How to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day

With Irish soda bread, Irish corned beef, Irish stew— and Scotsman Sean Connery?

By Laura Longley

Remember St. Patrick’s Day? That day once a year when everyone becomes Irish—except for the last two years, when COVID changed everything.

2022 must be our lucky year. It’s looking like we might go green again. Kids, back in school, can tape their drawings of rainbows up in the corridors. You can dress like a leprechaun, march in a parade down Main Street, drink green Guinness or McDonald’s Shamrock Shakes, and, to go with your Irish stew, bake a loaf of that sourdough bread you mastered in May of 2020.

Sourdough? Wait, don’t start the yeast “starter” yet. That early pandemic sourdough-baking craze was over within months. Besides, there’s nothing Irish about it; it was the Egyptians of 1500 B.C. who first used sourdough. Now is the time to try your hand at soda bread. 

This one-hour wonder with its crumbly, golden-brown crust and dense, tight crumb inside actually was created by Native Americans. But when baking soda was introduced in Ireland in the 1830s, this quick bread soon appeared on every Irish family’s table. 

To put it on your table this holiday, you might try your luck with “Grandma’s Irish Soda Bread.” (See the link to the recipe, below.) This cherished recipe by a real Irish granny— born on St. Patrick’s Day, no less—comes to us from her granddaughter Sally McKenney, a best-selling author and YouTube baking show star.

McKenney explains why this quick bread is so much faster and easier to make than sourdough: It doesn’t require any yeast. “Instead,” she says, “all of its leavening comes from baking soda and buttermilk… Buttermilk and cold butter are the secret to its delicious success!”

There seems to something magical about it, too. If you slice the traditional cross on top, you’ll let fairies out.

Irish soda bread could be a meal unto itself. But how could you resist pairing it with corned beef or Irish stew (two other foods of debatable Irish origin). Indeed, corned beef is likely a Jewish-Irish collaboration, the happy result of Irish immigrants buying most of their meat from New York’s kosher butchers. Irish stew supposedly traveled from America to Ireland in the early1890s. There it was quickly adopted by those with little but leftover mutton, onions, and potatoes.

Dessert? With that hearty meal under your belt who’d have room for Bailey’s Irish Cream Cheesecake? Why not binge instead on Irish movies— “Waking Ned Devine,” maybe, or, for the children, “Darby O’Gill and the Little People”? This 1959 Disney classic will entertain your imps with lots of naughty leprechauns. Parents are more likely to get a laugh out of a certain Scotsman’s miserable attempt at an Irish accent. But he would have the last laugh. Three years later, Sean Connery would make film history with just three words, spoken with an English accent: “Bond. James Bond.”
https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/grandmas-irish-soda-bread/