First things first though: a cup of tea from water boiled in a kelly kettle, which is rather like an inside out thermos.

Then Paul, who was the teacher, showed us the real things after which we selected a piece of wood. Thankfully Paul had already done the axe work so we had a basic shape with which to work.

 The photos show my lump of wood alongside a ready-made spoon. This was what we were aiming for.


Then he demonstrated the correct knife hold and pointed out that the knives were very sharp. 'Yes, yes, yes,' says I, shortly before being the first to stab herself with sharp pointy bit at the end. 

I was trying to ignore it - rather than draw attention and shame on myself - but I began bleeding over my spoon so had to be wrapped up.


Let's jump ahead now to the finished item.

Here are all the spoons being displayed above the pot of bubbling cawl.

And here's mine. I'm not comparing it to the real thing because it doesn't.

But it's not bad! And it works. Traditionally it has a slightly uneven bowl to allow for scooping one side and slurping the other. (Mine's obviously intentionally uneven for those and any other number of reasons.)

Gower doesn't seem to have a tradition of wood-carving so it's likely that pedlars came from further west and sold spoons. They'd be used for about a year then replaced when the pedlar came again. The old ones went for firewood so it's hard to get hold of an antique cawl spoon. Paul has a collection of spoons from all over the place, a few thousand pounds' worth of spoons.

An interesting fact he mentioned: sugar spoons have very short handles so people couldn't stir their tea with them - and then put them back in the sugar bowl - but had to use other teaspoons. We could do with some sugar spoons in Zac's.