Growing up, holidays could be a little weird. As a military kid, sometimes Christmas didn’t actually happen on Christmas day. Maybe it happened January 1st. Maybe we went all out, and we’d have first Christmas on Christmas day and second Christmas any time between New Year’s and July. It all depended on where in the world my dad was and how long he had to stay there.
Because of the holiday-shifting lifestyle of the military, we came to associate specific things with holidays rather than to associate holidays with specific calendar days. This in and of itself is not particularly unusual. Plenty of families have time-honored traditions surrounding all manner of holidays (the family down the street who, every Halloween, decorates their front yard with a plastic unicorn, an enormous inflatable Despicable Me minion, and an inflatable Santa climbing an inflatable Christmas tree while his inflatable dog pulls down pants revealing Christmas-tree boxers comes to mind.)
But for us, holidays really do center around the food and having our little family together.
For some reason yet to be identified, my dad was always (and I mean ALWAYS — every single year of my childhood) home for Saint Patrick’s Day. This fact, helped enormously by the fact that my mom is strikingly Irish in heritage, quickly solidified Saint Patrick’s Day as our family’s most important holiday. Mom made corned beef and cabbage the long way — with gallons of Guinness and hours of popping it back and forth between the stove and the oven. She roasted carrots and potatoes and made her grandmother’s shortbread. And I had the honor of making the Irish soda bread.
Soda bread is made in the tradition of generations of hard-working, food-loving, penniless mothers doing the best with what they had. Most cultures that come from Europe developed their version of a soda bread sometime in the 1800s for the simple fact that it is…well…simple. The rising agent is, you guessed it, baking soda. Baking soda has long been a staple of hearty bakes. It’s cheap, easy to use, and cuts out the need for hours and hours of rising and kneading dough. For a bread made with baking soda, a few turns will almost always suffice to make the dough rise properly. Baking soda, and the later invention of baking powder in 1880s1, made the long-rise tradition of making bread or the unpredictable short-cut of using sour milk as a rising agent a thing of the past. This recipe uses a combination of baking powder, baking soda, and buttermilk to create this hearty but well-aerated bread, which when topped with a chunk of butter makes a meal all on its own.
If I were to guess, I would say that I have made this recipe about one-hundred times. My mom ripped our Saint Patrick’s Day recipes out of a magazine back in the 1970s when she was a kid. I loved the yellowed color of the waxy paper and seeing my mom’s hand-written modifications in the margins. I would carefully lift the page out of the stack in my mom’s recipe binder with reverence and place it on the counter far away from the buttermilk, terrified that one day I would spill the milk on it and cry. I took great pride in my soda bread. After battling through the first few attempts, which resulted in not-quite-mixed dough and flour pockets in the finished bread (these were my early days of baking before I had a stand mixer and was lacking the arm strength it took to mix this dough, which is as tough as the women who thought up the recipe). But I honed my skills. I must have made it once a week after that first Saint Patrick’s Day, preparing for the next year.
Enjoy this recipe, which has become so much a part of my life and identity that sometimes I taste it in my dreams. Remember to stir the dough into submission. It fights back — it’s Irish after all.
Irish Soda Bread
You will need:
3 cups all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
9 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon caraway seeds
3/4 cup golden raisins
1 cup buttermilk for dough
1 1/2 tablespoons buttermilk for brushing
What to do:
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. In a large bowl combine the flour, sugar, soda, and salt. Cut in the butter using a pastry cutter until fine crumbs form. Mix in the caraway seeds and raisins. Add the buttermilk and stir until the dough is evenly moistened.
Gather the dough into a ball and knead about 16 turns on a lightly floured board. Pat it into a smooth ball, then into a 1-inch thick round. Place the round on a baking sheet.
Slash an X about 1/4-inch deep across the round, making sure to cut all the way to the edges of the dough. Brush the round with buttermilk.
Bake until the round turns a deep golden brown (about 30 minutes), switching the position of the pan halfway through the bake.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! If you want to share this Irish delight with a friend, hit the share button.
See you next time with another story-recipe,
Juliana Nicewarner
Check out this article by the Smithsonian for more information on the history of rising agents and to learn about the incredibly interesting “Baking Powder Wars” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/great-uprising-how-powder-revolutionized-baking-180963772/