Family Fortunes: Magic conjured in a silver tin on the shores of Lough Corrib

When my mother, Maureen, married in 1957, she had the foresight to buy a huge circular silver tin, almost 2ft in diameter. She could not have imagined then the innumerable cakes of bread and scones that she would make in it to feed her quickly growing family.

Flour would be poured directly into this shallow tin in copious cupfuls – Odlum’s self-raising white followed by Howard’s one - way wholemeal – until the base became dappled snow to my childhood eyes. Buttermilk and margarine followed, and finally an egg or two to add that golden hue to her “caiscín”. Homemade brown bread was never called anything but “caiscín” where we lived on the shores of Loch Corrib. In olden days, apparently, the curds were separated from the whey of the milk and women used the curds to make a cheese-like cake of bread.

As a young child I was fascinated by the magic my mother conjured in this enormous tin. I watched as her small hands brought all these ingredients together with deceptive ease into one huge oblong shape. Dough bounced back between her fingers, soft, pliable and light as the bread that would rise unfailingly like each new day. Before she transferred the dough from the “making tin” to the “baking tin”, my mother took her knife and made the shape of a cross, then deftly stabbed each corner. I wondered at this ritual; wondered if it was to do with faith or superstition or perhaps a combination of both.

The massive silver tin, when clean of dough, was a murky mirror through which I could see my flour-spattered face stare back at me. The tin is tarnished now, well past its gleam, with the scratches of 30 years of daily use. It’s impossible to imagine how many cakes of bread and scones were created there: more than enough to feed the 10 of us and my parents. The silver tin is not yet retired 57 years later and is still in use in my mother’s house in Headford, Co Galway. The smell of home baking that once welcomed us in from school welcomes us still when my mother lifts it out from her cupboard like an old friend.

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