This delicious Irish soda bread recipe can be made for St. Patrick's Day and beyond—it's fun to make and perfect for any time of the day. "Gammy" is what my father and his five siblings called their grandmother. To everyone else, she was Marie Phelan, born near Galway, on the western coast of Ireland, in 1888. She immigrated to the States when she was just sixteen and, like so many Irish immigrant women at that time, found work as a domestic servant in New York City, where she stayed nearly her whole life. She didn’t return to Ireland to visit until she was an adult.
Dad doesn’t recall if Gammy was a cook in the house where she worked, for a family called Rogers. But “I understand Gammy was a very competent cook,” he said, meaning, of course, more than competent: Her recipes are how I know Gammy, beyond whom my sense of my family’s history fades out like an old song. I feel lucky to have the recipe for her (much loved and equally teased) fruitcake, her Christmas rum balls, and her soda bread.
Her soda bread is a round, dense loaf made from an amazingly sticky dough—mostly fruit strapped into flour via buttermilk. Currants and raisins Dalmatian-spot the pale dough, caraway seeds are mandatory, and the bread is even better toasted (and amply buttered) than fresh. The recipe is a simple one, and also “truly an approximation,” as Dad said, texting me a picture of his loaf: Gammy’s recipes are all pretty vague, of the “bake in a slow oven” and “knead until it feels right” variety. —Caroline Lange
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