Brown Bread

Brown bread.  What a humble food and yet so glorious.  Erin and I reveled in the brown bread we ate on the trip, served at every meal and tea. 

The brown bread is not like our whole wheat sandwich bread but a squatter denser thing.  Its thick graininess forced a good bit of chewing but its non-uniform composition meant you had a lot to think about during that chew.  Its flavor has a hint of sweetness that distinguished it yet again and meant you could eat it without butter – but why skip butter if you don’t have to?

It wasn’t until we bought a loaf ourselves that I understood that we were eating soda bread.  Trained all my life by Mimi’s beloved baking to understand soda bread as deliciously white, soft-textured, with raisins and sometimes caraway seeds, my safe little world of preconceived notions was shattered.  BROWN soda bread?  If it tastes like this, sign me up. 

The most available brand comes as a 500g loaf (yes, they’re metric in Ireland) from John McCambridge of Rathcoole, Co. Dublin.  Touted as a family recipe, the ingredients are 43% fresh buttermilk, 30% stone-ground wholemeal flour, followed by traces of bicarbonate of soda, salt and wheatgerm.  We found it for sale in grocery stores but also in a gas station convenience store and even at the airport, transforming this commodity into a souvenir. 

I was such a fan of the brown bread that I paid little attention to the other types of breads we encountered.  The breakfast baskets often included slices of toasted white bread and scones.  Erin informs me that we were even served farl at one meal. She, the great baker, was paying attention but I was stuck on the single variety. 

We first encountered brown bread in our first breakfast of the trip.  We were spending two nights at the ABC Guesthouse in Dublin, a budget B&B in a terrific location – right on the main road from the airport which made it very accessible to buses.  It was also near the National Botanic Gardens (where we spent a beautiful morning sauntering along paths and through glass greenhouses) and Croke Park Stadium the pinnacle of Gaelic football fields (which we merely passed).  Our room was impeccably clean and spacious with complementary wireless and helpful host but with a shower that merely dribbled water that was either scalding or freezing. 

Groggy and disoriented, we arrived in Dublin later than originally planned because of volcanic ash delays.  We stumbled through the afternoon leaning how to navigate the buses (delightfully double decker!), visiting the Book of Kells at Trinity College, playing a round of cribbage during a pint at Banker’s Pub, and eating supper at Cornucopia, a vegetarian restaurant with a vegan cole slaw that both of us list as a food highlight of the trip (again found through the Bridgestone Irish Food Guide).  That night, Erin collapsed and I wandered down the road to Kennedy’s Pub for a session (seisiún) of traditional music.

The next morning we encountered the first of many full Irish breakfasts. Basic contents include fried eggs, links of sausages, thick bacon, roasted tomato, a basket of bread and tea.  Tasty variations that we would later encounter included black pudding, white pudding, roasted mushrooms, and boxty.  But at the budget B&B, the highlight of the meal was the wonderful brown bread.