One of my abiding memories of childhood is my mother making brown bread for the morning. She’d take out the large mixing bowl and turn up the stove in readiness for the miraculous transformation of some few ordinary ingredients into something so delicious, warm, and tasty – with the added bonus that the wonderful smell of baking would linger almost until morning.
Sometimes we’d take a break from destroying the house or fighting over toothbrushes to watch her swift, practised movements. No kitchen scales required, she knew proportions by eye or by weight in hand. She used the Mount Mellary Stoneground Wholemeal flour mixed with Odlums white. A small teaspoon sufficed for the soda, a pinch for the salt, the butter always cold and always lightly rubbed in. After mixing the dry ingredients with the buttermilk came the forming, firm and quick, no heavy kneading required.
She’d put a cross on top for a blessing, and into the oven it went on a floured tray. After 20 or so minutes out came the scrumptious bread, and she’d try in vain to bat us away as we begged for a hot slice with butter and jam, which we always got, as did the scattering of friends from the road who had been tempted to hang on for the chance of a taste. Eventually, she ended up making a huge round of bread – and then two – so that we could have both the hot slice straight out of the oven and more for school the next day. As we got older we became the ungrateful wretches that all teenagers are and starting preferring awful sliced white pan, but it was a fickle dalliance and we returned shamelessly to the timeless joy and incomparable deliciousness of Mam’s brown bread. Good times.
I make decent scones, but for some reason the perfection achieved in that kitchen of my youth seems beyond me. My brown bread is sadly average. On a recent visit home, my sister rustled up a flawless round as easily as my mother had always done. I sat and ate six slices without thinking and then resolved to do better in my own attempts, but maybe I haven’t the knack.
Either way, I was delighted to see that the Ploughing is continuing its fine tradition of The National Brown Bread Baking Competition which was launched on Tuesday at the Home of Innovation in Dublin.
The event, sponsored by retailer Euronics, is organised by the National Ploughing Association (NPA) and the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (ICA) and attracts entries from bakers across the country.
The final of this year’s competition will take place at the National Ploughing Championships, Screggan, Tullamore, Co. Offaly.
Eight finalists will take to the stage to bake their brown breads for the judges in the semi-finals on September 16 and 17, with the winner crowned on during the final on September 18.
The overall winner will take home a cash prize of €5,000, along with a NEFF Slide & Hide oven worth over €2,000. The three finalists on September 18 will be presented with a €500 Euronics gift card and all other finalists will be given a €250 Euronics gift card and a Neff hamper.
One detail that caught my eye was that all entrants were asked to drop their freshly baked bread to one of a list of local stores. That gladdened my heart, I have to say. No tech or modern comms involved: fresh baking and human contact, the way we are meant to be.
NPA managing director Anna May McHugh said: “We are delighted to welcome back Euronics to the National Ploughing Championships.
“The first national brown bread baking competition took place at the Ploughing in 1954 and it is wonderful to see that the competition is still as popular now as it was then.”
It is wonderful to see that its popularity has endured. And why wouldn’t it? Sourdough and other fancy variants may be having their moment in the sun, but homemade brown bread will be with us forever.
Some of its popularity is down to just how delicious it is, though I must say, much like cakes and scones, even the most upmarket productions rarely beat something fresh out of the oven. (The same goes for fairy buns, now called cupcakes by those who don’t know any better. I don’t know why, but a wooden spoon produces a better texture than an electric beater. Some physicist might explain it to me, but I remain convinced that, as with most things, a small batch produces a richer, more toothsome, tastier bun).
Then, of course, with brown bread there’s the added enhancement of nostalgia: the association with lovely childhood memories, the emotional connection, the hankering for that time in your life when things were easier and simpler and a dollop of homemade jam on the buttery bread in a warm kitchen could mend most wrongs. Nostalgia, as the saying goes, is a comfort-food ingredient. We’re transported back by those smells and tastes to when – likely through rose-tinted glasses – we recall, as Dylan Thomas said, when Time held us green and golden.
There’s a science behind food-evoked nostalgia, and its something that clever marketers tap into. The limbic system of the human brain that process tastes and smells – the amygdala and hippocampus – are also crucial for forming and retrieving emotional memories. We are hardwired to tap into the emotional and sensory experiences tied to food that was meaningful or familiar to us in the past, particularly it seems, in our formative years.
For Marcel Proust his “involuntary memory” of childhood and a long-forgotten tea with his aunt was triggered by his consumption of a madeleine. For many Irish people, the same experience is wrapped around brown bread or scones, or elements of daily baking from our younger years.
One study from the University of Southhampton found “evidence that food is a potent source of nostalgic reverie” and that “food-evoked nostalgia also predicted higher positive affect, selfesteem, social connectedness, and meaning in life.”
That sounds like a good reason to get baking. Or to take a trip to the Ploughing to take in the smells of childhood and the remembrance of things not just past but still very much part of what we are.