A loaf of Irish Bread is baking in my oven as I write. I say Irish Bread because that is the title of the recipe passed down in my family for what most people call soda bread. What’s in the oven now, in my modest but comfortable apartment in Chicago, would likely not be recognizable as soda bread to the ancestors who lived in Ireland in the mid-19th century, the period in which soda bread sustained the starving Irish. Soda ash, the precursor to baking soda, is believed to have been discovered as a useful leaven by Native Americans, and it was introduced in Ireland around the early 1800s (a more comprehensive origin story of commercial baking soda is not apparent to me, who is not a food historian).
Food traditions are often born out of necessity—hungry people need to eat—as well as availability of ingredients (or items that hungry people are willing to try as ingredients). My ancestors were hungry and poor. Their bread was soda leavened because yeast was hard to come by and expensive. It was also simple in flavor, though I like to imagine it was fairly nutritious, made with hearty milled grain and fresh buttermilk.
I wrote about the experience of wrestling with so-called authenticity in family recipes as well as in ethnic heritage in The Sacred Life of Bread. And every year, as St. Patrick’s Day rolls around, I wonder whether I’m doing enough to celebrate my own Irishness, whether I have an “authentic” claim to Irishness, whether I ought to encourage Irish identity in my kid, and so on. Irish identity is complicated as a white American some four generations removed from Ireland. In the city I call home, many associate Irishness with whiteness and with the police and a corrupt political machine. All over the place, it’s been associated with drunkeness, a hold over from the early days of Irish immigration to the United States and steeped deeply in anti-Catholicism.
I’ve been reading a lot of John O’Donohue lately, an Irish mystic, poet, philosopher, and former priest. When he writes about Irish spirituality, my own spirit is stirred and reminded the family tics and traits I thought were just that, not traditions and a way of looking at or understanding the world deeply embedded in our DNA. Whenever I hear a brogue (usually on TV) or the whine of an Irish fiddle or read a great poem or hear a wonderfully well-told story, I feel a connection to a land I’ve still never been to (though that’s changing this April).
Blessedly, those wonderings about my own Irishness have become just that, wonderings, still complicated, but not quite the worries, anxieties, or embarassament that I once felt. And so, for this St. Patrick’s Day, my kid and I made Irish Bread. It has just come out of the oven and is cooling for 30 minutes before we slice and slather it with rich butter. It is studded with dried cranberries and laced with orange zest and caraway seeds, a nod to the recipe that I inherited from my grandmother when I was 10, a terrible recipe that I have vowed never to make again with apologies to my late grandmother and great grandmother. (I say more about the experience of discovering how much I dislike the recipe in the book.) My recipe does not produce dry, dense, but sustaining bread. This bread is lighter and softer and tastes wonderful. It’s more like a large muffin than a bread. My revised recipe is linked here, but it is also in my book. It’s a good enough bread to be made all year long and enjoyed by the Irish and those who just love the Irish.
Table Talk
Soda bread has been made and for tonight’s dinner we will have a Shepherd’s Pie and drink Irish stout and I will make my family practice the art of storytelling, the real gift of the Irish. I’m going to use this recipe (subscription required) from the New York Times because I don’t have a good family recipe. For vegetarians, this one (again, subscription required) has great reviews and it’s adaptable for even making vegan.
Have you ever heard of Paprika? The app, not the spice. My friend Kelly got me hooked on it a few years ago and the past few months I’ve leaned in hard, using for recipe clipping, meal planning, grocery shopping, and pantry stocking. I have the phone and the desktop app, and in an exciting twist, it has dramatically reduced the drama around meal planning and grocery list making. This is not a paid endorsement, I just truly love this app.
Book News
Again, The Sacred Life of Bread publishes June 13. The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square has graciously agreed to host a launch party, details of which I will share as we get closer to the date. Chicagoans know how great of a shop the Book Cellar is, and I’m absolutely thrilled to get to share my book in person with you in that special place.
You can pre-order pretty much anywhere you buy books: Indie Bound, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Target, and even Amazon, though I hope you’ll support local book sellers.
I have some more news I’m sitting on (interviews! launch team!), but, alas, I am a parish priest and Lent is a particularly demanding time of year. After Easter, be prepared to hear from me with more regularity.