Missing more than just Irish bread this holiday season

It is nothing and it is everything. A disappointing-when-I-made-it recipe for Irish bread that was my mother’s. Somehow it’s missing. And this is making me crazy. And sad.

My mother baked. My mother enjoyed baking. For a while, when I was seven and eight, she worked at Whitey’s Bakery in Weymouth Landing where she decorated cakes with roses made of frosting. At home, I witnessed how happy she was baking. She hummed while she measured. She sang as she mixed. Maybe that’s why her Irish bread was rich but not heavy. Solid but not dry. Because it was made, not just with raisins and caraway seeds, but also with love.

I’ve made her Irish bread many times. I’ve boiled the raisins so that they plump, just as she did, crushed the caraway seeds so that they’re more flavorful, just as she did, sifted and measured, just as she did, and sometimes I’ve even sung a little, too. But my Irish bread is always a bust: dry, dense, bland.

I gave up making it after my father died. I’d bring it to him in his later years and no matter how bad it was - once I forgot to add sugar - he would toast it, lather it with butter, pour himself a cup of black coffee, then bite into it and declare, despite its deficiencies, that it was perfect.

It reminded him of my mother. That’s why he liked it. It reminded him of 9 Davis Road and the stereo playing some Rosemary Clooney song, and my mother, always in a dress, singing along. It reminded him of all the good years when he and my mother were young and I was a child under their roof and every day held the promise of more good days.

Maybe that’s why I went in search of the recipe this year, not just because it’s almost Christmas and Irish bread brings back memories of my mother, but because it brings back my childhood, too, and the safety I knew then. The world wasn’t perfect in the 1950s. I know this. But I was a child, whose universe was my house and my neighborhood and my school. And because all these places were safe, I felt safe.

For years I kept the Irish bread recipe on an index card stored in my office in a small metal box. The card was smudged and tattered and butter stained, proof that it had been used again and again. Ten years ago, maybe 15, I copied it onto a clean index card. But I didn’t throw away the old card. I kept both.

Then, last year? The year before? In one of my manic efforts to declutter, I cleaned out the metal box, got rid of all the recipes I never use along with a half dozen cookbooks, bought a three-ring binder, taped the few recipes I wanted to keep on to plain, white paper and made myself a handy, very thin, go-to cookbook of recipes I like.

My mother’s Irish bread recipe should be in this book. It should be on page one. But it isn’t. So where is it?

I remember some of the ingredients. I know that it calls for three cups of sifted flour and shortening “the size of an egg.”’ I suppose I could start with this, scour the Internet and cobble together something that resembles my mother’s bread. But it’s not the loss of a recipe that I’m mourning. It’s the loss of her. Of us. Of then.

When I was newly married, I was teaching school just a mile from my childhood home. Often, after school, I would stop and visit my mother. I’d sit at the kitchen table and there she’d be at the white, porcelain stove, right where I left her, in a dress, making coffee, offering me a cupcake or a cookie or a piece of Irish bread she’d just made. Warm from the oven, glazed and full of raisins, that bread was comfort and routine and safety.

And that’s what I’m missing this year. That’s what feels lost: The cadence of life as it was: No children being gunned down in school. No neighbors being snatched off the street. No non-stop barrage of bad news.

Instead there was Irish bread. My mother in the kitchen. Rosemary Clooney singing “White Christmas.” My father across the table from me. The safety of childhood in a world, long gone.