Lizzy O’Riordan talks with her father about the ways the tangy, subtly sweet loaf represents his fractured identity, childhood memories, and a small town in Southwestern Ireland.

The first time my dad had soda bread he was ten and the year was 1971. For the following five decades it would be a staple that he’d return to, representing memories of warmth and summer escapes. Eventually, he’d become an expert in the recipe and pass it down to his children, many years after that first experience. 

The first time he tried it though, it was lunch, and he was spending the summer in the small Southwestern Irish town of Tralee with his aunt and cousins. Bread was a daily ritual for the family, and the routine was as follows. A muslin cloth covered a clear pyrex jug of milk which his aunt Peg kept on the kitchen window perpetually. As the sun came through the window, it would slowly sour the liquid. Then, each morning she would use the mixture in her bread as a buttermilk substitute. 

When it hit midday, my dad, Jimmy, and his cousins piled into the kitchen. At the same time, his uncle swung round the corner outside in his lorry, in which he had been delivering pig food in the mountains all morning. He entered the house and pulled up a chair with the rest of the family and cut a slice of the still warm loaf, covering it with plenty of Kerrygold cheese. 

The bread was made up of a soft dense crumb and had a rough outside. Sometimes it was baked by Aunt Peg, and other times by my dad’s grandmother, who would make her loaf on a peat-powered oven range which “smelled smokey and rich, like a tobacco pipe,” he remembers.

“The old belief is that unless you cut a cross in your soda bread the fairies will stay stuck inside it and cause it to burn”

Olivia Armstrong

Whichever way, soda bread was at the centre of this “warm and peaceful place” in contrast to my dad’s own turbulent home in London, where he lived with an alcoholic father, in a household where fighting was constant. Soda bread came to represent calm Irish holidays, which were a staple for most of his tween and teenage life. Quickly, it became a beloved recipe.

An important food for my dad, and then for me, it’s simple to make and delicious. It only has four ingredients: flour, salt, bicarbonate of soda, and buttermilk. In this way, it’s one of the easiest breads to master and a massively comforting dish in my life, thanks to the crumbly texture and familiar taste. I have many fond memories of waking up for a school day to smell the sweet scent rising up the stairs, from where my dad had woken up early to bake it. Perfect with butter, as his uncle had, or with Nutella, as my teenage self insisted, it makes a great breakfast food.

It’s also a bread with a rich history. Though now most commonly associated with Ireland, the first documentation of the bread was actually recorded by Native Americans, who used pearl ash, formed from the ashes of wood, as a leavening agent. It wasn’t until the 1830s that the recipe spread to Ireland via a circulating agricultural newspaper, where they replaced the ash with bicarbonate of soda – an ingredient that was new to the country. 

Ireland quickly adopted the bread as their own and formed mythology around the food. According to Olivia Armstrong, a story workshopper who collaborates with the British Library, a cross, traditionally added on the top of the bread as decoration and to let heat out, soon became absorbed into Irish folklore around fairies. 

She says: “In Irish folklore the fairies are never far away, always causing mischief. The old belief is that unless you cut a cross in your soda bread the fairies will stay stuck inside it and cause it to burn. The cross allows the fairies to have an escape route.”  

This small detail shows how interconnected folklore and Irish Catholicism are – calling upon the religious symbol of the cross to banish fairies. “The Catholic Church accepted folk beliefs, and the two are intertwined,” Armstrong adds, “folklore and folk customs are found at all religious festivals and seem to co-exist.” 

“The simple bread took on a weighty task of representing the Irish part of him”

By the time of the Famines of 1845-1852, it was one of the most popular homemade breads in Ireland thanks to how simple and inexpensive it was to make.  My dad tells me that his family “used to call it ‘Irish bread’, not soda bread”. So, though there are many variations of the bread across the world – including in countries like America, Scotland, and Serbia – it is the Irish who seem to set the rules about what makes it authentic. 

The Society For The Preservation of Soda Bread was created for this reason, to protect the “Irish way” of making the recipe – and to moderate debate, largely about raisins and currants and whether they belong in soda bread. The society, which now has a Facebook group, strictly forbids their members to post images of anything except for the ‘traditional’ four ingredient bread. You won’t be allowed to sign up to the group unless you promise it. 

In my dad’s case, soda bread is synonymous with his sometimes fractured Irish identity. The simple bread took on a weighty task of representing the Irish part of him. Which seems appropriate considering the easy loaf contains multitudes of meaning when related to Ireland more generally. 

“My mother never made it,” he explains, lamenting that he wishes she had. “My parents wanted to distance themselves from Ireland by the time they came to London. Ireland hadn’t been particularly kind to them in the end since my mother became pregnant with me before she was married. They left because of that.”

Despite this, he was always welcomed to Tralee, the same town from which his parents felt ousted. And sometimes, after they’d had the soda bread for lunch, piled high with butter, he would join his uncle in the lorry. 

Pleasantly full of soda bread, they’d travel to his uncle’s work, taking in the landscape that stretched far and wide – “to farms very remote in the mountains, down narrow roads and exciting bends” –  before heading back to the house for dinner.