Welsh rarebit bread and butter and occasionally with the vinegar from pickled beetroot. The word "Welsh" may have been adopted because it carries a now-archaic sense in English to mean "foreign, non-native" - an etymological phenomenon seen in its ultimate ancestor, the Proto-Germanic "walhaz" ("foreigner") and many of its descendants like the dated sense of German (Romance-speaker). It is also possible that the dish was attributed to the Welsh because they were considered particularly fond of cheese, as evidenced by Andrew Boorde in his "Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge" (1542), when he wrote "I am a Welshman, I do love
Welsh cuisine such as cawl, and traditions grew around their use. One tradition, which was still in place at the start of World War II, was that villagers could plant an row of potatoes in a neighbouring farmer's field for each labourer the household could provide at the time of harvest. Whilst there are a large number of dishes that can be considered Welsh due to their ingredients, there are some which are quintessentially Welsh. Dishes such as cawl, Welsh rarebit, laverbread, Welsh cakes, bara brith (literally "speckled bread") or the Glamorgan sausage have all been regarded as symbols of Welsh food.