to make menus more pleasant. Laverbread, or Bara Lawr, is a Welsh speciality. It is made by cooking porphyra seaweed slowly for up to ten hours until it becomes a puree known as laver. The seaweed can also be cooked with oatmeal to make laverbread. It can be served with bacon and cockles as a breakfast dish, or fried in to small patties. Today, laverbread is commercially produced by washing in water, cooking for about 5 hours before chopping, salting and packaging. The Glamorgan sausage is a Welsh vegetarian sausage. It contains no meat or skin, instead it is made with cheese, generally Caerphilly, but sometimes cheddar, along with leek or spring onion. This mixture is then coated in breadcrumbs and rolled into a sausage shape before cooking. Glamorgan sausages date back to at least the early 19th century, at which point the sausages would have contained pork fat. Welsh cakes, or pice ar y maen meaning "cakes on the stone", are small round spiced cakes, traditionally cooked on a bakestone, but more recently on a griddle. Once cooked, they can be eaten hot or cold, on their own or topped either with sugar or butter. The dough which is mixed with raisins, sultanas and sometimes currants, is similar to shortbread, meaning they can have the consistency of biscuits when cooked on the griddle, and slightly more like a cake when cooked in the oven. Bara brith is a fruit loaf originating from rural Wales, where they used a mortar and pestle to grind the fresh sweet spices. Historically it was made with yeast and butter, though recently it is likely to be made with bicarbonate of soda and margarine. The fruit included would be dried raisins, currants and candied peel, which would be soaked in cold tea before cooking. Generally served sliced with butter during afternoon tea, it is often known as Welsh tea bread. Bara Brith translates to "speckled bread", but it is also known as teisen dorth in South Wales, where sultanas are included in the recipe, or as torta negra when Welsh settlers brought it to Argentina. Beverages Wine and beer, especially of the home-made varieties, were central to socialising in Wales, as they were in England. This remained the case even when tea gained popularity in England, supplanting home-made alcohol. Beer is now the national drink of Wales, although Welsh beers never gained the status