The Obvious Child

My go-to happy song is ‘The Obvious Child’ by Paul Simon. It can fix any bad or sad day. This is pretty weird when you think about it, as joyous drumming aside, the lyrics are a minefield of melancholic nostalgia. Doubly weird when you consider this song has held this place in my heart since I was a sixteen year old goth (and really, what sixteen year old goth likes PAUL SIMON?) This traces back to the day I had called my mother from a college payphone, incoherent with sobbing and demanded to be picked up RIGHT NOW. Assuming pregnancy, or drugs, or Satanism, or maybe all three, she screeched to a halt outside about ten minutes later, by which point I was mute with sadness. Oddly I don’t actually remember the cause of the devastation, but it was probably a boy, back then it was ALWAYS a boy. Mam’s Paul Simon tape was blaring from the emphysemic stereo of her battered Peugeot, and after a few minutes of heartbroken silence, that song came on. So she did what any right thinking mother would do, sang along to it throatily, whilst jigging about in the seat, waggling her eyebrows about for comic effect. She even did the deep ‘BAAA-BAAA’ backing vocal bits. A minute and a half of that and I was helpless with laughter and suddenly things didn’t seem that bad after all.

 Sometimes I need a foodstuff that performs the same function as The Obvious Child. The usual things like cake, or chicken soup, or a mound of mashed potato oozing butter, does not cut it however. What I want when I am struck with sadness or malaise or stress is Soda Bread. Obviously this is an unorthodox choice, but childhood memories are again responsible. Every Saturday morning Mam would go on an inexplicably long shopping trip for food. Granted, we were a large family, but I suspect the length was more to do with a week of being pawed at and shouted at by five children and various animals had taken her dangerously close to the edge. Five days of that and Sainsbury’s on a Saturday morning will feel like a spa trip. Whilst the younger children were eating mud or watching Postman Pat or forcing cake into their eye, I would go and seek out my Pa, who would be perusing the papers. Inevitably, he would after a time, cut himself a piece of soda bread, butter it, do the same for me, do a theatrical wink and say ‘Don’t tell your mother’. For years, this baffled me, until I realised that the butter to bread ratio was exactly equal, and instantaneous cardiac arrest was a very real possibility.


Pa always used to tell me that no one made soda bread as beautifully as my granny. Even as a child of six, I was incredulous at this, as Gran’s cooking was absolutely fucking atrocious. A formidable woman, Granny had a fondness for small dogs, oversized jewelry, painting her fingernails red, and claiming that any famous person she loved was Irish (including Dean Martin, that most of Italian of men, henceforth forever known in our house as Mario Murphy). What she didn’t like was cooking. Her specialty was what she called ‘Knock-Up’. This involved smushing the contents of the fridge (meat, veg, everything) into a loaf tin and baking it. It was approximately as horrific as it sounds. The memory of her boiled bacon and cabbage, cooked ALL DAY until both substances began to disintegrate into the greying water, could turn me vegetarian even now. And the cakes! She used to make fairy cakes filled with angelica that I once broke a tooth on (a milk tooth, but still). Looking back on it, she was by this point, in her seventies, not in the best health, and probably could no longer be arsed. So maybe her soda bread WAS amazing, but I just never got to taste it.

Soda bread in the shops is always a let down, even that posh one by the Irish chef Paul O’Thingummy that they do in Waitrose. So here is a recipe to make it yourself, which I heartily recommend doing. Not only is it delicious, but it is also so embarrassingly easy I feel like a fraud for posting it here. Stir stuff together, put it in the oven. That’s it. None of that poncing about with proving, Irish peasants clearly had no truck with yeast. Quite right too.

                                                              This is not a pretty bread, lets call it 'rustic' yeah?

Granny’s Soda Bread  

Ingredients
250g strong white bread flour
250g wholemeal bread flour
1 tsp bicarb
1 tsp salt
500ml buttermilk
80g porridge oats
25g butter  

Method

 1. Preheat the oven to 200C/fan 180C

 2. Stir all the dry stuff together with a spoon or palette knife

 3. Chop the butter up and do that ‘rubbing together’ thing with your fingers to incorporate it into the dry stuff and make you feel like a 1930’s housewife.

4. Pour in the buttermilk. Try not to be alarmed about how much it smells like sick, and under no circumstances drink any of it. You have been warned.

5. Mix everything with a palette or regular knife, but gently. Soda bread is really stroppy, and is to be handled with care.

6. Now attempt to shape this into a neat round loaf of about 20cm across. This will not be easy and you will get very bread-y fingers.

7. Put the loaf onto an oven tray which you have either lightly floured, or put one of those silicon-y sheet thingies on.

8. Cut a deep cross into the loaf, much deeper than you think is right. This, according to my ancestors, was to ‘let the devil out’. Beelzebub hanging about in unbaked bread was a genuine problem back then.

9. Bake for about 40 minutes but keep checking it from about half an hour in. My oven is very slow and very erratic on temperatures, yours might be normal. It is done when the bottom sounds hollow when you tap it.

10. Once cooled, eat with lots of butter, and don’t tell your Mam.