Bara brith

Wandering Bob

Wandering Bob

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It's already intolerably hot here - and it's still only mid-morning. Trying to stay positive, my thoughts are turning to much cooler autumn days. Late afternoons, a hint of woodsmoke in the air, coming back from a long ride on my bike, sipping some herbal tea - and maybe a slice (or two) of bara brith, that wonderful Welsh fruit bread.

I have very fond memories of my Welsh grandmother's version of this - but I've never made it. I've had a good rummage through my recipe archive and found three possible recipes to follow. Elizabeth David's (from the 1950s), my grandmother's own recipe (probably even older) and her mother's - which is so short on detail that it couldn't properly be described as a recipe at all.

My grandmother and great-grandmother both used self-raising flour to make bara brith and their recipes contain (to my eyes anyway) excessively long oven times - up to 2 hours. Elizabeth David's recipe is for a yeast-leavened bread - and contains some ingredients that I'll never be able to source in France.

Does anyone have a 21st century recipe for bara brith? Anyone in Wales or the Welsh borders able to help me please? @remedial_gash or @epicuric ? anyone else ?
 
Wandering Bob said:
Thank you for the suggestions. If no-one in the forum can offer me a current recipe, then I shall look elsewhere.




You wouldn't want to eat it right now (è troppo caldo) but it is a very good bread/cake for autumn or winter. As @remedial_gash says above, it's fruity and spicy
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Oh no, not for now, seen the scorching heat here too. But it is an interesting recipe to be archived for the autumn/wintertime
 
It might be worth looking at this webpage: https://historyofbread.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/bara-brith/
Another traditional bread, with lots and lots of versions, lots and lots of history, and very few old printed recipes. That doesn’t mean, of course, that modern recipes aren’t older, some are apparantly unchanged since the eigteenth century (see Bobby Freeman, First Catch Your Peacock, p. 103; Jane Pettigrew, Traditional Teatime Recipes, p. 26); others are folk recipes handed down from generation to generation, no doubted tweaked at every inheritence like a game of historical Chinese whispers.
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A recipe included which sounds easy to make. It uses yeast which is how it would have been made originally, I think.

It also begs the question; is it a bread or a cake? Looks like a cake to me!
 
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This article in the Spectator also has a recipe - using self raising flour rather than yeast and bread flour. I'm coming round to thinking its a fruit bread not a cake and I'd be inclined to make it with yeast and bread flour.

I have all the ingredients...
 
Wandering Bob said:
which article, please?
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Sorry I missed the link out.

https://life.spectator.co.uk/2018/02/recipe-bara-brith/

Here is an extract:

It’s St David’s day on Thursday (March 1), the day celebrating the patron saint of Wales. The usual symbols don’t quite seem appropriate right now: leeks and daffodils make me think of spring, but with the Beast from the East chilling the country to its core and covering it in snow, we’re a little out of step.

Happily, bara brith is here to save the day. Bara brith – literally, ‘speckled bread’ – is a sweet fruit bread, soaked with tea. It’s an old Welsh favourite: the story goes that bara brith would be the product of the final pieces of dough gathered up at the end of the week, mixed with scraps of dried fruit – perhaps unintentionally dried, hence the rehydrating with tea – and popped into the dying embers of the village oven producing a sweet bread. It even travelled with the Welsh who sailed to Argentina in 1865, and you’ll find it in Welsh teahouses in the Chubut province. And most importantly, buttered and eaten warm, alongside a hot cup of tea, it’ll protect you from the current cold of the outside world.

Although originally yeasted, it is now more normally made with self-raising flour. Purists may lean towards the yeast, but given that bara brith was born before raising agents existed, I have no issue with moving with the times, not least because it drastically reduces your preparation time. Self-raising flour will produce a slightly lighter loaf than yeasting, leaning more towards the cake than the bread.
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That's a very interesting read, thank you. I'll check the link in more detail to retrieve the recipe.

Does your "I have all the ingredients" comment imply that you're thinking of making one? it really isn't the time of year for it. Unless we're heading for a cold snap which would be delightful, of course...
 
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