Irish Soda Bread Connects Kansas Kitchen to Donegal Hearth
What do you do when you come home from work to get rid of all those anxieties that have built up?
Dave McDermott in the Christian Science Monitor has of late been making Irish soda bread. And in doing so he reckons the soda bread is crossing the miles from Kansas to Donegal and crossing time from this era of computers to an era when making soda bread was the new technology.
In fairness, maybe, McDermott does acknowledge his connection in baking this Irish bread is somewhat imaginery:
For me, however, Ireland is three generations distant. It is not a place to which I have any connection from life experience.
So when I eat soda bread to connect to the place of my heritage, I’m making a different connection than that of the Southerner who makes chess pie in Minnesota or the displaced New Englander who tries to assemble the makings of a fish chowder in Colorado. My connection is an imaginary one – what I dream it might have been like to bake bread in a whitewashed cottage in Donegal. I’m using food to connect to a landscape in the same way that chess pie and fish chowder connect other folks to specific places. It’s just that my place may never have existed outside my imagination.
I’m not really sure that you can make a connection to a place that you accept may never have existed outside of your imagination. Still though, if you like bread you may want to check out the article at least for the recipe.
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
Try a Star Trek convention or a Society For Creative Anachronism meet to see people who exist within their own imaginations. It’s real to them. This could get disgustingly philosophical in a hurry and I drink.
Cogito Ergo Sumthin’