How We Celebrate Easter in Russia - With Super-tasty Easter Bread

Oh god, i wanted to write this post like a week ago, because in Russia Easter was April 15th this year, but here we are – five days later. Better later than never, i guess. So, what’s the deal with Easter in Russia? Guess what, there’s no Easter rabbit! I actually have no idea what a rabbit has to do with Easter and especially eggs, and why is it always around Easter celebration in movies from overseas (kind of ignorant, i know, should Google it sometime). Besides not having an Easter rabbit we have a hell of a lot more differences with Western Easter tradition, and one of them is our special super-tasty “Easter ritual bread”, made only once in an year. P.S.: my spellchecker suddenly changed “Easter” to “Raster” – turned out to be some really interesting header there, lol! Sorry about that :)

The bread is the best part of Easter for me. The bread-making tradition is very old and people started it as some ancient church ritual that we still keep around because it’s cool. The bread is made with dough based on milk, white flour and eggs, classic recipes also included yellow and white ginger (for color and for smell) and saffron tincture, but i think no one actually bothers with those anymore. These days, the bread moved closer to case, so people mix in sugar, raisins and even cranberries. The dough has to raise in special high molds, that many people replace with tins and pots, and then is baked and coated with sugar and other stuff. There are several kinds of the bread, actually, with different names and different recipes.

The first kind, called in Russian dialects кулич (kulich) – the word that came from Greek, where it meant “pretzel” – and is made with plain top, no decorations, just some plain white sugar coating. The second kind is called паска (paska) – it came from Ukrainian and Bessarabian (contemporary Moldova) cuisine, and the word is used in Ukrainian, Moldovan and gypsy languages (probably in Romany language too, but I'm not 100% sure), as well as in Southern Russian dialect (yes, Russian has several dialects, just like English does). Paska is much more elaborate, made with patterns and embroidery and colorful decorations atop its white sugar coating, and sometimes even “ХВ” (short from Russian “Christ has risen”) and crucifix signs. There’s a third kind, made with cottage cheese, but i myself don’t know much about it because my family never cooked it. As i live in the South i use “paska” word myself, and we cook mostly paskas over here.

The bread was very important for people for hundreds of years. Each member of the family got their own kulich (or paska), and another one was made for the family as a whole, and some more were made to give out to other people according to some tricky rules they all followed back then. Also no one could eat the bread before it was blessed in the nearest church (and some people still go out to bless their paskas, like my co-worker’s mother, who had him drove her for over an hour one-way to a church she liked enough). Also, how all these paskas turned out – high or not, cooked-through or not – meant how the family will fare the coming year, will they be healthy and lucky, or someone is going to screw them over. There was even a tradition to keep one paska until the day when sowing started, so they could put a few pieces of it into the earth to ensure a rich harvest.

These days, many people don’t bother to cook their own paskas, and there are plenty of pre-made ones – every bread factory absolutely has to flood the market with their own kind of a paska. There are even some imported ones, but they taste either like a plain cake or shit. I myself never cooked a paska in my life - mom never baked anything and grandma died too early - but i love eating them, they are really tasty. Each year i tell myself I'm gonna cook a paska next year, and the next year, and next one, lol :)

Besides the bread, we also paint eggs. Last couple of years supermarkets started to sell some food colors and pre-made thermal labels (the one you’re supposed to put on an egg before it’s cooked, so the label will shrink and cover the egg), but what people always used are natural colors. There were no food colors in USSR and in Russia they appeared only recently (in my city, for the first time in my life i saw a food color sold in 2011). So people just cooked those eggs with onion shells, beetroot and other stuff that gave coloring. If you cook an onion shell, it will make an egg’s shell brown, beetroot – red, and there’s a way to make green color with some plants, don’t remember which one, though. We just used onions all the time. The eggs are served with paskas.

There is another tradition that puts Russian Easter apart from its Western counterpart – when Easter comes, you’re supposed to greet everyone “Христос воскрес!” (“Hristos voskres!”, “Christ has risen!”) and they’re supposed to answer “Воистину воскрес!” (“Voistinu voskres!”, “[He] truly has risen!”). No one gives a shit if you actually go to church or believe in god at all, as long as you’re not muslim you accept the greeting – that’s just a part of celebration, like cutting a birthday cake.

I may translate a recipe for paska, if anyone wants it, let me know.