Barm Brack

Barm Brack.  Photo by fordmadoxfraud, 
found on Wikimedia Commons

While surfing the Internet recently, I learned about a quick bread from Ireland that I might like even better than Irish soda bread--barm brack.  Barm brack, or barmbrack, or simply brack, has strong associations with Halloween, which makes it a good topic for an October post. 

Barm brack is an Anglicized spelling of the Irish Gaelic term bairín breac.  Barm brack is a quick bread made with self-rising flour, which typically contains baking powder.  Unlike Irish soda bread, barm brack contains dried fruit--raisins, sultanas, currants, candied peel--as well as sugar and spices like cinnamon. Recipes contain different amounts of dried fruit.  Some contain so much dried fruit that barm brack has been referred to as "Irish fruitcake".

The Halloween connection comes from the fact that this bread (or cake, as the Irish were wont to refer to a sweetened baked good) was, like the King Cake of Mardi Gras, baked with a surprise inside.  The surprise in a King Cake is a bean or figurine and finding it in your slice earns you a temporary, small privilege.  

Barm brack contains multiple trinkets, and the nature of the trinket you find supposedly tells your fortune in the coming year.  Wikipedia reports that a barm brack could contain:

a pea, a stick, a piece of cloth, a small coin (originally a silver sixpence) and a ring. Each item, when received in the slice, was supposed to carry a meaning to the person concerned: the pea, the person would not marry that year; the stick, would have an unhappy marriage or continually be in disputes; the cloth or rag, would have bad luck or be poor; the coin, would enjoy good fortune or be rich; and the ring, would be wed within the year.

The Welsh make a similar bread called bara brith or "speckled bread," from all of the raisins or pieces of dried fruit inside.  Unlike barm brack, it does not seem to have fortune telling or Halloween associations. The Irish and Welsh breads both involve soaking the dried fruit in strong tea before adding it to the dough.  

I've long had a weakness for raisin bread.  Which is why I seldom buy it--I have no desire to become even more loaf-shaped than I already am.  But barm brack and bara brith sound distinctive enough to be interesting.  I might make some for experimental purposes, sometime.  

World's Oldest Fruitcake?

In keeping with the holidays, this post will discuss an amusing archaeological find: A fruitcake, found in Antarctica, on Cape Adare.  A BBC News article about the find may be read here.

A fruitcake.  "To my grandmother's recipe"
James Petts from London, England.  Found on Wikimedia Commons

It's believed that the cake is 106 years old, based on the deduction that the cake was left by an expedition of explorer Robert Falcon Scott. According to a short article on the find by Archaeology magazine, Scott was fond of fruitcake.  This one was found in its original tin (somewhat rusted) and had been made by the British company Huntley & Palmers, which after going dormant was reestablished and is once again in business today.  The cake was in surprisingly good condition, and "smelled edible," according to one of the archaeologists quoted in the BBC article.  A picture of Scott's fruitcake in its current condition may be seen in that article.  The photograph to the right is a more recent fruitcake; it is NOT the one found in Antarctica, but it may be used (with attribution) under a Creative Commons license.

The fruitcake find was only one of many at the Cape Adare site, where excavations have been ongoing since 2016.  The 1,500 or so finds, including clothing, tools, badly deteriorated meat and fish, and some "rather nice looking" jams, are being restored and returned to the find site, which was the base camp for Scott's last Antarctic expedition.  Scott's team found the South Pole, only to discover, to Scott's dismay, that a Norwegian team had beaten them by 33 days. Scott and four of his team members perished on their way back to their base camp.

It turns out that Scott's cake may not be the only fruitcake to survive a century.  This ABC story is about another fruitcake, preserved (though not as well) among ANZAC memorabilia, apparently as a serviceman's memento of his wife.

I hope you've enjoyed these odd tidbits about fruitcake!  Have a happy and prosperous New Year!