Meaning of bastable cake | Babel Free

Definitions

A round loaf of soda bread that is baked in a bastable (“an earthenware or cast-iron pot used for baking over a fire”).

Ireland

Examples

“Sister Cornelia was in the corner puffing and blowing like a porpoise as she made a new bastable cake, that she, bein' a County Waterford woman, like the "blower" itself, had introduced into them parts.”

“There was no show but the heap of sweet cake, not to mention all the shop bread, he brought from town. Bastable cakes would be too common for the likes of such a grand dance, a mhic ó! There was enough there to feed half the parish.”

“The fact is that we have in this country today such inept people that they are not able to do what their grandmothers did; they cannot turn out a decent cake or a decent loaf of bread from wheat grown in this country. Their grandmothers were able to do that. What is wrong with those charged with manufacturing wheat into flour and flour into bread? Have they been so spoilt by alien trends and so trained in foreign habits and foreign manners that they have completely forgotten how to bake the old bastable cake and the loaf that was good enough a generation ago for the people of Cork city and the people of Dublin city?”

Parliamentary Debates: Official Report

“A bastable cake! It was bread, really, but because it was baked in the three-legged iron pot, called a bastable oven, and because of its nice round shape, Ma called it bastable cake.”

“On it, in front of the fire, would be placed the cake, and it would bake handsomely. However, the cake would have to be turned when one side was baked. That would be as good as any bastable cake.”

“The Christmas pudding was boiled in it [a flour bag] and then wrapped in another, dry one for storage, and it was wrapped around the hot bastable cake to soften the crust.”

“With each goose she placed a big brown bastable cake, and eventually everything, including my father's potatoes and turnips, was stored in the cart behind the jennet.”

“He hadn't a pleasant time and was quite ill one day and couldn't eat anything – sodden bastable cake and smoky butter and tea was what he got in one house for breakfast and dinner.”

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