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For many years I’ve been collecting data on Irish Soda Bread (and American Soda Bread) with the intention of writing a factual History of our beloved Irish Soda Bread. Well, the time is coming..

This will be more than the common cook book found on Amazon, but an in-depth view into the 19th century experiments using hydrochloric acid to make bread and an entire chapter on how and why “raisins” were added to the basic soda bread recipe to become very common in modern day recipes starting in the early 20th century. I’ll also go into the dietary condition of many of the Irish farmers between 1860 and 1960.

Forward

I grew up eating soda bread in Ireland and the United States so it didn’t seem so extraordinary at the time.

Whenever I went home, my Mother would have a loaf of brown bread and a tea cake freshly baked from the oven ready for my arrival. And when I was an adult, she showed me how to make it.  Much like her mother and grandmother showed her when she was 12 years old in 1936 except for replacing the open fireplace with a modern oven and using precise measurements instead of my Mother’s instinct of just knowing how much of each ingredient to put in the mix.

Now, I could simply give you the four ingredients of Irish Soda Bread:  (found here on this website)

• Flour

• Baking Soda (Bread Soda in Ireland)

• Salt

• Buttermilk (or Sour Milk)

  With a recipe and that would be all you would need to enjoy true Traditional Irish Soda Bread every day and my job here would be finished.

But, as I have learned over the past 45 years, there are newspaper writers, and their readers, going back to the 1960s and beyond, who think there is a “debate” over what is in an Irish Soda Bread and even when they do know, it is human nature to want to “improve” a recipe when you write the story.

Nothing wrong with that except when it is labeled “Traditional Irish Soda Bread” when historically it isn’t.

So, this book contains my personal research into the history of Irish Soda Bread to make the reader as much of an expert as possible on the subject.

To Be Continued