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BREAKFAST: Irish Soda Bread
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
BREAKFAST: Irish Soda Bread
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| Soda bread with raisins becomes Spotted Dog |
| Irish Dance & Music |
On Saturday night, a herd of green-clad young professionals went carousing across Third Street, blocking traffic and inspiring much angry honking. As I watched the intoxicated inexpertly attempt to gain entrance to Ansill, of all places, I realized what was going on.
It's the Erin Express, Philadelphia's� sodden bus tour of heroic drunkenness, now in its 35th year. The party is ostensibly in honor of one St. Patrick,� a long-dead European who never once drank a green beer or passionately slobbered all over a complete stranger. I know the way of the Erin Express because I've been on it � just once! But once was enough to gather enough data about wasted white people to last me my entire life. Some of these white people are, on some level, Irish Catholics.
This makes them authentic Irish drinkers, they will shout at you, proudly wearing the dregs of a Carbomb all over their shirt. Authentic!
Around this time of year, claims of authentic Irish whatever proliferate like mushrooms after a spring rain. Irish Soda Bread is one of the most hotly contested. The first exposure I had to the seasonal bread was from an Irish friend, a Dubliner, who brought a loaf to work one day. Dense, faintly sweet and studded with raisins, it was toasted and spread thickly with Irish Kerrygold butter for a heavenly breakfast.
That wasn't Irish Soda Bread. According to the inflexible standards of the Society for the Preservation of Irish Soda Bread (SPISB), what we ate was called Spotted Dog; really a tea cake modified with raisins, sugar or caraway seeds. Their Web site states that true soda bread, a daily bread eaten in Ireland since the mid-19th century, contains only flour, baking soda, buttermilk and salt.
It makes sense. Surely our impoverished Irish ancestors could not have afforded (on a daily basis) the eggs, sugar, candied fruit and whiskey called for in many "authentic" Irish recipes. The SPISB explains that in the first part of the 20th century, American newspapers would often publish "authentic" Irish recipes in conjunction with St. Patrick's Day, modified to appeal to American tastes for sugar.
No matter which side of the authenticity debate you stand on, both sweet, raisin-filled tea cakes and traditional, unsweetened soda bread make a brill brekkie. Check out three different recipes, both traditional and modified, after the jump.
Alton Brown provides an excellent recipe for Spotted Dog (which he calls Irish Soda Bread) on the Food Network Site.
Bobby Flay's show did "Tasting Ireland," where he visited a bakery that turns out hundreds of loaves of traditional soda bread every day. Irish food writer Darina Allen contributed her recipe here.
The Society for the Preservation of Irish Soda Bread provides the traditional, absolutely no-frills recipes for both soft white and wheat soda bread on their site.
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