The mother of invention? If I call this new gluten-free bread an Irish soda bread, traditionalists will snicker. Raisins are not traditional in a “true” Irish soda bread, you see (if a soda bread has raisins in it, it’s called Spotted Dog in the Emerald Isle, or so I’m told). I never knew this, growing up on the salt-kissed clapboard villages of the Connecticut shore. I was blithely ignorant of this quaint canine moniker, despite a streak of Irish blood. We ate more pierogi and kielbasa in our culturally eclectic house than Irish soda bread and tea. So my own first home baked Irish soda bread had raisins in it. And, actually, come to think of it, why the heck not? When it comes to traditions, I wiggle and chafe beneath constraint and “should” like an itchy Catholic school girl with pinching new Easter shoes gazing out the window at the unsettled spring sky. I admire traditions. At least in theory. In an abstract way. Experimenting, though, is more int…
