Irish Brown Bread

• Brown soda bread used to be the traditional daily loaf for most of Ireland, especially the rural areas. It's made very simply with soft local wheat, ground to a medium-coarse flour and mixed with baking soda, buttermilk and a pinch of salt. The flat loaves could be baked on the hearth, or in a heavy pot that could be heaped with coals to simulate an oven. The quick-cooking bread was sparing of fuel, which matched the frugality of the ingredients and made this simple bread even more practical for poor farmers and laborers.

Baking Irish-Style Brown Bread

• Making an authentic version of Irish brown bread in the United States isn't easy, because American-style whole wheat flour is ground to a finer texture. Odlums and other brands of Irish flour are available in some parts of the country, and a few American flour mills make a coarser Irish-style flour that can be used to bake an authentic loaf. Less fortunate bakers can replicate the bread's coarse texture and nutty flavor by combining stoneground wheat flour with bran, wheat germ or other ingredients. The end result won't be quite authentic, but can be very satisfactory in its own right.

Boston Brown Bread

• One traditional American bread that could be considered a counterpart to the Irish bread is Boston brown bread. Like its Irish counterpart, it's made with locally grown grains, in this case a mixture of wheat, rye and corn. It also has a coarse texture and nutty flavor, though it's prepared differently. Rather than baking on a hearth, Boston brown bread is steamed in a mold or -- in modern days -- in a parchment-lined tin can. Boston brown bread is also sweeter than Irish brown bread, thanks to a generous dollop of molasses in the batter. Despite these differences, its rustic history and use of local ingredients make it a counterpart to the Irish bread.

Corn Bread

• Irish brown bread uses soft wheat, because that's what grows most readily across the country. In America's frontier days, the equivalent was maize, or "Indian corn." Corn could be grown even in the roughest of fields, could be harvested by hand, and required no tedious threshing. Instead, it could be pounded to meal on a stone or in a hollow stump and quickly turned into a coarse, well-flavored bread. Regional variations range from dense and unsweetened to light and cake-like, but cornbread is arguably the most universal of rustic American loaves and therefore a counterpart to Irish brown bread.