Soda Bread

[Mortblanc]

I was making some turkey soup today and decided I wanted some soda bread on the side.

I do not bake much so I got the fixin's out and mixed my two cups of flour and cup of buttermilk to a splash of baking powder and salt, mixed it up and popped it in the oven.

It came out nice and brown on top and bottom and done perfect on the inside so I sat down to supper and enjoyed the meal.

After a while I got to thinking that I could not remember when I bought that flour and it came to me that I did not buy that flour, my wife bought it and she has been gone to the grave more than 7 years past.

Then I remembered that the baking powder had been purchased by a nice lady that came to visit me from your Midlands region back in 2012.

Like I said, I do not bake often.

What does this prove?

It proves that when it comes to flour and baking powder you can forget the "use buy" dates. As long as there are no weevils present just go for it.

[CharlesHarris]

[harrypalmer]

Do you make Bannock bread?

[Mortblanc]

Bannock is a lot like soda bread, its form has changed as it became "civilized".

The bannock I learned to make when young was a simple dough skewered on a stick and baked by the fire. Now everyone wants to put raisins and currants and brown sugar and cinnamon in it, bake it at a precise heat in the oven and make a desert bread out of it!

Soda bread is the same and as soon as you mention the word folks start talking about adding flavors and fruit and using this and that instead of buttermilk or sour milk.

I love the simplicity of the original forms, especially since both were intended to be survival foods. Soda bread was not developed until the potato famine in the mid 1800s and was often the only food on the table. I think bannock has been around since before we discovered cave living.

Over here we also have corn based breads that were developed for cooking directly on the coals or on improvised surfaces which were called "ash cakes" and "hoe cakes". The modern name has been changed to "johnny cakes".

Hoe cakes were originally cooked on the flat part of a weeding hoe which was much heavier than a modern garden hoe and had a removable handle. You would knock the handle out, sit the hoe blade in the coals and cook the bread, made from corn meal and water, on the flat surface.

[harrypalmer]

[CharlesHarris]

As a kid I remember eating an oatmeal-raisin bannock Grandma cooked on a griddle on the woodstove either having a poached egg cooked in a hole poked in the top, served with bacon or butter served in a soup plate and a ladle of hot milk poured over it. For supper made without the raisins, but instead with bacon and chunks of haddock or cod served similarly. Not sure where the recipe originated but she then lived in Kittery, Maine and lived her entire life within 50 miles of there.

[Mortblanc]

The only thing the "first nations" people adopted was the use of European grains and the iron pot to cook them in.

They had been making quick breads from maize, acorn flour and milled native grains for their whole existence, cooking them by the fire or directly on the coals.

Further south it worked the other way around and the Scots and Irish that flooded the mountains where I live adopted Maize and converted to cornbread almost exclusively.

Most of our southern U.S. cornbread recipes are almost identical to the plain quick bread wheat, barley and rye recipes of GB and Europe, which you would call bannock.

Corn meal, buttermilk, baking powder, an egg if you have it and a spoon of sugar, mix and pour into a greased dutch oven and bake in the coals for 45 minutes.

[harrypalmer]

[Mortblanc]

Not tense, I just discovered that I make better bread than Ray!

His was still gooey in the middle.

[harrypalmer]

Maybe, but mine will always be better.