The winner of Butte’s Irish soda bread contest reflects on her recipe

St. Patrick’s Day is a time to recognize and celebrate Irish history and culture. But in Butte, a city with a long history of Irish heritage, the March holiday also means coming together as a community — even if one is not of Irish descent — through festivities, parades and, of course, food.

Soda bread, a traditional Irish dish, is a staple recipe for many families in Butte. Shawn O’Donnell’s American Grill and Irish Pub, which opened a location two years ago in the city’s uptown neighborhood on Main Street, hosts an annual soda bread contest around the Irish holiday where community members come to taste and vote on the best bread.

Pub owner Johnny Gallogly, known to some locals as “Irish Johnny,” moved to Butte from Washington state in 2020, after emigrating to the U.S. from Ireland in the late 1990s. He said he was motivated to start the annual contest because of his own relationship to soda bread. 

“I grew up on soda bread in Ireland. The idea behind it is most people in Ireland didn’t have modern ovens, so you would bake it over a hearth fire,” Gallogly described to Montana Free Press in a March interview. “It was a poor man’s bread. But it’s become somewhat of a delicacy, particularly in Irish enclaves like Butte.”

MTFP spoke with Butte local Bethany Lawson-Garwood, the contest winner for two years in a row, about the dish, its Irish significance and how Butte usually celebrates St. Paddy’s Day. Her comments have been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

MTFP: Tell us about your Butte roots.

Lawson-Garwood:  My name is Bethany, and I live in Butte, Montana.  I work at the Bonanza Freeze. It’s an old ice cream drive-in place. [Bonanza Freeze] has been open since 1947. My grandparents bought it in the ’60s and now my uncle has it, so I help manage that. 

MTFP: Can you tell us about the soda bread competition? Why is it significant during St. Patrick’s Day? 

Lawson-Garwood:  With everyone in Butte, everyone’s grandma or auntie has a phenomenal recipe for soda bread that they’ve been working on over the years. Whether you’re Irish or not, being in Butte, you know what Irish soda bread is and somebody in your family has the best recipe.

[The competition is] a great opportunity for everyone to showcase their family’s version of that Irish cuisine. Everyone has different things they add into it or how they shape it or what they serve with it. A lot of the old families have that recipe, so it’s pretty cool to see all the different versions that can be showcased in one place.

MTFP: Can you describe what soda bread is for readers who may have never tried it before?

Lawson-Garwood:  I think traditionally it’s very bare bones. Like when they didn’t have access to yeast, they would have baking soda. The older recipes were, like, flour and baking soda and buttermilk with a little salt, maybe a little sugar.

And then additives came in later, with different things like caraway seeds or raisins or currants. Herbs like thyme would be added. But it’s not a yeast dough, so you need the baking soda as a leavening agent, and then the buttermilk, the soured milk, to react with that, to get it to rise to help in the growth of it. 

When it’s in the oven, you want to cut a cross in the top, which gives it the distinctive Irish soda bread look. But it’s also meant to help with the leavening and become a nice dome shape.

MTFP: Can you share your winning soda bread recipe with us? 

Lawson-Garwood:  My recipe is from one of my old bosses, who is amazing. This lady Noelle Johnson, she is a phenomenal baker. So I have my base recipe from her, but then I’ve kind of tweaked it over the years with ideas from my grandmother or my aunts with the delicious flavor combinations.

I always add currants instead of raisins because I like how it’s a little smaller of a bite. I like sometimes adding orange zest and caraway seeds. I think soaking the currents in whiskey for a week or so is really nice. It adds a flavor that you can’t quite pick out, but it adds a delicious element to that.

MTFP: We’ve gotta ask — is the whiskey Irish?

Lawson-Garwood: Of course, yes.  Then our family would always have [the bread] with the corned beef and cabbage on St. Paddy’s Day. If there’s any left over, it makes a great toast for breakfast the next day. 

MTFP: What does it mean to you that you’ve won this competition more than once? And how does it relate to Butte’s Irish heritage?

Lawson-Garwood:  It’s pretty huge, but there’s a lot of real, true-blooded Irish women that make phenomenal bread and it’s pretty awesome to even be a part of it. 

From what I believe, when the mines were going, the Irish in America were not very welcomed immigrants, but Butte was very welcoming to them and wanted them there. So we ended up with a huge population of Irish immigrants and their families. It’s a safe place. 

My family was Italian and so they lived in the Meaderville area. And my grandma, who’s 99, still tells the best stories of growing up in Butte back in the day — of all the different communities. Everyone kind of lived in their area, but everyone was in it together. 

Everyone’s dad worked in the mine, or brother, or you know, whatever it was. So there were a lot of shared recipes. There’s a Butte Heritage Cookbook that’s a blast to look through and read. Everyone shared a lot, so even if you don’t have Irish blood, when you grow up in Butte, you almost feel like you do. 

Nora Mabie contributed reporting.