A county culinary delicacy that I've never heard of before: it seems to be fruit cake infused with tea - I might have bought soe this morning if it wasn't so expensive.
-
-
mattk
- 23 Oct. 2009 @ 16:02:31
-
-
lee954
- 23 Oct. 2009 @ 17:03:11
I've not even come across the word 'brack' before; I can't even find it in the dictionary. The cake was baked by a company in Whitby [over a hundred miles away at the other end of the county] and so maybe 'brack' is a dialect word.
-
-
-
Barm is a dialect word, but not from Yorkshire.
Barmbrack is a traditional Irish spicy fruit bread similar to the Welsh bara brith. It's also quite easy to make at home, although you do need to plan ahead to allow time for the fruit to soak over night in strong tea and for the dough to rise as barmbrack is a yeasted bread (barm being another name for fermented yeast). The word barm meaning yeast is also found in the north west barmcake, a breadcake which elsewhere would be called a bap or stotty.
-
Sorry, I forgot to add that the word Brack (in the context of food) seems to exist only in the two terms Barmbrack and Yorkshire Brack, but seems to apply to fruit loaves made with tea and without fat. It seems that the Irish barmbrack is the original, and that Yorkshire Brack seems to be of fairly recent origin having been introduced by Bothams of Whitby. My guess is that Barmbrack is actually a single Irish word and that someone at Bothams split the word to create the name Yorkshire Brack as it doesn't contain barm but seems to have E500 sodium carbonate and E501 potassium carbonate as its raising agents.
My mother (25% Irish, 25% Welsh, 25% North Western, 25% North Eastern and - sadly - born in the south) made a great loaf with fruit soaked in tea, but I do not know from which ancestor she inherited the recipe. -
-
isadora101
- 23 Oct. 2009 @ 20:58:23
No, i've never heard of it before either.
-
I never heard of that when I was living in Yorkshire. I like the detail that you would have bought some if it wasn't so expensive - how like a Yorkshireman is that!!
