Irish soda bread

I keep meaning to document this one. St. Patrick's Day seems like a reasonable time, right?

Okay. In the long-forgotten days of Diary-L, before the term "blog" existed, I was internet friends with a girl named Siobhan, who lived in NYC, went to art school, and occasionally wrote down the things she cooked and baked. So I read her recipes, tried them out, and added them to my rotation. I baked my first acorn squash ever, I voluntarily ate pecans, and I mixed up flour and lemon juice-curdled milk to make her grandmother's soda bread.

I wrote out the soda bread recipe by hand. For two years it hung on the wall of our terrible drafty gradschool house, alongside our scribbled formulas for eggplant business, pizza dough, and lentil soup. I baked it every couple weeks, and in our seven-person household, it vanished damn near instantly. Soda bread warm from the oven, with butter. Soda bread with peanut butter. Soda bread plain, cold from the fridge at 2 am.

I haven't baked Siobhan's grandmother's soda bread in years. This is largely because John and I can't drink even a quart of milk before it goes off, and so we almost never have it in the house. But I may go ahead and chance it for a batch of soda bread.

This is transcribed exactly from the page that was taped to our wall. I always used caraway seeds instead of raisins or currants, 100%. Of course, this time we had no caraway seeds, so I baked half the dough with mixed dried cherries and half plain. It still worked admirably.

Eat Siobhan's grandmother's soda bread.

4 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup veg oil
2 eggs
1 c buttermilk (aka milk w lemon juice)
raisins, currants, or caraway seeds
bowl.

Mix up all the dry stuff besides 1 c flour and raisins. Add eggs, oil, & buttermilk.

Knead in the last cup of flour on the previously cleaned kitchen counter. Then knead in the raisins or whatever.

Make the dough round and loafy & put it on a baking sheet. You can cut a cross in the top or you can not cut one.

Bake @ 325/350F for 1 hour, or until good.