Easter Egg Breads: Sacred, Profane and Scrumptious
By T. Susan Chang
NPR
April 4, 2007
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Blame it on the hens.
Eggs — white, brown,dyed, painted and chocolate — are everywhere this time of year. You mightthink this is because their unique yet universal form, like the number zero,reminds us that nature is hitting the "reset" button for the new year.Or maybe you think that people get a hankering for protein along with springfever.
But it's really all aboutthe hens. Their natural cycle leads to a production slowdown — orcomplete stop, in some cases — throughout the dark, cold winter.
When the spring equinoxrolls around, however, the longer hours of daylight send a message to the hen'stiny brain ("Warmer temperatures, fresh food supply, time to breed"),and the eggs come back.
That's where what shouldreally just be the hen's private business collides with human spiritualpractice. Jews, pagans and every sort of Christian make much of the egg intheir sacred rites of spring. Easter is the holiest day in the liturgicalcalendar, but it coincides with a host of pagan rites and debauchery.
The egg — symbol ofrebirth and purity, but also of fertility and sex — makes for an aptmetaphor for both the sacred and the profane.
Whatever the case,practical bakers got creative with the ovarian windfall, and lots of eggs endedup in bread. Some bakers, such as the Eastern Orthodox Christians, boiled anddyed eggs and buried them in ornate crown- or braid-shaped breads. Germans andAustrians, among others, made animal bread shapes: doves, hares, bears orfoxes, with eggs for heads.
But by far the tastiestEaster-season breads do without metaphor and simply add the eggs to the dough,a bit of culinary cleverness that moistens and elasticizes the gluten structureof the bread, letting it rise high and mighty without drying out.
As a result, the centurieshave bequeathed us an international carb-o-copia of leavened egg breads: Greektsoureki, Eastern European babka, Russian kulich, English hot cross buns. Andmany of the braided Easter breads of Eastern Europe strongly resemble challah,the beloved Jewish egg bread eaten at Sabbaths yearlong — but not atPassover, when leavened breads are off the menu.
An eggy challah was thefirst yeast bread I ever made. As I kneaded the sweet, milky dough, I reveledin its resilient texture — its Spandex-like skin stretched tight over aball so smooth it might have been a great big egg itself. I didn't know thenthat it was the eggs that made it so satiny and stretchy. I loved rolling outthe ropes of dough and weaving them together. I hadn't had so much fun withanything since Play-Doh.
And when I took the great,steaming gilded braid out of the oven, I experienced that peculiar satisfactionusually reserved for crafters of buttercream roses, ice sculptures and a wholeworld of marzipan figurines: of having made something you can eat that lookslike something that you can't.
But this was nothingcompared to the egg-headed bread-beasts of sacred Easters past I had learnedabout. I didn't know, either, about the Paas Haasie
And when my son tears intoa hot cross bun, singing "one a penny, two a penny," he is notthinking of the British school that banned the traditional Good Friday treatlast year when Jehovah's Witnesses called them a "pagan symbol offertility."
Metamorphosis or metaphor?The promiscuous hare or the virtuous, productive hen?
For me, there is nothing ambiguous about the rise heavenwardof an Easter egg bread, its crust emitting an odor of sanctity, its goldencrumb as rich as manna. Call it what you will, egg bread allows me to believethat Easter is a time when you are not only what you eat, but, miraculously,just a little more.