How to make the perfect bara brith – recipe | Felicity Cloake's How to make the perfect …

How to make the perfect bara brith – recipe This Welsh fruit loaf is tricky to get right, and even trickier to perfect, but it’s squidgy heaven if you do B ara brith, the traditional Welsh fruit loaf whose name means speckled bread, is, as Ben Mervis notes, not dissimilar to Yorkshire brack, Irish barmbrack and Scottish “kerrie loaf” – the last is a new one on me, though, of course, I’m more than familiar with how well they all pair with strong tea and cold salty butter. According to food writers Laura Mason and Catherine Brown, they were originally known as teisen dorth in south Wales, and they date the recipe to no earlier than the beginning of the 20th century. However, the digitising of records since their book Food of Britain was published in 1999 allowed me to find a reference to it being eaten before school examinations in Bala, Gwynedd, in Seren Cymru from 1857. ( Pen Vogler notes that “anything made with flour, however, is likely to be relatively modern, as wheat was too unreliable to be a staple in wet, upland Wales.”) There’s no reason to doubt the pair’s claim that bara brith was originally made from excess bread dough, but I think it’s good enough to need no such excuse. The raising agent The biggest divide in bara brith recipes is between those raised with yeast, as seems to have been more common up until the mid-20th century, raised with yeast, and those that take advantage of chemical raising agents – the earliest recipe I find that uses baking powder comes from a Miss AM Davies of Montgomeryshire (modern-day northern Powys), and appears in the 1946 collection Farmhouse Fare. The pastry chef Roger Pizey notes in his book World’s Best Cakes that, while “originally bara brith included yeast … I prefer this yeast-free version that tastes better the day after you have made it”. It cannot be denied that baking powder and bicarbonate of soda are far less capricious than yeast, and give good moist results – Elizabeth Luard’s recipe , which she credits in A ...