{"id":2385,"date":"2023-03-17T10:41:52","date_gmt":"2023-03-17T17:41:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/?p=2385"},"modified":"2023-03-18T14:20:16","modified_gmt":"2023-03-18T21:20:16","slug":"irish-soda-bread","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/irish-soda-bread\/","title":{"rendered":"Irish Soda Bread"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A number of years ago, when my children were still pretty small, I made Irish Soda Bread for an International Day celebration at school and made a mistake. I mistook the fennel seeds in my cupboard for caraway, and the whole experience changed. \u201cYour recipe is so delicious!\u201d people said. And I\u2019ve never looked back. It\u2019s fennel in my Irish Soda Bread every year now, on March 17th<\/sup>, St. Patrick\u2019s Day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have a card with my mother\u2019s handwritten Irish Soda Bread recipe on it. This recipe was was probably her mother\u2019s, and before that her mother\u2019s\u2014my Nanny, a great-grandmother I never knew who sailed over from Ireland around 1913, the year that both Ulster Protestants and Irish Catholics formed paramilitary forces.  But I don\u2019t bake that bread. I use the recipe from the King Arthur Flour cookbook that says \u201cAmerican-Style\u201d at the end. It is more moist and more sweet than the original, and seems so crazy indulgent. The \u201coriginal\u201d Irish soda bread was a product of scarcity, using basic and inexpensive ingredients, and no yeast, to create a bread that was both versatile and cheap. Nanny’s uses baking soda and cider vinegar and no sugar at all. And definitely<\/em> not fennel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While I was baking last night, I made another mistake. I poured the milk into the bowl before whipping the butter and sugar and eggs. I stood momentarily paralyzed and then grabbed a slotted spoon and rescued the softened sticks of butter from the goop. And then I took the rest and poured it down the sink, so I could start over. \u201cShhhhhh!\u201d <\/em>I said to my 16-year-old daughter keeping me company in the kitchen. \u201cDon\u2019t tell my famine ancestors!\u201d But then I caught myself. \u201cNo,\u201d I said. \u201cLet\u2019s tell them. I am going to celebrate abundance this year, in their honor.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My ancestors immediately began whispering in my ear. A cacophony of disagreement. 
\u201cAtta girl!\u201d some of them said, \u201cCelebrate survival and abundance!\u201d 
But \u201cWho do you think you are?\u201d some of them said. \u201cYou wasteful, disrespectful woman.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our life is a strange mix of scarcity and abundance this year. We lost our home to wildfire a few years ago and still do not have everything we had then, but we have what we need. Not necessarily all that we want, but what we need. I sort through want and need in my body almost every day. So I think my ancestors whisper to me every day. I just don\u2019t always know it\u2019s them speaking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All Irish ancestors are famine ancestors, in one way or another. Only a few of my Irish ancestors arrived at the time of An Gorta M\u00f3r<\/em> \/\u00a0 The Great Hunger, from County Cavan.\u00a0 They settled in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania and became part of a Catholic working class mining community.\u00a0 A few (the Robinsons) had arrived in the decades before, from Ulster, part of the last wave of Protestant Scots-Irish settlers in Pennsylvania before the predominantly Catholic influx of migrants escaping famine began. Nanny and my great-grandfather arrived in the early 20th<\/sup> century from County Mayo, during that time of rising Irish nationalism, on the eve of both global and civil wars. None of these migrants and settlers could have evaded the disaster of An Gorta M\u00f3r, which eviscerated indigenous Irish culture and impacted both urban and agricultural societies in the U.S. (in the process continuing to displace Indigenous peoples here). In the decades after the famine, three of my Robinson great-great-great uncles (a wheelwright, a blacksmith, and a stonecutter) left Philadelphia to become farmers in Iowa. That means they settled on land that was more recently stolen than the land they grew up on or the land they never knew, back in Ireland.\u00a0 It\u2019s possible (probable?) that they were trying to evade the rapid growth of Philadelphia due to both Irish Catholic and Black migration around the time of the U.S. Civil War (the Black community of Philadelphia grew from 20,000 to over 60,000<\/a> in the second half of the 19th<\/sup> century). \u201cI don\u2019t know much about these emigrants,\u201d my grandfather Robert Barnes Burrows Robinson wrote in a family history he scribbled out for me on a legal pad when I was 17. Except \u201cthey were bigoted I know,\u201d and they \u201chad a lot of boys who scattered over the country.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a long time I only considered my Tamaqua ancestors\u2014Ann Cullom and Michael Farley\u2014to be \u201cfamine ancestors.\u201d But now I consider them all ancestors impacted by famine in Ireland and by the violent histories of slavery and settler colonialism in both Ireland and the U.S<\/em>. It\u2019s a mouthful, I know, but it\u2019s more true. Even St. Patrick\u2019s Day reminds me that Patrick\u2014before he was a religious leader\u2014was an enslaved boy, captured by the High King of Ireland and taken from his home in Roman Britain to the slopes of Sliabh Mis (Slemish Mountain) in County Antrim.  The history of Ireland is a deep history of violent entanglement across the cold Irish Sea, spilling out through diaspora into other lands. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My Nanny, who probably passed the Irish Soda bread recipe I don\u2019t actually make down to me, left a rural coastal region of Ireland that had been devastated by famine just over half a century before. That\u2019s the span of my lifetime now. The brevity of that passage of time feels tangible in a way it did not when I was younger. In that span of time, what was left of a vibrant, complex pre-famine Irish culture became more tenuous (even as voices to revivify and reinvent\u2014and militarize\u2014it grew). An authoritarian Catholic Church took advantage of the trauma vacuum left by An Gorta M\u00f3r and offered solace through repression. This, also, was passed down to me. Pull the curtains. Don\u2019t talk about it. Who do you think you are?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Irish Soda Bread I choose to make these days\u2014\u201cIrish Soda Bread, American-Style\u201d\u2014includes all of this<\/em>. I even learned today that it was not any of my Irish ancestors, but rather Indigenous peoples of this continent, who first used a form of baking soda to leaven bread<\/a>.  So inside this bread I hear all the whispers. All the complexity. Gach br\u00f3n agus gach amhran. <\/em>All the sorrow and all the songs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

La fh\u00e9ile P\u00e1draig sona daoibh, a chairde. <\/em>Today, bake the Irish Soda Bread that whispers to you. And try to listen. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All Irish ancestors are famine ancestors, in one way or another…. And inside this simple bread are all the whispers. So much complexity. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2386,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17,14,25,6,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-empire","category-history","category-ireland","category-social-change","category-storytelling"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/IMG_9765-scaled.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4goq1-Ct","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2385"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2395,"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2385\/revisions\/2395"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}