My mom is Polish, my
dad is Swiss. The good thing about being a mix is that I get to pick and match
the best traditions out of two cultures while leaving out the crap boring
stuff. The downside is that people don’t understand each other at our dinner
table (only my brother and I speak all three languages used in my family:
german, swiss german and polish. Yes you Germans out there, Swiss German is a
language shut up. And yep. I have to translate stuff often. And yes. It’s
annoying. But then, apparently polish is extremely hard to learn so I do
forgive my dad. Occasionally.) Anyway today I will, as it is in fact Easter, tell
you about Swiss and Polish Easter traditions. As you might know, most people in
Switzerland care about roughly four things: chocolate, cheese, money and
keeping strangers out. Ok yeah I do admit it, I tend to paint a rather dark
picture of the country but that might just be because I like painters (and
composers) with a dark biography, like Vincent van Gogh (Fun fact: My parents
wanted to call me Vincent, had i been born a boy. Gosh that man cut off his own
EAR!). Anyway. What do we Swiss do for Easter? We eat chocolate and eggs. In
fact, the only really big thing is the Sunday midday meal. We have eggs in all
shapes and colors. We take great pride in decorating hard-boiled eggs during
hours of careful work only to use them for a game called „Eiertätsch“ where two
eggs are hit against each other and the owner of the intact egg wins. The prize
of the winner is only the victory itself. (I know you expected it to be money
but HA! You lose!) Both eggs are then destroyed and eaten. Another popular egg
game is „Eierlaufe“, a relay where the contestants have to run around while
balancing a spoon with a raw egg on it. It can look quite ridiculous and (omg)
in this case the winners DO get a prize. Woohoo! So yeah, we eat eggs (has
anyone ever had an ostrich egg? There is an ostrich farm near my parents’ house
in Switzerland but I’ve never had an egg. And the ostriches look SO evil.) and
there is also an Easter egg hunt. In this case, the eggs are in fact chocolate
eggs, made of the finest and most delicious Swiss chocolate. If there is one
thing I want you to take away from this text it is that Swiss chocolate is
indeed the best chocolate in the world. And when it is molded into an oval
shape and wrapped in a colorful aluminium foil it can indeed be considered both
a food- and an eye-orgasm. Oh yeah and
one last thing: We eat this very nice Easter cake (recipe below). So there you
go, Swiss Easter traditions: Cake. eating eggs (both from hens, ostriches and
chocolate), running around with them, and hitting them against each other. Now
let’s move to Poland. Now if there is one thing you need to know it’s that many
Poles like Catholicism very much. And thus most Polish Easter traditions are
very much religious. Around the time of Easter there are around 1000 different
days where you do different crazy stuff like take a palm tree to church, eat
fish (good Friday), go to church a LOT, eat some more fish (every Friday
basically, I kinda lied about it being just good Friday), go to church some
more, have a massive meal on Sunday and splash people with water on the Monday.
There is one funky tradition that I wanna highlight because you can modify it
and it’s just funny. On Holy Saturday, we take this basked full of random stuff
to church to get it blessed by the priest. The traditional components are salt,
ham, bread, horseradish, water, eggs and a little figure of a lamb. And the
priest says some amazing blessing and then we take the basket home, let the
stuff stand around and spread all the fantastic blessing around the house and
on Sunday we eat everything (I lied. again We don’t eat the plastic lamb.) and
thus the blessed molecules get integrated into our bodies and it just feels so
great! Yeah. And here comes the fun: You can obviously put anything you like in
the basket and the priest will bless it. You can play really fun games, like hide
a condom in there and have sex with a blessed condom. I have not actually done
that. But you could. Also Polish Easter is a lot about decorations. We make
some of the nicest decorated eggs (But they are wooden, we don’t destroy them
and eat them like those Swiss barbarians.) called Pisanki. It is a tradition to
get a branch from a tree and hang them on it. In fact, we once had one of those
branches for so long that it grew roots and we ended up planting it and it’s
now a big tree in our garden.
That is basically all
I wanted to tell you about Swiss and Polish Easter. If you may excuse me now, I
have to go and paint some more hard-boiled eggs while listening to Chopin. That
is the composer I hinted at earlier. A genius. Died at the age of 39. And most
interestingly, he was also a mix: Half French and half Polish. So he probably
did the basket thing, too! Who knows, maybe he added some sheet music to his
basket? Or a mini-Eiffel tower? Oh wait… that wasn’t built yet. Ach I should
just go back to my eggs…
SWISS EASTER CAKE
RECIPE
For the dough:
200g flower
½ teaspoon salt
100g butter
40g sugar
½ lemon: grated skin
1 egg: beaten, not
stirred
For the filling:
3 tablespoons apricot
jam
400 ml milk
pinch of salt
(preferrably blessed by the priest)
55g semolina
50g butter
45g sugar
½ lemon: zest and
grated skin
40g sultanas
20g almonds, ground
3 eggs, yolk and white
separated
To make the cake:
For the dough just mix
all the stuff and use it to cover the bottom and sides of a 24cm diameter
baking pan
To make the filling
Bring milk to a boil.
Add semolina, simmer at low heat for 15-20min.
Pre-heat oven to 220°C
Add lemon, butter,
sugar, sultanas and almonds to the semolina mix, let cool down.
Add the egg yolks
Beat the egg whites
until stiff, add to the mix
Finish and bake:
Spread the apricot jam
on the bottom of the cake, pour the filling into the baking pan, bake for
roughly 30min. let cool down. Use icing sugar and all your amazing imagination
to decorate this delicious treat!
EN GUETE!
