What is a recipe? At its simplest, it is a set of clear instructions from one cook or baker to another, which, if followed faithfully, will reproduce something delicious to eat.
A good baking recipe will have been thoroughly tested and, if necessary, tweaked and re-tested. 
After all, baking is both science and art, and small details can result in big differences. However, a recipe is of course so much more than reliable instructions. To cook a dish from a beloved recipe can be an act of generous and ritualistic love. And to share a recipe has always been an act of love and generosity too, as well as a mark of respect. Recipes are often guarded jealously – until they are gifted to someone who can be trusted to honour that recipe and do it justice to the best of their ability.
Kind contributions
This crowd-sourced collection of bread and baking recipes is a generous gift from the women of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (ICA), a bequest from their ovens and kitchen tables to ours. These recipes archive and honour the skills that have passed down through generations of women (and often from their men too), preserving that expertise for generations to come.
Foccacia.
The contributions are impressive in range and diversity, with traditional recipes sitting alongside those adapted to and reflecting modern diets and palates. Each recipe was meticulously tested, often twice – to be sure, to be sure! – and any necessary tweaks were incorporated with utmost respect for the precious gifts that we had been entrusted with.
Sharing the love
There is so much love bound up in these recipes. There is the love inherent in any recipe that has been cooked time and again for a growing family, the very smell of which can bring you back, years later, to being oven-height.
Soda bread.
There’s the love of a recipe tweaked for a special individual, like Eilish McDonnell’s savoury soda bread with pesto, red onion and red peppers that she developed for her vegetarian daughter.
There is the inter-generational love represented by many of these recipes. Helen Kavanagh’s orange and cranberry pudding is inspired by her son David’s marmalade-making habit which he inherited directly from his grandmother, Lily Sheeran, while helping her squeeze oranges and lift heavy pots as a young boy.
Tea brack.
The recipe for Miriam Murphy’s mocha muffins was a gift to her mother from her aunt Ina before Ina’s untimely death in the 1980s, and Miriam always thinks of both women whenever she bakes them. Caroline Power’s Oxford Lunch is adapted from a booklet of her mother’s and grandmother’s recipes that she and her sisters put together when they first set up their own married homes, so that they could carry forward and honour the practical knowledge that these women had amassed.
Behind the recipes
The intimate stories that these recipes tell are often quite beautiful. One of my favourites comes from Connie McEvoy’s Grandda Kavanagh, whom she honours every year as she harvests her patch of forced rhubarb and remembers that winter of 1947, when a big snow saw her living with her grandparents for weeks, and enjoying his home-baked speciality of upside-down rhubarb treat with Aunt Peg’s whipped cream sweetened with brown sugar.
Spelt bread.
Connie recalls in amazing detail the pride with which her grandfather prepared and baked this proud culmination of his patient efforts as an avid gardener. It’s impossible to read her account and not see Grandda Kavanagh through the eyes of his besotted granddaughter.
Another recipe comes to us from Josephine Whitmore, adapted from a recipe torn many years ago from a magazine that was brought to her by a friend’s mother to keep her company during an illness. That small act of kindness is remembered every time she bakes her three-tiered scrumptious carrot cake for her friends and family today.
Others are poignant, telling of emigrated family members brought a little closer by the recreation of a special dish. Patricia Cavanagh’s French apple cake comes from her son’s Parisian girlfriend with whom he lives in Barcelona. Margaret Ferguson’s apricot honey bread is an ode to her 1950s childhood in her family’s west Clare farm, and to the thrilling glamour that surrounded a visit from her aunt who lived in the US. In pairing the exotic apricots and nuts that her aunt had brought home together with honey from the farm’s own beehives, the resulting sweet bread captures a precious moment in time and the memory of a family reunited.
Simple scones..
Most of us, if we’re lucky, carry our own intimate childhood baking memories: the thrill of licking the spoon, the fragrance of fresh bread or scones straight from the oven, or the glow in the house on that November evening when the Christmas cake and plum puddings were being prepared. Many of us have lost the habit of home baking, preferring to watch it on television for our comfort kick. Hopefully this special collection will inspire you and yours to rediscover the joy of home baking for yourselves, and to embrace the gift of a little bit of magic from one of these many home kitchens into your own.
