Fighting Irish

It used to be a simple formula:  starve all day, striving in earnest distraction to complete tasks assigned.  Come late-evening, revel in the comfort and reward of a feast generous enough to satiate and support for the next twenty-three hours.  This is a practice I adhered to, with minor variation or interruption, from freshman year of high school on to as recently as early 2011.  I can recall that, at seventeen, I had hobbled my metabolism enough that one binge was enough to sustain my activities for close to forty-eight hours, with one meal every other day.  You can only guess at the staggeringly low levels of concentration and mood experienced under such conditions, and it didn't help matters that I would strictly consume a combination of non-fat carbohydrates, drizzled in I Can't Believe It's Not Butter spray and coupled with diet sodas, chiefly for dunking purposes.  (To this day, "fake butter" --a purportedly low-fat/low-calorie concoction-- remains a crutch in my diet, providing a creamy and versatile topping upon provsions both savory and sweet.  Several bottles have been a familiar staple in my pantry from as early as age fourteen, and a shameful one given the product's dubious chemical ingredients and my purported devotion to more natural food sources.  As concerns the carbonated, aspartame-laced beverages, I replaced them for three years with less pricey dime-store seltzer waters, only to majorly relapse in April 2004 when home from Manhattan and a related stint at a Philadelphia clinic.  Diet Caffeine-Free Coke and Fresca-- Oh, sweet nectar, charmed ambrosias!  They would wet and distract my hungering insides until that remote dinner hour came to pass.  Needless to say, I continue their engagement --with increasing caution.)  At the end of eleventh grade my body was so in need of proper nutrition --protein, especially-- that I could barely bring myself to compete for college admission.  What's more, feminine pride was shaken by my increased size, as the calories I consumed after such agonizingly infrequent intervals were being desperately converted and stored as fat reserves.  I have never been as heavy as when I relied on this dysfunctional system.  With time, I came to correctly intuit that I had been exclusively craving breads, air-popped popcorn, fat free frozen yoghurt, and baked winter squash because of immediately digestible carbohydrate content.  Overcoming the addiction was a process, one that saw me embracing exercise and, eventually, vegetables (hello, leafy greens!), but not before relying exclusively on two bags of dollar-store puffed wheat cereal, per night, for a year-long run, or, as this essay ventures to explain, a full loaf of Irish Soda Bread.

Vintage ad, now almost comical, illustrates a a carb-loaded spread.
American Bakers Association: LIFE Magazine pg. 76, May 17, 1948

Most people with even a peripheral relationship to Ireland have seen, heard of, or tasted Irish Soda Bread.  My experience has been far from fleeting, as it was my singular go-to food while living on my own in a Puerto Rican neighborhood off Central Park West.  This was the early aughts --a decade back-- and New York was, as as it remains today, a pricey playground.  Baking a single round per night was was my solution to reducing extraneous ingredients, not to mention grocery fees.  I knew the recipe by heart, and it is a self-rising and easy victual.  I had come to know of it because my mother made the loaves on her cast iron skillets to accompany an annual Saint Patrick's Day spread of corned beef, potatoes, cabbage, and carrots; I adopted it as one of my dependable carb sources in high school, along with toasted French baguettes.  (I can recall packing portions with me to an upstate theater competition one year --the rare occasion when I ate away from the controllable confines of home).  Again, leaning on this as my primary --nay-- sole food intake was a remarkably foolhardy practice.  I cannot recall, but I may have supplemented it with my beloved baked squash as vitamin source, given that  the bread consists almost exclusively of bleached white flour, baking soda, sugar, skimmed buttermilk, salt to taste.  With my one meal conditional to its provision, you can imagine the remarkably sluggish metabolism I continued to foster.  Facing increasingly insurmountable mental fogs, I eventually turned to NYU's center for health services, where I shamefacedly confessed to a nutritional therapist of my longstanding butter spray reliance, among other foolish exploits of unbalanced edibles.  I am not quite sure how I got from that position, at which I was at a higher weight, to shedding scores of pounds through vigilant exercise and Chinese take-out of a steamed veggie-chicken-rice combo over brown rice for $3.75 a day.  I know that complications from wisdom teeth removal, paired with worsening depression and dismaying, acute mental deterioration (facing, also, the obligations of college) saw me bottoming-out at fifteen to twenty pounds less than my previous high, when I might have been seen as on the fuller side of slender.  Today, I can still recall the reaction of my appointed school advisor, a well-intentioned professor of abstract expressionist/freestyle artworks, upon a visit to his office:  "Whoa.  Look at you!  You used to be fat.  Now you can really be a model!"

So, it goes without saying that, for me, Irish Soda Bread carries with it no lack of emotional baggage.  True, it is delicious when soaked in a soup or drink of one's choosing; fluffy, with just the minor hint of sweetness and a cheerful yellow glow.  It is also quite dense; being built solidly of flour, it acts almost as a paste to gum-up one's insides.  (Constipation is one's compensation for customary consumption.)  It almost begs the question:  "Does I.S.B. cause I.B.S.?"  

We are just now rounding the bend of a weekend-long celebration for dear St. Pat, having seen the holiday fall on a Sunday.  I can proudly proclaim that, as much as I was at times compelled to nosh exclusively on the many helpings provided to me, I contented myself to "sensible" portions, as they say in Weight Watchers commercials.  (My mother, preferring to utilize the entire quart of buttermilk, baked two large loaves; I ate 1/4 the first night, 1/8 at two subsequent lunches, careful not to rely on the bread alone for sustenance.  The remainder has been happily plied onto others or placed into deep freeze.)  I have battled this ultimate temptation, and at one point considered myself again its slave, as the larger hunks I ripped off were admittedly substantial.  I even gave myself permission to have it at today's lunch --despite an air of gloom.  It might have been this accompanying psychological displeasure that left me satiated after a modest piece.  Irish Soda Bread might fill me, but it no longer fulfills me.  Now two days older and clumsily reheated (or zapped) via microwave, what I once deemed my "chocolate cake" and "ultimate indulgence" was spongey and bland, tasting of defeat.  I no longer wanted it as a part of me.  It is something I can appreciate, especially when famished and in need of immediate, hearty fare.  But I.S.B. is no longer some special allowance for my efforts of "being good" by denying intake and "working through" pain to a predetermined, difficult goal.  This traditional Irish dish is merely a thing I once loved and badly abused, so much so that it leaves me, now, a little doleful of the imperfect journey it helped to carve.