Introduction

Visitors to Ireland go home with glowing accounts of Irish baking. They enthuse especially over Irish bread. Sustaining, usually dark brown and available in every first-class restaurant, it is delicious with fresh butter, with smoked salmon — with almost anything. Luckily it has been confirmed lately that good bread is healthy, bodybuilding for children and fortifying for adults.

This rough brown bread has been made in Irish homes for hundreds of years — the tradition has never lapsed from the time when people lived too far from towns to go to bakeries. In cottages and small farmhouses, bread, fruit loaves and cakes were made in a skillet or pot oven over an open hearth. The skillet swung over the turf fire on a homemade crane. There was an open fire below the skillet, and burning embers were shovelled on top of the lid to make the bread cook from above as well as below.

Though small houses were limited to hearth cooking, the ‘big house’ and the larger farmhouses boasted wall ovens and solid fuel ranges. Every kind of baking could be done in these — yeast breads, pies, puddings, cakes and biscuits. Rough brown bread was also popular in the finer houses and was made each day. Every house in the Irish countryside was, and sometimes still is, pervaded by the wholesome smell of baking bread.

The recipes in this collection start with several for soda or country bread, simple to make using white or wholemeal/whole-wheat flour. These are followed by some for yeast bread, more complicated than country bread, lighter in texture, delicious and easier to digest. People who can make yeast bread are much admired. They have a talent that goes to the heart of skilful cooking and can recognise the warm, pleasant feel of the kneaded dough when it is ready for proving.

The Barm Brack, or fruit bread made with yeast, has a special tradition in Irish life. It was eaten on New Year’s Eve and on the feast of St Brigid on 1 February. But Barm Brack was specially known in the Hallowe’en jollifications when a ring would be put in the mixture — whoever found the ring in his or her slice would be married within the year. This caused jokes all round.

Among the recipes in this book are some mixing flour with potato, like the one for soft pastry on this page. This has always been popular in Ireland, as are the well-known potato cakes, eaten with melting butter. Boxty pancakes made with grated raw potato (here) are traditionally served on All Saints’ Day and very satisfying they are.

Cakes were sometimes baked in a pot oven. Most were not iced, but were often enriched by spirits or stout and served on special occasions. Each housewife had her own specially guarded recipes to be passed on only to daughters, grand-daughters and intimate friends.

The cake recipes are mostly simple to make, so are adaptable for modern life and tastes. The biscuits are the same. Both are mixed much more easily by the melting method whereby butter, syrup and sugar are warmed and poured onto the flour mixture. This method is introduced in many of the traditional recipes here.

Savoury pies slowly became popular in Ireland, probably as a way of keeping meat warm and moist. The meat also went further, making pies economical. Pastry recipes were adapted from abroad many years ago and became part of the Irish diet, like steak and kidney and chicken pies. Donegal pie (here) and Dingle pie (here) have become local dishes.

The last section in this book is for simple ‘no flour bakes’. Is this a contradiction in terms? Surely not. We all like light food sometimes. Some people are avid slimmers, a few are allergic to flour. With or without flour, we can all enjoy the concentration of flavour, the nourishment, the sheer convenience that baking gives to almost any food.