When Gretta Yore left Galway as a young woman to emigrate with her mother and five younger sisters to Chicago, she never thought the brown bread her mother baked from scratch every day would come to be considered a delicacy. Her grandmother had been known to make it in a three-legged cast-iron oven over an open fire, and “baking was nothing special to us,” she says. “We just did it. We didn’t have shop bread, as we called it.”
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Now, as the Galway Bakers, Yore and three of her sisters supply their brown bread, soda bread, and other traditional Irish baked goods to several restaurants and shops in the greater Chicago area, provide “sweet tables” (dessert buffets) for wedding and baby showers, and sell their goods–which also include apple tarts, tea cakes, boiled raisin bread, plum puddings, and a multigrain bread called caiscin–at events such as the Irish American Heritage Center’s annual Saint Patrick’s Day festival. It’s a big commitment for four women in their 50s and 60s who have families, work full-time, and have to fit all their baking into evenings and weekends. “We have two other sisters who are not involved who think we’re nuts,” Yore says.
They also added soda bread, a more upscale cousin to the everyday brown bread. Made with white flour and studded with moist, chubby raisins, in the old days it was baked only on Sundays, “in case someone came to visit,” says Yore. It quickly joined the brown bread in popularity. Both are round, crusty, surprisingly heavy, and divided into quadrants by a cross marked into the top–to allow any stray evil spirits to escape, the story goes. Less traditional are the sisters’ many sweet breads in varieties like applesauce pecan, carrot walnut, zucchini, and pumpkin spice. A chocolate chip-banana version is available either as a small loaf or a massive cake. “This weighs about four and a quarter pounds,” Yore says, putting her hand on a cake.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/A. Jackson.
