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Griddle Bread
1 pound Five Roses flour 1 tablespoon sugar ½ teaspoon soda Pinch of salt Sour milk.
Knead into stiff loaf and flatten on floured griddle. Cook slowly on top of fire ½ hour to each side.
A soda-raised griddle loaf of the Irish farl type, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what the dough should feel like. The liquid is left entirely to judgement, and the timing assumes a cast-iron griddle over a coal range.
- The hinge: heat low and steadyThis is a thick loaf cooked without an oven, so the surface will scorch long before the centre sets if the griddle is hot. Use the lowest steady heat that still browns the crust, and expect a pale, slightly leathery skin rather than an oven crust.
- A pound of flourAbout 3½ to 4 cups, depending on how it is scooped. Five Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian bread flour, so all-purpose or bread flour both work.
- Sour milkThe original means milk that has clabbered naturally with the bacteria in unpasteurised milk. Buttermilk is the direct modern substitute; pasteurised milk left out does not sour, it spoils. Add it gradually until the dough just holds together.
- How much liquidGenuinely unspecified. Expect roughly 1½ cups of buttermilk for a pound of flour, added in stages. "Stiff" here means firm enough to shape by hand and hold a round on the griddle without spreading.
- The soda is lightHalf a teaspoon of soda to a pound of flour is at the low end; ¾ to 1 teaspoon is more usual for a buttermilk bread of this size and will give a better lift. Sift it through the flour so it does not streak.
- Handle it briefly"Knead" is misleading for a soda dough. Bring it together with a dozen strokes and shape at once; the acid and soda begin reacting the moment they meet, and long working flattens the loaf.
- Score itCutting a deep cross into the round, in the traditional manner, lets heat into the middle and makes the loaf easier to turn as four wedges.
- Timing and donenessA full half hour per side suits a thick loaf over very low heat; the recipe gives no thickness. A thinner farl needs 10 to 15 minutes a side. Judge by sound and temperature rather than the clock: the base should sound hollow and the centre read about 200F.
- YieldOne loaf, four to six servings. Best eaten warm the day it is made; it stales quickly and is traditionally split and toasted the next morning.
Griddle bread belongs to the long stretch of baking history in which most households had a fire but no oven, and it survived in Ireland, Scotland and the Scottish and Irish settlements of Canada well into the era of the cast-iron range. The technique is older than the leavening: flat breads were baked on a bakestone or girdle for centuries, but the modern soda version depends on a nineteenth-century arrival, cheap bicarbonate of soda, working with the sour milk of the household dairy. Its appearance under "Fancy Bread" in the Five Roses Cook Book he Lake of the Woods Milling Company, compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives han any any grandeur in the dish. Recipes came from the women who baked them, in the terse form a practised cook would write for herself, which is why the milk here is measured only by the feel of the dough.