Easter Traditions--old, and new.

A few of my own personal Polish and Ukrainian Easter Eggs.

I miss the traditions associated with the Polish Easters from my childhood in Michigan—everyone wearing the ashes of Ash Wednesday, the fasting of Lent, the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday, the Stations of the Cross at noon on Good Friday, the blessing of the Easter Basket on Holy Saturday, and, of course, the beauty and solemnity of Easter Sunday with masses of fragrant Easter lilies surrounding the altar, brilliant white candles ablaze, and the smell of incense in the air. Even Easter lilies don't smell like they used to--they are very pretty, but not very fragrant.

I love Polish and other Slavic Easter eggs decorated in vibrant colors. The Polish word for decorated eggs is pisanki. I once tried creating them myself, but a tragic accident involving a broken bookshelf destroyed every one of my eggs. Since then, I began to collect eggs rather than create them. Some of my collection is visible here on my page. I found an outstanding website, Pisanki – the decorated Easter eggs in Poland,  that goes into much detail on the history of Polish Easter Eggs. There are also examples of eggs from different regions of Poland.

New Pysanky from the Ukraine, 2019.

At my grandmother’s home in Detroit, our Lenten fast was broken with a traditional Polish Easter soup (Biały Barszcz)—bowls filled to the brim with smoked meats, eggs, cheese, and rye bread, ladled over the top with a tangy white broth made from the cooking of the Easter kielbasa.

If you are looking for a recipe for our traditional Polish Easter soup, you can find it on my website here.

I found an idea for serving Polish Easter soup in rye bread "bowls". I thought it was a very creative idea. Click here to go to the website.

Dessert was usually a white cake covered in coconut in the shape of a Pascal lamb often made by my Aunt Hattie.

I often make a Easter Egg Nest Cake---it's a yellow cake accented with orange zest, and frosted with Sander's Buttercream Icing. 

A few weeks ago, I made a different cake that I thought would be a great cake for Easter because of its colors of purple-blue and vibrant yellow. The flavors of lemon and blueberry also make for a nice finale for an Easter Brunch.  

I found the recipe at Delish.com and made no changes to the recipe. It was delicious!

Lemon Blueberry Cake

INGREDIENTS

Lemon Blueberry Cake

1 18-oz. box vanilla cake, plus ingredients called for on box

Juice and zest of 1 1/2 lemons, divided, plus more zest for garnish

1 3/4 c. fresh blueberries, divided

3 tbsp. all-purpose flour

1 c. (2 sticks) butter, softened

3 c. powdered sugar

1/4 c. heavy cream

1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

pinch of kosher salt

2 thin lemon slices, for topping

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 350º and grease three 9" cake pans with cooking spray. Line with parchment. Prepare cake mix according to package directions, then stir in juice and zest of 1 lemon.

In a small bowl, toss 1 cup blueberries and flour until completely coated (to keep the berries from sinking). Gently fold blueberries into the batter.

Divide cake batter evenly among prepared cake pans and bake until a toothpick comes out clean, 18 to 20 minutes.

Let cool in pans for 10 minutes, then invert onto a wire rack and let cool completely.

Showing the beautiful layers of lemon buttercream and blueberries.

Make frosting: In a large bowl using a hand mixer or the bowl of a stand mixer using the whisk attachment, beat butter and 2 1/2 cups powdered sugar. Add remaining lemon juice and zest and heavy cream and beat until combined, then beat in vanilla and salt. (Add remaining 1/2 cup powdered sugar as desired for texture and flavor.)

Place a dab of frosting on cake plate (to keep cake in place) and place parchment strips on each side of the cake plate. Place down first cake and top with frosting, then top with second cake and frost.

Repeat with third cake and frost sides.

Garnish with remaining blueberries, lemon slices, and zest and serve.

I found the recipe here: Delish

https://www.delish.com/cooking/recipes/a52625/lemon-blueberry-cake-recipe/

Happy Easter in Polish!

Polish Easter Basket Blessing

On Saturday morning I took my Easter Basket to St. Leo's for a blessing traditional especially for folks of Polish ancestry. One person had a dish with nothing but seven Easter butter lambs. Another had a can of Bud Lite in her basket along with the food. Many had beatiful decorated eggs. Hope you enjoy the pictures of my basket. Last year Publix, the local supermarket, carried butter lambs, but not this year so at the last minute I carved my own!

A Polish Easter in Detroit, Michigan

Top row l. to r. - Vincent Wacht, Lillian (Wacht) Janowski, Edward Wacht.
Bottom row l. to r. - Adam Janowski, Jr., Marie Wacht.

Having been raised Catholic, the many traditions associated with Easter were almost more significant than Christmas.

On Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter, palm leaves were distributed at Mass and afterwards were often woven into intricate braided shapes and hung inside homes, usually on a crucifix or religious picture. After Palm Sunday all of the statues in the church were covered in purple tunics indicating that the disciples of Christ had fled Jerusalem.

On Holy Thursday we went to church to commemorate the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples and for the blessing of the feet ceremony where the priest washed the feet of the poor. On the following day, Good Friday, we spent the hours from 12 noon to 3 in church or in silence at home. It was a double torture as mom used that time to cook all of the meat for the Easter Sunday meal. No meat would be eaten Good Friday, so the smell of ham baking and keilbasa cooking was excruciating!

On Saturday we took an Easter basket lined in linen and lace to the church to be blessed. It contained pieces of all of the food--ham, sausage, salt pork, rye bread, farmer's cheese, dyed hard-boiled eggs, horseradish and salt and pepper, that would be served on Easter Sunday. It also often included a butter carving in the shape of a lamb. The basket would be blessed so that we would have food in abundance throughout the following year.

Easter Sunday service was a glorious celebration! Everyone was dressed in new clothes and the church smelled of Easter lilies and incense. As you can see from the picture above I (the little boy with the fedora) was always a snappy dresser!

The service was followed by a festive and filling breakfast. We ate a white, slightly sour, soup, with cubes of meat, bread, cheese and eggs in the soup. Horseradish was often added to spice it up. If red horseradish was used the soup would turn a pretty pink color.

We almost always went to my visit my grandmother on my mother's side in Detroit. The dinner meal was another serving of the same type of soup followed by cake. The cake was often made by my Aunt Hattie and would be in the shape of a lamb covered in white icing and coconut. If she wasn't bringing the cake someone would by a cake from Sanders Bakery in Detroit. It would be yellow cake with buttercream icing garnished with crushed hazelnuts. We'd often add an Easter "nest" of green colored coconut with a couple of chocolate malted milk "robin's eggs".

In my next post I will be providing you with a few recipes--my sister Barbara's recipe for a traditional Easter soup, my own interpretation of it, and a recipe for an as close as I can get version of Sander's buttercream icing which did not include butter or cream.