Literrata: Folklore: Irish Soda Bread Recipe (two loaves)

Tuesday, December 4, 2001

Folklore: Irish Soda Bread Recipe (two loaves)

IRISH SODA BREAD

Nollaig na nBan

JENNIE WALSH REILLY, 1893-1987, Bantry Bay, Co. Cork, Ireland
(as taught to her granddaughter, Maureen Hurley, 1952— in Forest Knolls)

PRE-ASSEMBLY:

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Or full blast.

Melt 2/3 cup of shortening (butter/margarine; or Saffola oil mix—melt butter, pour into measuring cup, add enough oil to make 2/3 cup). Let it cool to room temperature.

Grease up two bread pans (Grandma saved butter wrappers to grease pans; or use oil). I use Pyrex glass lids to melt the butter, then use them as baking dishes. Pre-greased!

More traditional: use heavy round cast iron frying pans (like a griddle) or a Dutch oven for a thicker crust. Batter is thick enough to stand alone. (If you’re camping or cooking over a hearth fire, then a Dutch oven with lid is necessary. Preheat lid in the peat fire.) Coat greased pans with flour. Knock extra flour into large mixing bowl. Set aside.

MIX DRY INGREDIENTS:

In a large mixing bowl, take 6 cups flour (part of the mixture can be made up of 1 to 2 cups of whole wheat and/or 1 to 2 cups coarsely ground oatmeal flour* can be substituted. Use a coffee grinder to grind the oats—or you can just add large handfuls of quick cooking oats. I use 2 very generous cups of coarsely ground rolled oats. Don’t use old fashioned steel cut oats, they won’t soften up enough—you’ll break your teeth. Total flour should be about 6+ cups).

1 level teaspoon baking soda, or bicarbonate of soda (use box edge or knife to level it).

If you don’t have baking powder, add a pinch of cream of tartar to baking soda and increase baking soda by 1/2.

3-4 level teaspoon baking powder (depends upon strength/brand/freshness of baking powder and the sourness of the buttermilk. Lately I've been using 3-4 teaspoons of baking powder, as oats are dense.)

2 tablespoons sugar, up to 1/4 cup. (Great-Aunt Kitty used more sugar; veritable wars were fought over correct family recipes. Also, too much sugar is a humectant and will make the bread flatter).

1 teaspoon to 1 tablespoon salt. (Or one small hand hollow. Grandma used the hollow of her hand to measure. So do I). If you use oil, or lightly salted butter, use more salt.

OPTIONAL:

1 to 2 tablespoons caraway seeds (Or one large hand hollow.) Caraway is very Celtic.

1/4 to 1/2 cup currants or raisins (currants are more traditional, but harder to find. Most so-called currants are small raisins, not currants; it’s often called Irish freckle bread, or spotted dog). Or add 1/4 cup dried cranberries to an equal amount of currants or raisins.

Mix dry ingredients thoroughly until raisins are coated with flour. I use a whisk. I also use the dry mix to dust the greased pans, banging off the excess flour right back into the bowl. You can also strew a handful of rolled oats atop the floured, buttered pan. They press into the wet dough nicely.

WET INGREDIENTS:

In a small mixing bowl, beat 2 extra-large fresh eggs, mix together with

2/3 cup of melted shortening (butter or margarine or oil—if you use a cup of butter, the bread will be extra crunchy but you'll need to add extra flour) mix with

2 cups fresh buttermilk (use that greased shortening cup & buttermilk won’t stick! or just use a 1/2 quart of buttermilk from the carton). Mix well. If you don’t have buttermilk, you can sour 2 cups of milk with a tablespoon or two of vinegar or lemon juice. If you ad a few dollops of sour cream or yogurt to thicken it, use less milk to keep it in the 2 cups of liquid ratio intact.

ASSEMBLY:

Make a well in dry flour mix, pour in buttermilk/egg mix. Scrape off any liquid in the bowl. Mix dough quickly using a spatula to fold, or cut ingredients. You want them mixed, but barely moistened. Don’t stir it too hard or gluten will develop and your bread will be tough. Mixture should be lumpy, on the dry side, not soupy. Add more flour if necessary. But don't over mix. NEVER knead a quickbread.

Divide dough into two portions and put into two greased, floured pans. I use Pyrex lids. Cast iron pans are hard to come by. Don't pack the sodabread down. Cut a large X in middle to divide loaf into four quarters, or farls “to let the fairies out.” This X is often called St. Brighid’s Cross. Brighid was the pagan goddess of the hearth, cattle, and abundance who was later made into a Catholic saint as she was a central mythological figure. Paint top of bread with butter and sprinkle with rolled oats (optional).

