“No, you have to hide
the egg!” my twenty-two-year-old daughter
demanded.
I was covered with flour, had been
up since dawn and my hands were starting to go numb. I didn’t need my
twenty-two-year old acting like a two-year-old unless she was planning to help
me with the bread scattered throughout my sticky kitchen.
“But you already know it’s in the
bread,” I pleaded. “And Nana didn’t hide the egg when I was a kid.”
“I don’t care. This is the way you
did it when we were kids and this is how Nana did it for us. It’s our tradition.
You can’t mess with it.”
“Ok, sorry. Next year, I will hide
the egg, that you already know is in there.”
“Thank you,” she huffed, as if I
should have known better.
Perhaps I should have. When I was a
kid through to when my mother passed, I took for granted that bread with a
whole egg baked inside would appear at Easter. Unfortunately, I only took an
interest in my mother’s old recipes after she passed and there wasn’t much to
go on. That the recipes were written in scribbled Italian was the least of my
problems. I called on her best friend, who often baked with my mom, to help me
out.
Hoping I didn’t sound like an
amateur, I asked, “Why is there no flour listed in the ingredients? I know
there’s flour in there – it’s bread! But how much flour?”
“Oh, you’ll know,” she said.
I told her I would not know, so she
sighed and gave me a starting point. “Start with eighteen cups of flour and
work your way up. The dough will be sticky but be sure not to add too much
flour.”
This was helpful but terrifying. How
sticky? And eighteen cups for starters – I knew my mother made several loaves
but how many loaves were we talking about? I had more questions but I was used
to tackling ambitious baking projects – I could do this. And perhaps my
mother’s friend was right and I’d just know.
The first time I made Easter Bread I
planned to keep track of how much flour I used. I vowed not to hand down
recipes with “you’ll know” as an ingredient. I started with eighteen cups and stopped
counting at thirty-two. I guess there’d be a “you’ll know” in my recipes, too.
Trying to channel my mother’s baking
expertise while ignoring her voice in my ear and her hovering over my shoulder,
only added to my anxiety. While wishing she was with me, I knew she’d criticize
and correct my technique, I’d get defensive and we’d end up in a shouting match.
It’s no mystery I never mastered her recipes while she was alive.
She used to start this bread in the
late evening while she waited for my father to get home from work at 1:00 a.m. She
juiced about a dozen oranges by hand, scalded the milk, added butter and sugar
and then let the mixture cool to lukewarm before adding the juice, beaten eggs,
softened yeast and pure anise extract.
Only after she mixed all the wet
ingredients with care did she start to add flour. But it was about that time of
night that I’d go to bed, knowing that I would awaken to the pungent smell of
anise mixed with the sweet and yeasty aroma of freshly baked bread.
The next morning, she’d complain that
even though she’d gone to bed as soon as my father got home, with the dough
kneaded, covered with an old flannel blanket and readied for its five to six
hour rise, she hadn’t slept.
She’d gotten up multiple times to
check the dough, worried that it would rise so much that it overflowed even her
biggest bowl. Sometimes her fears were justified and I’d find her in the
kitchen, telling me she’d been up since before sunrise to ready the dough for
its next rise.
With a decisive hand, she punched
down the massive dough ball and then worked through the dough, slicing one piece
off at a time, rolling it into a long thick rope, folding it in half and then braiding
the two strands to make a long loaf.
She always placed an uncooked egg,
still in its shell, in the small hollow at the top of the braid. This was the
step that fuelled the egg controversy.
When my brother and I were growing
up, the egg remained in plain sight with the dough rising up a bit to nest it
in place. Once grandchildren arrived, my mother thought it would be fun and
mysterious to hide the egg by putting a thin layer of dough over it, making it disappear
under the pillowy bread.
Hidden egg or not, there were always
twenty or more loaves that rose again for another 90 minutes and occupied space
on every available surface. The old oven fit three loaves at a time, so even after
the baking began, the finish line was still far off.
Once out of the oven, the crowning
glory was a boiled milk and sugar glaze that gave the loaves their trademark
shine and sticky exterior. We’d barely wait for the loaves to cool before
pulling pieces off with our hands to savor the the unique texture of the bread at
the juncture of the twists where the dough was stringy and candy-like.
In the midst of the production,
someone was always dispatched to deliver a still warm, wrapped loaf to a
relative, friend or neighbour.
My mother passed twenty-six years
ago, and I started making this bread shortly after, inviting family over to
enjoy it hot out of the oven and sending bread home with them.
I hid the egg as she had done for my
children, until the year I decided to go back to the old tradition of an uncovered
egg. After being reprimanded by my daughter, I reverted back to the way my
children remembered, asking silent forgiveness for going against tradition.
As much as I felt pulled toward the
custom of my childhood, my children only knew the hidden egg version. My mother
had intended to create an aura of mystery with that hidden egg. And my kids
loved it.
As if she knew I needed validation,
my little cousin called me one day and asked how the egg got into the bread, to
which I answered, “There’s an egg in there?”
Her mother told me later that her
daughter’s eyes grew to twice their size. Yes, the mystery still worked. Who am
I to mess with that?
***
Norma Gardner retired from the corporate world a few years ago and enjoys spending
time with family and friends, travelling, and expressing herself through her
writing and sourdough recipes. Growing up in Northern Ontario, her family’s
antics and her Italian upbringing supply the inspiration for her personal
essays. She currently lives in Waterdown, Ontario.
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