Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with Homemade Irish Soda Bread
As the oldest of nine children, Darina Allen remembers watching her mother bake bread just about every day of her life in their Cullohill, Ireland, home. And often that bread was a loaf of classic Irish soda bread.
“When we were little mommy would give us a little bit of dough and I’d shape that beside her in a little flour,” says Allen, founder and principal of the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Shanagarry, Ireland. “I just always knew how to make bread. It was like I had absorbed it by osmosis.”
While those early, miniature loaves of soda bread didn’t turn out quite like her mother’s—“it was hard as a rock because it was over handled”—the experience, along with her family’s kitchen garden and their “house cow,” was an early inspiration for Allen’s career as a chef, instructor, television personality and cookbook author. After marrying and moving to Ballymaloe, she continued developing her culinary prowess with guidance from Myrtle Allen, her mother-in-law and Michelin starred chef of Ballymaloe House.