Britain and Ireland · Volume 33, The Bakestone, the Broth and the Salt Marsh

Bara Brith

Name: Bara Brith
Cuisine: Wales
Ingredients: 500 g mixed dried fruit; 350 ml hot, strong black tea; 250 g soft brown sugar; 350g flour; 1 egg; 3g mixed spice; to taste butter, to serve

Wales

Bara brith, tea soaked fruit loaf: thick slices of a dark, dense fruit loaf studded with plump dried fruit, cut from a whole loaf resting on a wooden board.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: Not statedNo source states a time and the atlas has too few comparable dishes to estimate one.

Researched: No outside sources linked
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Tea-soaked fruit loaf; the word itself dates only to an 1888 Welsh-language dictionary, and named a different, older dish, a loaf of mixed grains, in the eighteenth century.

by Wales

Welsh nonconformism, dominant from the mid-nineteenth century, did not just fill Sunday. Calvinistic Methodism ran a genuine temperance strand, and by the 1850s temperance had become one of the cornerstones of Welsh society, with its own tea rooms, magazines and even hotels. The clearest food-culture trace of this is te capel, chapel tea, gatherings after a service where bara brith was served on bone china, a tradition Carwyn Graves says lasted roughly a century and a half, alcohol-free and social rather than solemn. In the mining valleys the same reforming instinct plausibly, though not provably, connects to diod fain or diod ddail, small beer brewed from nettle, dandelion, ground ivy, redcurrant leaf and ginger and sold door to door as a genuine non-alcoholic household product: one recorded seller made 42 bottles a week for seven shillings' profit, in the words of the museum record that preserves her account, "an invaluable addition to the low family income." The link from temperance movement to diod fain trade is this chapter's own inference from parallel facts rather than a documented causal claim, and it is offered as plausible context, not settled history.

Read the history

As tradition built it

500g dried fruit, soaked overnight. Bakes in about 1 to 1½ hours.

Ingredients

500 g mixed dried fruit
350 ml hot, strong black tea
250 g soft brown sugar
350g flour
1 egg
3g mixed spice
to taste butter, to serve

Method

Soak the mixed dried fruit overnight in the hot, strong black tea and the soft brown sugar, until plump and dark.
The next day, work the flour, egg and mixed spice into the soaked fruit and its liquid to a soft, dropping batter.
Pour into a lined loaf tin and bake slowly until a skewer comes out clean, roughly an hour to an hour and a half depending on the oven.
Serve sliced, thickly buttered, traditionally at te capel, chapel tea, on bone china after a Sunday service.

What a modern chef changes

Fruit concentrated and vacuum-compressed, baked in a humidified oven

Method

Dehydrate a portion of the dried fruit further before soaking, concentrating its sugars so less needs to be added separately.
Vacuum-compress the fruit in its tea and sugar for twenty minutes rather than soaking overnight, forcing the liquid into the fruit under pressure in a fraction of the time without losing the depth a long soak gives.
Bake in a water bath-humidified oven, or with a tray of water alongside, for a moister, more evenly set crumb than a dry domestic oven produces.
Serve with a cultured butter whipped with a little of the reduced soaking tea, rather than plain butter, a modern nod to the same tea-and-toast pairing rather than a departure from it.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists