I'm passionate that Welsh cooking shouldn't be forgotten

"I'm passionate that Welsh cooking shouldn't be forgotten."What can he mean? Sitting around the fireside with his customers, many of whom are also his suppliers, a glass of wine in his hand, he listens to their memories of family cooking and allows his imagination free rein as they talk of stews of lamb, game, rabbit, pungently flavoured with herbs. Or fish and cockle pies and breakfast fry-ups of laverbread (a mixture of boiled seaweed and oats).Laver is a peculiarly Welsh taste and, in fact, a useful mineral and vitamin supplement (the Japanese rate very highly its cousin, nori). But does it not take a leap of the culinary imagination to embrace its iodine flavour in cooking?"The Welsh love laver," says Ann Taruschio. "So we had to find a way of including it on the menu." What did Franco do? He used some deep-fried to accompany a dish of roast monkfish and also made it into a tangy sauce - and very good it is too. We've chosen it as this month's New British Classic (see recipe, below).We could as easily have chosen his cockle and mussel pie, cockles from the Gower peninsula being almost a staple food of the Welsh (Franco combines them with mussels as he might in Italy). Or we could have shared Franco's famous salted Welsh duck, his interpretation of (and improvement on) a dish from the classic 19th-century cookbook by Lady Llanover (her husband, a reforming Liberal MP, commis-sioner of works and a towering 6ft 2ins, gave his name to Big Ben).

Salted Welsh duck takes three days to make, but the silky, delicate breast is like no other meat.Or we could have given his recipe for bubble and squeak, suggested Ann Taruschio, Franco's twist on a Welsh favourite That's Welsh? Thanks, but no thanks. One doesn't like to be rude, but really, we victims of boarding-school food don't need to be told what bubble and squeak is. It used to be the institutional cook's way of recycling left-over mash and (shudder) overcooked, wet cabbage.Enough No, I must go on. This mess was then fried in bacon fat (left over from breakfast rations and scraped from pans where it had congealed). As it carbonised into a black crust in the frying pan the cabbage would release sulphurous fumes from hell.Ann Taruschio sends Franco's recipe anyway and, of course, his "Welsh" bubble 'n' squeak recipe is from heaven, a measure of his genius. No cooked cabbage features in it, luckily, but a generous handful of wild garlic stems plucked from the local hedgerows.Franco chops the stems and sweats them in butter, then adds a little water, continuing to cook till it evaporates and the leaves are cooked. He blends them into freshly mashed potatoes (boiled in their skins, peeled while still warm, passed through a mouli-legumes), which he combines with crispy-fried bacon strips (fat poured off), mint and black pepper.This mixture he rolls into a 5cm/2in thick cylindrical shape.

He cuts it in slices, flours them, and fries them in a mixture of olive oil and butter till crisp on both sides Absolutely delicious Some bubble, some squeak. (Ingredients for four: 1 kg/2lbs potatoes, l00g/ 4oz streaky bacon, 50g/2oz wild garlic leaves, 15 chopped mint leaves.)Where does one start with Franco? A series of accidents led him to Wales. He was 16 when he left home to become a student at catering college in Como, north Italy "I wasn't ambitious to cook," he says "All I could think about was girls. I headed for Switzerland, France, and then thought I should learn English and arrived in the Midlands.

It was a cultural shock."He met his wife in Rugby, where she was teaching. The notion of opening a hotel or even a restaurant foundered when they examined their savings. So they settled for a pub in what was then a remote spot in the Brecon Hills (this was 1963 and the Severn Bridge was yet to be built - when it was, it brought England to within 35 minutes by car).The smell of garlic coming from Franco's kitchen puzzled theWelsh, as did the menu; in the early 1960s no one in Wales had tasted spaghetti bolognese, let alone lasagne or cannelloni "Ignorance of Italian food was enormous," laughs Franco. "People here really believed the April Fool joke on TV showing spaghetti growing on trees. Olive oil was something people bought in tiny bottles in Boots to clean their ears."Yet within a year Franco and Ann had built up that sense of loyalty which characterises The Walnut Tree customers. On a January afternoon in 1964, when they'd prepared dinner for a party of 12, the snows came down, and so did the telephone lines The road became impassable.