Irish or not - here I come

Memory:
My real husband, Michael, and I are both of Irish/Catholic descent. So much so, that my daughter was named for the Shannon Airport in Ireland after it was bombed in 1970, and my younger brother, Johnny, and I were as close to being IRA supporters as any two Bridgeport, Connecticut idiots could be without carrying a gun.

But my "recipe" for my Irish Soda Bread is Emi, my 14 year old granddaughter. Nothing about this girl is Irish, but that has never stopped me before. My daughter is mostly Polish and Russian from her real father, John, and her husband, Ed, is French Canadian and Native American, which means none of my Irish eyes and red hair ever made it near my little Pocahontas. But, once a year around March 17th, this dark eyed, dark skinned beauty starts to look more and more like me when we make our soda bread together.

There is a certain ritual to this event. We use a special, huge pottery bowl and only this bread bowl to mix up our precious dough. We always watch "The Secret of Roan Inish" movie to help create the mood. Otherwise, how could the two of us believe we were doing all this in a whitewashed cottage on one of the Republic's sod covered coastal islands.

This dough is one of the stickiest, messiest muddles I've ever worked with (so be warned), but I wouldn't change it even if I knew how. It wasn't that way when I originally got this recipe from an Irish friend of mine, Alice Conway, in the 1970's. Back then it always had a firm dryness to the mixture, and when it was put in the cast iron pans, it was easy to crisscross the top before baking, but not since Emi and I have been making it together. Don't know what made the difference, but it was one of the happiest mistakes that has ever happened to me, and I really believe the bread tastes better. There is nothing like goo up to your elbows and a grandchild to turn a round loaf of bread into a holiday.

Recipe:
Grammy's Irish Soda Bread
Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees
Grease and flour two cast iron skillets about 8 or 9 inches round

1 quart buttermilk
2 eggs beaten slightly
1 tbs. oil

8 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 tbs. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 tbs. salt

2 cups raisins or one box
1/4 cup caraway seeds.

• In a small bowl combine all the wet ingredients.
• In a large bowl (pretty darn large, too) sift all the dry ingredients. Combine well.
  
• To the dry ingredients, add the caraway seeds and the raisins. Be sure to coat the raisins in the flour or you'll have raisin balls in the thing.
• Make a deep well in the middle of the dry ingredients and pour in the liquid mixture.
• Stir this until blended.
  
• Divide the dough in half to make two round loaves and place in the prepared skillets.
• Bake for 1 hour until golden.
• Be sure to make a cross on the tops of the bread before placing in the oven. AMEN

Once you get the bread out of the oven, cover the warm tops with lots of butter. When you are ready to cut the bread, cut it down the whole length of the middle of the loaf. Then cut it across the small sides of the halved loaf for a manageable size portion.

Thought:
This might not make you an Irish Soda Bread lover if you are not one already, but it's pretty good and my family thinks it "gold."

A quote from my "Black Irish" dad, "The Irish are lovely people," and he ought to have known.