Soda Bread & Farting Turkeys
Defining Family Food Culture, part one
Irish soda bread is not complicated.
At its most traditional, it is a combination of four ingredients: flour, salt, buttermilk, and baking soda. Yet, depending on the baker, these breads can taste incredibly different from one another. It is interesting to think about the fact that soda bread, which was once baked out of necessity and survival, is now an Irish cultural hallmark.
One has to wonder, how exactly does this happen?
How does a combination of simple ingredients become a cultural phenomenon?
Answer: families.
The basic building block of human society, the family offers the best starting point to examine food cultures throughout history. Every recipe ever devised began in someone's kitchen. Were all those kitchens the kitchens of large families? No. In my opinion, however, it is family traditions that keep food cultures alive and thriving.
I’m going to use two sides of my family — the Italian and the Irish sides — as examples of what I mean.
My Italian relatives immigrated to the United States by way of Calabria — the tip of the boot— in the early 1900s. My great grandparents, Antonio and Mary, set up shop selling fruit in Boston. They owned a two family house, rented out the smaller bottom apartment, and reserved the larger upper apartment for the family.
In classic Italian fashion, the family was large, at least by today's standards. One boy, Frank, and three girls, Rosie, Anna, and Rita. Anna was my grandmother. While she was a good cook in her own right, nearly all of the food traditions I have from that side of my family come from my great grandmother, Mary.
She loved to cook, and she did it a lot. She’d make lasagnas, pasta from scratch, sausage and peppers, meatballs and sauce, ravioli, tortellini, the works. And, I’ve been told, she had no qualms about guilting you into multiple helpings.
Yet, it is the American tradition of Thanksgiving that holds strong food memories for my mother. Grandma Mary would stuff and sew up the holiday turkey in preparation for roasting. With each successive stitch, more air was pushed out of the bird, creating rude noises that rose in pitch, and sounded like high octave farts. Grandma Mary was completely oblivious to this, but my mother and her siblings thought it was the funniest thing in the world.
Now, my family Thanksgivings didn’t, and still don’t, come with farting turkeys. That’s because Thanksgiving is the one meal of the year that my father has complete control over.
My dad is not one for thinking too deeply about food and its cultural connections. This is not a fault. It’s just his way. But roast turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, mashed butternut squash, stuffing, and gravy are his absolute favorites. His Thanksgiving turkey is a source of pride. Every year, he seeks out the very best turkey he can find, and roasts it to perfection. If there was a year where it was less than stellar, I don’t remember it.
It is interesting to me that my father loves this particular food tradition, because it is not one that was cultivated during his childhood.
My dad is 100% Irish. And 20th century Irish Americans are not famous for their culinary achievements. Perhaps it was the canned goods and lack of any definitive family traditions that made my dad so disinterested in food.
So different were my parents’ culinary upbringings that, when my dad was dating my mom and meeting her Italian family for the first time, he inquired, in complete sincerity, as to what bakery all the pastries and cookies on the table were from. My Great Aunt Rita, ever the kind humorist, gently told him: “We made all these ourselves, dear.”
I don’t want to cast any shade on Irish culture or cuisine. In fact, classic Irish traditions, like lamb stew, smoked fish, and farmhouse cheese are among the greatest of all gastronomic treasures. But something was lost on the journey across the Atlantic. Was it the prejudice faced by so many upon their arrival? Was it the the availability and convenience of cheap food?
Regardless, my father did not grow up like my mother with any solid food traditions.
Except one.
My Irish grandmother, also named Anna, makes a mean soda bread. Hers is a sweeter recipe, using sugar and raisins instead of salt. It’s a recipe that has been, and shall remain, a family secret. My dad and I have been graced with the knowledge of it for some years now.
Nana would make soda bread for us every time we visited her house. She knew I loved it, and always made sure that there was a fresh loaf waiting for me when I arrived. I will grant that her version of soda bread is more Americanized. But, at its heart, the tradition is there.
I don’t know too much about my Nana’s childhood. I know she was part of a household of 13, all of whom crammed into a small, two room, concrete cottage not far from the Connemara tidal marshes in Galway. She raised sheep, caught eels in the river, drank raw cows milk, and knit socks for her many siblings. Though Ireland was neutral during World War II, Nana remembers the sight of Luftwaffe flying over head for a bombing run of Dublin in the east. She emigrated to America in the 1950s, and hasn’t been back to Ireland since. She turned 90 this past July, and doesn’t make soda bread anymore.
If soda bread is the only snippet of Irish food culture that my Nana brought over from Ireland and shared with her family enough for it to become a beloved staple, it was well worth it. All of us, her children and grandchildren, share memories of spreading butter over slices of soda bread and enjoying cup after cup of Irish Breakfast tea with Nana.
Now I make her soda bread for her great grand children, and for her whenever I visit.
Family food cultures, whether longstanding or brand new, and regardless of background, can be built upon the simplest of traditions. That is what lies at the core. A respect and admiration for the past, for those who came before you and unlocked the secrets of these amazing foods. And it is up to you, as dad, to help care for these traditions.
And it is also up to you to help build one of your own.
to be continued …