Scones can also be made from Irish bread mix. Fashion a round loaf about 2 inches high, and cut into 6 or 8 farls (St. Catherine’s wheel) and baked in a hot oven for 20-30 minutes. The main thing to remember, that for a tender, crunchy soda bread, is to barely mix the ingredients and handle dough as little as possible.

MIXING TIP:

Soda reacts immediately to wet ingredients. So don’t blather on, you need to get the dough into the hot oven as soon as possible! Bake bread on top shelf of oven at 450° for 15 minutes; lower heat to 350° to 375° for 30 to 45 minutes to an hour. When knife (or broom straw—use the clean, top portion of the straw, not the part that sweeps the floor!) comes out clean and bread is golden, the bread is ready.

Remove bread from the pans or the crust will soften.

Bottom of bread should sound hollow like a drum when struck. Cut bread into generous portions and serve piping hot with Irish butter and marmalade or homemade blackberry jam for afternoon tea.

PLAN B:

If you need to keep bread warm for company, you can bake the bread for about 30 minutes at 350° until it sounds hollow when you knock on it (after the initial 15 minutes at 450°). If the bread is still wet, you need to bake it to the moist stage. Check with a knife. Then turn off the oven, and leave the bread in the pans for about an hour, and they'll still be warm and crusty.

*HISTORY:

With the introduction of commercially available shelf-stable chemical leavenings: baking powder, ca. 1843, and double-carbonate baking soda, ca. 1846, was an improvement on volatile unstable old-school leavening agents. Washing soda ash with lye was used as leavening in the 1790s; pearlash/potash, and stinky hartshorn—ground up antlers—were also used. Heat-activated hartshorn, or baker’s soda is still used for traditional Nordic/Slavic cookies, but the ammonia odor while baking cookies is worse than a public urinal—just don’t eat the raw dough!

Circa 1816, carbonate of baking soda (aka soda ash, or washing soda), the pre-courser to modern bicarbonate of soda, became commercially available, but needed special handling. Washing soda, aka soda ash, made from rinsed wood ash, burnt kelp, burnt limestone, or mined from dry lakebeds, was used at least 5000 years in glassmaking, jewelry, laundry, etc., but I couldn’t find specific cooking references. Except pretzels, and noodles. Add pickles to that list. I suspect soda ash was used for leavening, but not well documented, before the 1800s. Think hardtack/pilot biscuits.

There are two types of baking powder—one is made with baking soda and expensive cream of tartar in 1843 by Alfred Bird, and a more stable form buffered with cornstarch by Eben Norsford in 1856. The upshot was with the invention of stable, chemical leavening agents, the housewife’s chore of baking the daily bread with yeast starter was reduced from an overnight chore to that of a couple of hours. It was a smash success story. Check out this lively story on the invention of baking powder and cream of tarter. And this Smithsonian article too.

The use of rolled oats in leavened bread (they say yeasted bread was introduced to Ireland by the Normans, but if an Iron Age culture figured out how to make beer, they could figure out how to make bread too) dates back to the days when wheat flour was a highly-taxed luxury item shipped off to Elizabethan England. All that was left for the Irish peasantry to eat were oats and potatoes, which the landed English aristocracy didn’t fancy.

So, at one time only oat flour was used for soda bread. You could use all oat flour, or add some buckwheat flour if you are wheat/gluten intolerant, but you will need to experiment with the leavening accordingly. You could also add extra eggs, and beat those whites until stiff, and fold them in at the last minute, as leavening too.

However, the Celts (and the Irish) have traditionally baked flat, (we think, unleavened, but hearth ash, called pearlash, was used as a leavening too); oatmeal cakes were cooked on iron griddles for over 2000 years. In the Iron Age tale, the Táin Bó Cúailnge, The Cattle Raid of Cooley, the mythological superhero, Cú Chulainn ground his oats in a stone quern, baked the cakes on an iron griddle, and took the toasted oatcakes to battle. He must’ve had a small portable quern and griddle as he carried them with him.

There’s an old Gaelic saying: the quern works best when the grindstone is pitted. (Quern is brà, or bró/brao in both Scots, and Old Irish Gaelic, from Proto-Celtic brawū. Our molar teeth were once called in Old English, cweornteð, or quern-teeth. Dét fiss, Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s tooth of wisdom in Old Irish.)

So you could say that the basis for Irish bread has its roots in Irish antiquity. The Irish preferred to bake rounded breads on hot griddles over peat coals. Sometimes potatoes (introduced from Latin America by Sir Walter Raleigh, AKA Reilly in the 16th century), were slipped into the coals to bake in their jackets. A grand meal could be had of potatoes, great gobs of Irish butter and sea salt, a farl Irish bread—all washed down with kettles of sweetened black tea with cream, hot off the hob.