In soda bread, one ingredient makes all the difference

Kathleen Regan knows what she wants in a perfect Irish soda bread: ''Crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside, not too sweet, with a healthy amount of raisins," she says. She also knows what she doesn't want: ''No caraway seeds. None of the breads in my family have that."

She's not the only family member with strong opinions on the subject. A few weeks before St. Patrick's Day, she drove from Medford to an aunt's house in Springfield, where her mother, Mary Burke, and three cousins gathered for a bake-off, turning out three Irish soda breads using two recipes. It was all good fun, she says, with plenty of gossip and chatter, but the rivalry was never far from the surface.

Regan uses her mother's recipe, her aunt and cousins use theirs, and every year there are ''disagreements" over whose is best. ''My mother's recipe uses one stick of butter and 1 1/2 cups of buttermilk," Regan explains. ''My cousin doesn't use butter but uses whipping cream. And she can add a beaten egg. Hers is more crumbly."

The bread has been integral to her family for generations. When her mother was growing up in Springfield in the 1920s and '30s, her family had it with dinner. ''Whenever there were visitors, there was the Irish bread," she says. ''We have it for breakfast. It's a social thing, too. I make a lot of bread, come St. Patrick's Day, for friends."

She finds the taste of caraway seeds ''horrible." ''I never heard of caraway seeds in Irish soda bread until I left home," she says.

In the ''Oxford Companion to Food," Alan Davidson makes no mention of caraway in his definition of Irish soda bread, while Sharon Tyler Herbst's ''The Food Lover's Companion" says the bread is usually ''speckled with currants and caraway seed."

For Sean Hurley, owner of Hurley's Boston Irish Baking Co., the answer seems to be based solely on upbringing. ''Some people think it's blasphemous if you include caraway seeds," he says, ''and some people think you're crazy if you don't." Hurley, who grew up in Milton, is a caraway fan -- within reason. ''I liken it to putting vermouth in a martini," he says. ''We always include just a whisper."

Pauline Harte, a pre-kindergarten teacher in Arlington who moved to Massachusetts from outside Dublin in 1989, almost always makes Irish soda bread with raisins. Occasionally she shakes things up and throws in some dried cranberries or chocolate chips. But never caraway seeds. In Dublin, she says, such a thing would be unheard of. As would the half-and-half she has seen in some recipes here. ''I think my aunts would be horrified if they saw that," she says.

Harte, who learned to bake the bread by watching her mother in Ireland in the 1960s, makes it frequently: for her book group, as a gift, to bring in to school, and for St. Patrick's Day. ''We learned cooking in the fourth grade, at Catholic school, and my mother was great. She let us bake at home," says the former nanny. ''My mother has pretty bad arthritis, so when I go home now, I bake for her."

According to Harte, the secret to a perfect soda bread is minimal contact with the dough. ''The less you handle it the better," she says. She is so experienced that she is usually able to mix up a batch and get it into the oven in about five minutes.

Harte always mixes the ingredients in a metal bowl, cuts in butter, and blends it with a metal knife; she even stirs the wet ingredients into the dry with a knife. Before putting it into the oven, she cuts a cross in the middle of the dough, to let the bread rise as it bakes. Legend has it, though, that the purpose of the cross is to scare away the devil.

Arlene Mahoney, a retired Arlington High School math teacher, baked her Irish soda bread -- with caraway seeds -- and brought it to school for her colleagues every St. Patrick's Day for nearly 30 years. ''The students loved to sneak in and have some," she recalls.

But when Mahoney retired from teaching, she did not retire from baking the recipe that she inherited from her mother, Helen Mahoney. ''Someone had to take on the tradition of the bread-baking, and that fell to me," she says. When they were growing up in Arlington, Mahoney and her siblings did not particularly like their mother's Irish soda bread, but she developed a taste for it when she started baking it for her colleagues.

Mahoney always uses caraway seeds and raisins. And she always bakes her bread in the same 10-inch round pan. Like Harte, she bakes the bread for her book club and on St. Patrick's Day. ''It's also good for brunch and a cup of tea," she says.

''Everyone has their own variation," says Regan. And on Friday, all the iconic, craggy-topped loaves spilling over bakery shelves, cooling on kitchen counters, and adding a note of festivity to drab school or office lounges will probably taste even better than on any other day -- with or without caraway seeds.