I’ve eaten there.
Juicy capons with coarse bread and onion
slow-cooked in the fractured stove
and eggs; large, orange-yolked, thick albumen.
Michelin would never star Maes Mawr
a thousand yards along the track
that meandered by river and field
to a dung-splashed cobbled yard.
No one would certify the kitchen
with its broken Rayburn, the cook
having to use an open fire in the next room,
and the three hundred years of dirt.
Then there were caul-wrapped faggots
brought from the tins they’d been cooked in,
potatoes and cabbage from behind the house
grown in a fine tilth, that’d been dug for centuries.
And, from the wooden-stalled mart in Carmarthen
soft, green bara llawr bought wrapped in cellophane
dusted with oatmeal fried with thick, meat-streaked
glistening white slices of Welsh bacon
Stone-baked bread from good strong flour
toasted, before flames that danced on hard Welsh coal,
then spread with salted butter – delicious, delicious.
© Anthony Fisher March 2010