Flour on the Floor: Irish Soda Bread

The visual diagram of my family looks less like a tree and more like a vine—the roots starting at the same place then running quickly away in all directions, fertilized by grudges and pruned by divorce. There are some flowers, sure, but also lots of thorns.

Drafting the invitation list to a family holiday requires a series of if-then statements. If this brother, then not that one. If Dad, then not Mom. At my wedding, I couldn’t cobble together enough amicable members of my family to fill a ten-top table. Instead, we spread the settings wide and seated seven with plenty of elbow room.

My husband’s family tree has some fallen branches, but the trunk is strong. In fact, almost all members live within several hours of each other on the East Coast. Holidays require rental tables and linens. His immediate family is larger than mine: two sisters, one brother-in-law, two nephews and both parents still living and (more or less) sane. This week, I packed up our two children and boarded a plane sans my husband and went to visit my in-laws in New Jersey.

When I told friends that I was going without my husband to visit his family, the reaction was universally congratulatory with an edge of dubiousness. Wide-eyed my friends muttered encouraging statements like “good for you,” laced with just enough unspoken pity and a shake of the head or roll of the eye that indicated that they thought it was anything but. However, in a buck to the trend, my mother-in-law has become like a second mother to me. My father-in-law is also considerate and welcoming, and loves my kids as if they are his own (which is to say that he wouldn’t change their diapers but is happy to take them to McDonalds).  

My mother-in-law and I have spent the last 13 years strategically preparing Thanksgiving meals for 25-35 people—you take this stack of recipes, I’ll take that one. But this time we get to bake together just for the joy of it. She chooses Irish Soda Bread out of this first chapter of Baking Illustrated.

Irish Soda Bread is bread for people who don’t want to make bread. There is no yeast. No kneading. It’s perfect for baking with kids. My nephews and my daughter will be “helping,” which brings the total to three four-year-olds in the kitchen.

It’s hard to operate in someone else’s kitchen. I don’t know where anything is which leaves me feeling like I do each time our house cleaner empties our dishwasher—if I were Jola, where would I put the measuring spoons? My mother-in-law’s kitchen is serious about baking; it would guffaw at my galley. There are entire drawers lined in stainless steel filled with flour and sugar. There are plugs and access to water within a foot of anyplace you might stand. It’s Williams Sonoma minus the register. She used to be a professional baker with two at-home, successively cleverly-named bakeries: first “Two Smart Cookies” then “Rolling in Dough” after her partner went out on her own.

The kids argue over who gets to do what in the recipe then fall into a pattern of taking turns with my mother-in-law. There ends up being little room for me. In fact, this is the first recipe that I actually have no hand in making. I become photographer instead of baker. Though I’m not measuring or mixing, I have read enough to know that the “soda” in the bread’s name refers to the baking soda that interacts with the acid in buttermilk to give lift. Tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide form to rise the bread but too much handling pops these bubbles resulting in bread that is too-flat or too-dense. But when each child needs a turn and the command of “gentle” is often ignored (poor dog down the street), it’s best to brace for too-flat and too-dense.  

They shape the over-handled dough into a circle and I use a serrated knife to cut a large cross in the top. A Today Show article says that this act allows heat to penetrate into the thickest part of the bread. But the author also mentions that the cross is symbolic of giving thanks in a Catholic country like Ireland. I like the idea of gratefulness while I am here with this cobbled-together extended family.   

My husband and I purposely chose to live in a city far from our families. We were newly-married and full of the idea that we wanted to do everything on our own. We didn’t want to be held down by our old roles in the towns that knew us as kids. Of course, this was before we had our own children. Now being so far away often feels lonely. Especially since the town we live in is so full of boomerangers who left for college or a fabulous single life only to return to raise their own families where they grew up. These friends have family two minutes away rather than a two-hour plane flight.

It’s easy to idealize what having grandparents and aunts and nephews closer would be like. I imagine Sunday dinners—for some reason conjuring mounding bowls of pasta topped with meatballs though we are Jewish, not Italian—and extra members cheering our children at school events. I think of doing this baking project with my mother and mother-in-law in the kitchen with me, generations sharing their know-how and family gossip.

But this isn’t the reality of anyone I know with family close by.

As with memories of ex-boyfriends that grow sweeter with the passage of time, so does family with the passage of miles. Family far away is perfect family; they can do no wrong. My visit is for eight days and I expect my illusions will be tarnished if not cracked by the end. But for now, here on Day Three, my mother-in-law and I sip wine while the bread bakes. Living far away helps me appreciate these small moments that would likely be overlooked if they occurred more regularly. We work together with my sister-in-law to prepare dinner for family and friends. We joke and laugh while we chop and season. There are hugs and double-kiss greetings and a full table.

The Irish Soda Bread emerges from the oven monochromatic and lumpy but smells wonderful. It bears prints of small fingers and palms. If we forensic-tested the crust we’d find fingerprints tying the four-year-olds to any one of a number of household crimes: Who dropped the ice cubes that have now created little puddles all over the kitchen? Who left the seat up and missed the potty anyway?

The bread is a hit at the dinner table. It has a great actual effort to perceived effort ratio. You can serve fresh homemade, still warm bread without the work that goes into a yeasted loaf. It’s like that commercial with the woman who throws flour on her face before emerging with a plate of cookies that she merely cut from a pre-made log and baked. It says, “See how much I love you?” with arms spread wide but with fingers crossed—it’s a bit of a cheat, but one easily forgiven.

We sit outside on this balmy summer evening, acorns dropping around us (and sometimes on us), toasting each other and breaking bread. The children are begging for dessert already but we shrug them off and continue with our well-worn stories. We slice and slather the bread with butter. Its appearance and flavor are work-a-day (not seeming to warrant a fan club) but it offers a quiet satisfaction. It’s the kind of bread you eat for sustenance; the kind that keeps you going—just like the family gathered around the table, that we get to spend a few more days with before heading back to the home that we’ve created on our own.