Bara Brith
I have a particular fondness for Bara Brith, the traditional Welsh fruit-speckled tea bread. My late sister Thomasina lived and worked in Wales, and my first taste of it came courtesy of her next door neighbour, Dai, over 30 years ago. It’s extraordinarily simple to make: you steep dried fruits and treacly sugar in hot tea overnight, then the next day you simply stir in an egg and some flour and pop it in the oven. As Dai did, I add a couple of teaspoons of mixed spice (though you can easily substitute dried ground ginger or cinnamon alone if you prefer) though I choose to add it to the steeping fruits rather than the flour. The only difficult thing about any of this is having to wait a day after baking before eating it. But this is a counsel of perfection: you can eat it as soon as it’s cooled, but to taste Bara Brith at its best, I would beg you to be patient. You may have noticed there’s no butter (or any fat) in the recipe: this isn’t a mistake: the butter comes in later, when it is essential. Believe me, there is nothing better mid-afternoon than a thick slice of Bara Brith spread generously with butter, so generously that the Danes would recognise it approvingly as tandsmør — which is to say, butter spread thickly enough that you leave teeth marks in it after taking a bite! And please read the Additional Information section at the end of the recipe before proceeding.
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