Making Bread (3mins 43secs)
Another great life story here from Nan Connors and how they were reared and fed by the farmers when they lived in Wexford. She talks about the vegetables they ate and also about drinking buttermilk. When she talks about drinking buttermilk she then talks about her mother making a cake of bread in the bread pan baker on the open fire. This is something my own mother and grandmother did and something many country people did right up to the early 1960s and the advent of the gas cooker and gas cylinder.
For many families, everything was cooked on the open fire and children were sent out to collect dried cow dung which was brought in and mixed with the "greasach" (coals cinders) and placed over and under the bake pan when baking bread. If you didn't put the greasach coals on top of the pan, the bread wouldn't rise.
I have recorded a good few people here in Wexford who remember doing it and there are two lovely old Irish words which survived for these dry cow dungs: one bóithleáns (bohlyawn) while the others bóshauns (bowshawns), both related bó, the Irish for cow. My grandmother in Ballygarrett would mix the bóithleáns with coal slack and make little bricks that were placed at the back of the fire. While if a parent wanted to get a child out from under their feet, they'd be told to "go out in the fields and pick cowshites".
Kathleen and Nan didn't call them bóithleáns or bóshaunss but instead called them "boreens, boiríns" and you can hear me asking them this is the clip. I love how Kathleen recalls how her mother called her "daughter" in the clip, again something common within the Travelling community but also a term I'd hear used by working class women, urban and rural, in Wexford. My own mother used it.
The clip ends with Nan talking about making bread still and how families were reared on home made bread.