What is a recipe? At its simplest, it is a set of clear instructions from one cook or baker to another, which, if followed faithfully, will reproduce something delicious to eat.
A good baking recipe will have been thoroughly tested and, if necessary, tweaked and re-tested.
After all, baking is both science and art, and small details can result in big differences. However, a recipe is of course so much more than reliable instructions. To cook a dish from a beloved recipe can be an act of generous and ritualistic love. And to share a recipe has always been an act of love and generosity too, as well as a mark of respect. Recipes are often guarded jealously – until they are gifted to someone who can be trusted to honour that recipe and do it justice to the best of their ability.
Kind contributions
This crowd-sourced collection of bread and baking recipes is a generous gift from the women of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (ICA), a bequest from their ovens and kitchen tables to ours. These recipes archive and honour the skills that have passed down through generations of women (and often from their men too), preserving that expertise for generations to come.
Foccacia.
The contributions are impressive in range and diversity, with traditional recipes sitting alongside those adapted to and reflecting modern diets and palates. Each recipe was meticulously tested, often twice – to be sure, to be sure! – and any necessary tweaks were incorporated with utmost respect for the precious gifts that we had been entrusted with.
Sharing the love
There is so much love bound up in these recipes. There is the love inherent in any recipe that has been cooked time and again for a growing family, the very smell of which can bring you back, years later, to being oven-height.
Soda bread.
There’s the love of a recipe tweaked for a special individual, like Eilish McDonnell’s savoury soda bread with pesto, red onion and red peppers that she developed for her vegetarian daughter.
There is the inter-generational love represented by many of these recipes. Helen Kavanagh’s orange and cranberry pudding is inspired by her son David’s marmalade-making habit which he inherited directly from his grandmother, Lily Sheeran, while helping her squeeze oranges and lift heavy pots as a young boy.
Tea brack.
The recipe for Miriam Murphy’s mocha muffins was a gift to her mother from her aunt Ina before Ina’s untimely death in the 1980s, and Miriam always thinks of both women whenever she bakes them. Caroline Power’s Oxford Lunch is adapted from a booklet of her mother’s and grandmother’s recipes that she and her sisters put together when they first set up their own married homes, so that they could carry forward and honour the practical knowledge that these women had amassed.
Behind the recipes
The intimate stories that these recipes tell are often quite beautiful. One of my favourites comes from Connie McEvoy’s Grandda Kavanagh, whom she honours every year as she harvests her patch of forced rhubarb and remembers that winter of 1947, when a big snow saw her living with her grandparents for weeks, and enjoying his home-baked speciality of upside-down rhubarb treat with Aunt Peg’s whipped cream sweetened with brown sugar.
Spelt bread.
Connie recalls in amazing detail the pride with which her grandfather prepared and baked this proud culmination of his patient efforts as an avid gardener. It’s impossible to read her account and not see Grandda Kavanagh through the eyes of his besotted granddaughter.
Another recipe comes to us from Josephine Whitmore, adapted from a recipe torn many years ago from a magazine that was brought to her by a friend’s mother to keep her company during an illness. That small act of kindness is remembered every time she bakes her three-tiered scrumptious carrot cake for her friends and family today.
Others are poignant, telling of emigrated family members brought a little closer by the recreation of a special dish. Patricia Cavanagh’s French apple cake comes from her son’s Parisian girlfriend with whom he lives in Barcelona. Margaret Ferguson’s apricot honey bread is an ode to her 1950s childhood in her family’s west Clare farm, and to the thrilling glamour that surrounded a visit from her aunt who lived in the US. In pairing the exotic apricots and nuts that her aunt had brought home together with honey from the farm’s own beehives, the resulting sweet bread captures a precious moment in time and the memory of a family reunited.
Simple scones..
Most of us, if we’re lucky, carry our own intimate childhood baking memories: the thrill of licking the spoon, the fragrance of fresh bread or scones straight from the oven, or the glow in the house on that November evening when the Christmas cake and plum puddings were being prepared. Many of us have lost the habit of home baking, preferring to watch it on television for our comfort kick. Hopefully this special collection will inspire you and yours to rediscover the joy of home baking for yourselves, and to embrace the gift of a little bit of magic from one of these many home kitchens into your own.
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