With a name transliterated from the Old English word beorma, for a fermented, yeasty liquor, and the Irish word brac, meaning “speckled,” today’s Barm Brack is either a sweet bread or a yeasty cake.
Neither fish nor fowl, the humble baked goodie falls somewhere between a healthful, workaday meal staple you could serve with butter alongside an evening meal of meat and gravy, and a dessert treat or afternoon sweet to be enjoyed with a hot drink and maybe a spoonful of jam.
Delicious and popular variations on the theme include Tea Brack, which uses baking powder as a raising agent instead of yeast, and Cider Brack in which the fruit is soaked in cider as opposed to tea, resulting in a juicier and lighter loaf.
Legend has it that in Ireland’s wanting and frugal years gone by, the yeast to raise the bread dough for Barm Brack was skimmed from the top of vats of fermenting beer and recycled in preparation for the Halloween celebration that began as Oíche Samhain, or Samhain Night, which signaled the end of harvest and the time to settle in for the winter. This “feast of the dead” featured Barm Brack, a calorie-dense and fortifying food, perfectly designed for chill winter’s evenings. Also served is colcannon, a dish of cabbage or kale and floury potatoes, and jellied eels. This menu is favored because, religiously speaking, this was a night of abstinence on which the consumption of meat was prohibited.
It’s Irish custom to bake trinkets into the bread dough to divine the fortunes of the celebrants in the year ahead. The charms determine whether luck will be good or bad, and, while the specific charms vary from house to house, region to region, the two classics are the coin and the ring. If a coin is found, good fortune and wealth can be anticipated, and, if the finder gets the ring, an imminent marriage is predicted. Also popular are a small stick, indicating an unhappy marriage; a piece of cloth, which predicts poverty; and a pea or thimble, foretelling that the finder will not marry. Some families put in a medallion of the Blessed Virgin, which marks the finder for entrance into the priesthood or nunnery.