Bread for the Journey

Irish soda bread. I figure any time in March is right for this one …

There’s a problem with low-carb diets: We already know bread, its aroma when baking, its buttered glory, its scent and satisfaction. Who wants to do without that “forever,” even if digestion improves and a couple of inches of Western more-than-enough-ness finally slide off the hips?

Gramps explained his recipe for me, in six typed pages, airmailed from England. I was a seasoned 10-year-old big sister, preparing nighttime bottles for my youngest brother, and Gramps said the water temperature for the bread should be about that same warmth. So I found double layers of comfort: that he shared the Way with me, and that it all made one big story with the parenting I was learning to do (too soon, you might say, but it came in handy later).

Gramps! A New Englander … who moved to England to make his wife happy.

What Gramps’s letter failed to explain was the texture of bread dough. I thought it was supposed to feel like pie-crust dough, where you have to press hard with a wooden rolling pin to make it spread out on a board. As a result, I baked the world’s toughest, driest bread. Over and over again. For years.

Thank goodness, at age 24 I watched a girlfriend “do” bread the way she’d learned via an in-person class. The soft moist surface had nothing in common with…