Why I Won’t Make Irish Soda Bread This Year

It never lives up to the bread of my childhood.

Real Irish Soda Bread was as good as dessert.

Except, like many memories that glorify childhood, the Irish soda bread of my youth wasn’t real Irish soda bread.

Light, sweet, studded with raisins and caraway seeds, it was so short (a baking term) it fairly crumbled before you reached for a knife to cut the first slice.

Soda bread to the Irish families of my Throggs Neck section of the Bronx was the preferred “little something” served with a mouthful of tea after dinner.

While my mother was a great baker of pies and tea cakes, she never made soda bread. Why would she when our local bakery up on Tremont Avenue sold the real deal for the better part of two bits?

Residents lined up after Sunday mass for a round hot from the oven along with a loaf of rye, white, or Italian bread, sliced or not. Maybe a few Kaiser rolls with the crusty exterior covered with poppyseeds and soft doughy centers you pulled out for a nosh hot from the oven.

Instead of a P&J sandwich, my lunch of choice was always a slice of soda bread thickly slathered with butter.

I’d angle my lunch bag under my desk so that when the nun turned her back, I’d pinch off a bite.

The only remnants left by noon would be the crumbs on my uniform.

Can you tell I’m in my reminiscent mode?

That look back at the past you can only see when you have your blinders in place. Because food was not always what I loved about home, except for the roast lamb on Sunday.

I think my mother would have been a better cook if she’d had more encouragement from my father.

But he was better at pointing out that the meat was as tough as the sole of his shoe, and she was better at getting the first loaf of soda bread fresh from the bakery’s oven on Sunday.

It wasn’t until I moved to California that I had my first medium-rare steak and realized my father’s tough meat was due to his insistence on having it cooked within an inch of its life.

If you like steak well done, be prepared to chew it to death.

And kiss your beloved Irish soda bread goodbye if you trade California’s perpetually sunny skies for New York’s snow and slush or summer heat and mosquitos.

California had a lot to offer in the late 1950s when I relocated for college, but it didn’t have soda bread.

And I’ve been on a hunt for the treasure ever since.

I’ve made every recipe my mother sent me. None of them have come close to the loaf you can find (or could when my relatives were still alive) in every bakery worth its salt in the Bronx.

They all seemed to share the same recipe for flour, salt, butter, buttermilk, and a touch of sugar. It didn’t matter which baker made it; each loaf was identical in its perfection.

Except mine.

And my father, RIP, would have soda bread and Kaiser rolls waiting for me before my plane touched down at LaGuardia and then JFK. And when my parents sold my childhood home to move to an apartment upon retirement, their new local bakery supplied them with, you guessed it, soda bread identical to the one we enjoyed in Throggs Neck.

Finally, in time, I gave up trying to replicate the soda bread I’d remembered. It went the way of my skate key and Flexible Flyer.

In time, St. Patrick’s Day caught up with the San Francisco Bay Area and badges proclaiming Kiss Me, I’m Irish proliferated along with round loaves of something supermarkets tried to pass off as soda bread.

Thanks, but no thanks, I said to these dense, chewy imposters, lacking even the requisite caraway seeds.

When my mother died, thirteen years after my father, my sister and I flew to England and Ireland to visit our parents’ remaining siblings and our numerous first cousins.

I hadn’t yet started my novel set in the Irish famine, but my love of my family’s homeland was secured on my first visit with my mother after my father, on vacation to visit his parents’ graves for the last time, died of a heart attack on the farm where he was born.

Can you imagine a more poignant reason for paying homage to the birthplace of your father? No wonder Ireland wrapped itself around my heart on that first visit.

He was born in the middle of the brood of fourteen and followed my mother to America. My earliest memories include my father counting out Irish pounds and stuffing used clothes into boxes during WWII to mail to our relatives in England and Ireland.

When i visited Galway during the late ‘90s, I saw my father’s sister Annie. By that time, she no longer recalled our earlier meetings, and I sat speechless as she berated my family for sending those boxes.

“What did we need your old rags for? Think we couldn’t buy our own clothes?”

Did my family misread wartime want or did Aunt Annie’s luxury in her later years color over the early hardships of my father’s farming family?

There was no one left to ask.

In 1976, three years after my father’s death, Ireland still lay in the harsh economic clutches of the nineteenth century. For accommodation, we simply knocked on the door of the nearest farm with a B&B sign. The wife welcomed us with a hot water bottle, which at first puzzled me, until I slipped under the frigid sheets, and in the morning she served us a huge full Irish breakfast. All for about $2 a person.

A five o’clock traffic jam meant we had to pull over to let the farmer cross the road with his flock of sheep. A horse and cart pulled goods on narrow roads because only one two-lane road linked Shannon to Galway.

I was in heaven and too overwhelmed with emotion and wonder to notice what kind of bread I ate.

And ten years later, when my sister suggested we go again, I’d jumped at the chance. To see family, of course, but this time to visit the source…

Of real, traditional soda bread.

So imagine my shock and horror on our first morning at a four-star hotel–this was my sister I was traveling with after all (Aunt Annie’s niece), and the Celtic tiger had just been poked, when the waiter served us, upon my request, a heavy, brown, tasteless bread that he passed off as soda bread.

No worry, I thought. This place has been westernized. Wait until we get to the towns and villages. That’s where we’ll find real Irish soda bread.

Except, in the five or six times I’ve visited the land of my father, I’ve never had a crumb of the soda bread of my childhood.

What was passed off as Irish soda bread, I’ve realized, is a New York phenomenon.

Maybe you can find it in Boston or Chicago or other cities in the east where the Irish congregate. San Francisco certainly had a thriving Irish population when I landed here blah blah years ago, but the Irish soda bread craze missed them.

You can find green beer here. You can plant shamrocks. You can learn to do a jig. But you won’t find authentic Irish soda bread.

From what I’ve tasted, maybe that’s a good thing.

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