Analysis: A fierce debate broke out in 1927 between Barners and Barmers on on the proper name of the cake associated with Halloween celebrations.
For a week in early November 1927, the Correspondence column of the Belfast Newsletter newspaper was alive with sharp, sometimes derisive debate on the proper naming of the sweet confection associated with Halloweeen celebrations. Letters, many fuelled by righteous indignation, appealed for a once-and-for-all style resolution to the annual upset of misnaming the Halloweeen brack (or bread, or is it cake?).
At one level, The Battle of the Barners and Barmers can be viewed as a divide between the practices of home and commercial bakers. But on another level, it played out against a backdrop of language where familiarity, or otherwise, with Ulster Gaelic was seen as a decisive means of settling the debate on the 'correct’ naming of the barn/barm brack.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Liveline, listeners call in to fume about the lack of rings in their bracks
It started with Girnie-Go-Gabby ’s letter to the editor in the November 1st edition of the Newsletter. He expressed worry at ‘seeing the bakers and confectioners announcing the sale of "Barm-Bracks" and hoped that someone ‘more learned will correct those well-meaning, but ignorant, persons!" ’. Until then, he proffered as an ‘Ulster native’ that the correct name was not "Barm-Brack" but "Barn-Brack" meaning speckled cake and he called in the support of W.H. Patterson's Glossary of Antrim and Down, where ‘Barn Brack is described as a large sweetened bun, containing currants, in season at all times, but especially at Hallow Eve.’
Incensed by the put-down of the bakers, John McWatters of Cromac Bakery in Belfast, was swift in his response with his letter printed in the November 3rd edition of the newspaper. ‘As a native Ulsterman’ with thirty years’ experience in the baking trade, he asserted that he had ‘never heard it called anything but "barm-brack" ’ and explained that barm, as a by-product of brewing, was the leavening agent used in baking before the availability of compressed baker’s yeast.
Getting into a tangle about the word brack to mean ‘cake’, McWatters rejected Paterson’s Glossary as a reliable source, surmising that the old people of Antrim and Down confused the terms barn and barm. He held that the former was a term familiar to ‘simple countryfolk’ and that it had slipped into the dialect thereby perpetuating the error by those who chose to remain ‘ignorant of the facts’.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Ray D'Arcy Show, Dr. Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire from TU Dublin on the origins of the barm brack
Beneath McWatters’ letter was a shorter one penned by Florence Irwin of Stranmillis Training College in Belfast, who expressed pleasure at seeing Girnie-Go-Gabby’s letter ‘protesting against the use of Barm-Brack, instead of Barn-Brack’. Irwin herself was the cookery and housekeeping notes writer with the Northern Whig newspaper and was well informed on Ulster foodways through her work as a domestic economy instructress with the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction.
Irwin argued that the usual Irish term for cake or loaf was ‘bairgen’, now pronounced borreen, hence boreen-brack, a speckled cake (speckled with currants and raisins). She concluded that barm brack is a corruption of barn brack. While the authority to support her view was no less than the great historian P. W. Joyce and his A Social History of Ancient Ireland, the evidence is used in a somewhat off-context manner. She signs off with a call of ‘let us not corrupt it.’
Emboldened by the support of Irwin, Girnie-Go-Gabby comes back with another letter to the editor on November 5th. He further explains the terms barn (as coming from the Irish bairgen meaning bread/loaf/cake) and the term breac, (meaning speckled in reference to the fruit-speckled character of the bread). Essentially, the debate centred around the differences between a sweet fruit, possibly a soda bread-style homemade loaf and the yeast-leavened ones more associated with commercial bakeries framed in a (often jungled) discussion of translation issues.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Ray D'Arcy Show, barm brack recipes for Halloween from Catherine Leyden
This debate was not confined to northern counties. In a 1924 letter to the editor in The Irish Times on November 1st, a County Tipperary reader admonishes the paper for the incorrect use of the term ‘barm brack’ in its leader on Halloweeen. The issue surfaced again in the paper in October and November 1933 in both the Irishman's Diary and in the letters to the editor section with Charles E. Jacob (of Jacob's bakery) entering the debate to note that while barm is a term of recent fashionable use, the correct name of the Halloweeen confection is barn, as seen on their products and their packaging.
That this was an annual cause of public concern and ire is evident in another reference to the controversy in an Irishman’s Diary, on October 31st 1938, where the debate is shut-down with a back reference to the Jacob’s bakery favoured use of the term ‘barn’. In recalling that affirmation, the column writer hoped to ‘avert the annual spate of letters on this subject’ and declared the correspondence closed.
He expressed worry at 'seeing bakers and confectioners announcing the sale of "Barm-Bracks" and hoped that someone ‘more learned will correct those well-meaning, but ignorant, persons!"
While the barm/barn brack controversy may seem petty and inconsequential, it does bring attention to considerations of the role and function of food in identity formation. The brack debates in the Belfast Newsletter and the references to natives and language are significant in the context of conflicting and complex identities. Here, the brack and its naming can be seen as an expression of place and space-specific gastropolitics.
In a broader context, the barn/barm battles connect with simplistic and restrictive approaches in food studies to create definitive origin myths for certain products and dishes and indeed are not unlike the etiological narratives that claim Hallowe’en as an Irish invention.
Yours in uncertainty....
Barm, Barn, Boreen, Barney, Bareen Brack, Bread, Loaf, Cake, Bun.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
