Selwyn's Seafoods

Laverbread — boiled, minced seaweed, the 'Welshman's caviar' — is one of those foods you have to be raised on or brave about, and Selwyn's is the name on most of the good stuff. Selwyn Jones grew up in the Gower village of Penclawdd gathering cockles and laver seaweed off the estuary sands with his mother, selling them at Swansea Market; more than fifty years on, the family business he built still cooks cockles and laverbread on the same stretch of the Loughor estuary, and supplies fishmongers and kitchens across Wales and beyond. It remains a family firm, true to a very local and very old way of harvesting the Gower shore. You can buy the cockles and the laverbread — and the seaweed snacks the business has branched into — and taste a corner of Welsh food that almost nowhere else still does properly. The estuary, the cockle-gatherers, the laver: Selwyn's keeps the whole tradition alive.