Favorite Irish Soda Bread

New Year. 2017. The first full year without Rosa. I stood in the bakery kitchen at midnight — I was still there, finishing a batch of buñuelos for a New Year's Day order — and I heard fireworks outside, distant pops and crackles from the neighborhood, and I thought: this year she was alive, and next year she was not, and the years will keep coming and she will keep being not, and there is nothing I can do about the years except fill them with bread.

Alejandro went back to Juírez on January 2. I drove him to the bridge. He got out of the van and stood on the sidewalk and looked small — not old-small but lost-small, like a man who has misplaced the reason for the trip and is going anyway because he doesn't know what else to do. I hugged him and he let me, which is not something Alejandro does easily — he is a man for whom physical affection is a foreign language he never learned — and I said, "Papí, you can stay. You can live with us." He said, "The house." He meant: the house he built. The house in Anapra. Rosa's kitchen. He cannot leave it because leaving it means she is really gone, and as long as someone is in the house, someone is keeping watch over the place where she lived, and keeping watch is the only thing Alejandro has left to do.

The bakery reopened fully after the holidays. January is slow — the quietest month, the month when everyone has spent too much and eaten too much and is resolving to eat less, which is the enemy of a bakery but the reality of January. Sales drop thirty percent. I don't panic because Rosa taught me not to panic. Rosa said: "January is the month the kitchen rests. You don't rest when the kitchen rests — you plan." So I plan. I look at the numbers. I think about the spring menu. I think about what Rosa would add. I think about what Sofia would add. I think about the gap between Rosa and Sofia and how I fill it.

The recipe notebook has eighty-nine entries. I counted them on New Year's Day, sitting on the couch while the children watched a movie, and I read through every recipe and I could hear Rosa's voice in the margins — not in the words, which are mine, but in the spaces between the words, in the "a handful of" and "until it looks right" and "the dough should feel like an earlobe," the instructions that are not instructions but memories, the knowledge that lives in the body and not on the page.

I made rosca de reyes for Three Kings Day. The sweet bread in the shape of a ring, decorated with candied fruit and sugar, with the small plastic baby Jesus hidden inside. The tradition: whoever finds the baby Jesus in their slice has to host a party on February 2, Día de la Candelaria. Diego found the baby Jesus. He held it up like a trophy and said, "I'm hosting a party!" and then realized what that meant and his face fell because hosting a party at eight years old is an abstract responsibility that sounds fun until you realize it involves planning, and planning is less fun than finding tiny plastic babies in bread.

Camila asked for a dog for Christmas. She got books and a doll and new shoes and a toy kitchen (from Carmen, who understands that Camila's future is in food even if Camila doesn't know it yet). She did not get a dog. She has not forgiven us. She is including the dog in her nightly prayers with an escalating specificity: "Please God, a small brown dog that doesn't bite and sleeps in my room." I admire her persistence. I fear her prayer life.

The rosca is the bread of celebration—it belongs to a specific day, a specific ring of candied fruit, a specific small plastic baby hidden inside for Diego to find and hold up like a trophy. But January is thirty-one days long, and after the rosca is gone and Alejandro has crossed back over the bridge and the bakery has settled into its slow season, I need a different kind of bread: something plain and sturdy, something that asks almost nothing of you but gives you the satisfaction of a real loaf. Irish soda bread is what I make when I need to remember that bread is, at its core, just flour and something to leaven it and your hands doing the work—and that is enough, and that has always been enough.

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 40 min | Total Time: 55 min | Servings: 8

Ingredients

4 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 3/4 cups buttermilk, cold
2 tablespoons cold butter, cut into small pieces
1/2 cup raisins (optional)

Instructions

Preheat the oven. Heat oven to 425°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or lightly dust with flour.
Mix the dry ingredients. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt until evenly combined.
Work in the butter. Add the cold butter pieces to the flour mixture. Using your fingertips, rub the butter into the flour until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs—this is the work that goes into your hands, the part that cannot be rushed.
Add the raisins. If using, stir in the raisins and toss to coat in the flour mixture.
Add the buttermilk. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the buttermilk. Stir with a wooden spoon or your hands just until the dough comes together—it will be shaggy and sticky. Do not overwork it.
Shape the loaf. Turn the dough onto a lightly floured surface and shape it gently into a round, about 8 inches across. Place on the prepared baking sheet. Use a sharp knife or bench scraper to cut a deep X across the top, about 1/2 inch deep—this helps the center bake through.
Bake. Bake for 35–40 minutes, until the loaf is deep golden brown and sounds hollow when you tap the bottom. The dough should feel like it has set all the way through—not soft, not doughy, but firm and proud.
Cool before slicing. Let the bread cool on a wire rack for at least 10 minutes before cutting. It is best the day it is made, eaten warm with butter, though it keeps well wrapped at room temperature for two days.

Nutrition (per serving)

Favorite Irish Soda Bread — The January Kitchen Rests, But the Baker Does Not