My husband John is forever bemoaning the lack of soda bread in our house. Once, he bought a postcard from the famous Ballymaloe hotel and cookery school in Ireland, with a cartoon of a woman holding a soda bread and this legend, a quote from Ballymaloe’s doyenne, Myrtle Allen: ‘I was many years married before I triumphantly put a really good brown soda loaf on the tea table. Of course, this brought me no praise. Only a few disillusioned grunts about the pity it was that I h
