We have Easter just around the corner and this, for a good part of the salaried world, means "holidays!".
At this time, together with the swallows, the recipes and formulas for bagels, Easter cakes,
tonyas
, panquemados, French toast and sweets of all kinds, coming from the traditional regional recipe books, that the guild of gastronomic communication also return to our landscape
Take out to ventilate for a couple of weeks and store in the "recurring" drawer at the end of the month, until the following year.
For a working-class girl born in the eighties, Easter meant going to town to climb trees, hunt for crayfish, fish for pike, piss squatting in a sea of wheat ears and poppies, chew powder, and taste the Easter mona with the godparents.
I remember perfectly.
We would get up very early on Saturday and with bleary eyes we would load the trunk of the old Peugeot 305 to the brim, a very rare model and difficult to find in Spain that my father had bought second-hand from Pirri's father-in-law, the legendary Real Madrid midfielder. , for 125,000 pesetas, and after five hours of painful travel without air conditioning or power steering we arrived at Tragó.
More information
The best torrijas in Spain are made in a Getxo butcher shop
Swallowed was not even a living town, but rather the ruins of about twenty houses that had once been a town until they were covered in water and abandoned in the sixties, when the dam for the Santa Ana reservoir was built. We went there to eat the monkey with the family clans of my father's military colleagues, who acted as godparents, in a post-apocalyptic developmentalist dryland landscape on the border between Huesca and Catalonia;
there we would set up the tent and spend the nights singing, chasing rabbits and roasting sausages in the heat of the fire, with the
fru-fru of
tactel
tracksuits
rubbing against us.
And the gastronomy of Easter is that, more than anything else.
I explain.
Have you noticed how at this time of year the recipe book fills up with eggs?
Roscas, pan de ovos and braids Galician are traditional Easter preparations made from good
brioche
enriched with eggs, which is, in part, what differentiates these roscón from the Roscón de Reyes;
the San José cream, called crema catalana outside of Catalonia, has extra eggs and yolks to honor the occasion;
The mona de Pascua, a typical cake on Easter Monday, is not such if it is not crowned with eggs, chocolate in its modern version, boiled eggs in its traditional version.
Before being coated in sugar and caramelized with blowtorches by advanced pastry helpers in terrific restaurants, French toast in Spain had always been egg-bathed and fried in oil.
Today, there are plenty of eggs on the market all year round.
They can go up more or less in price, but they never disappear, and they never cease to be within the reach of all budgets.
It is precisely for this reason that we say that something "is on the ball" when it is easy to achieve.
Years ago, however, at this point we had a couple of months with a shortage of eggs.
It was not until the arrival of spring that the hens, recovered from the racking of molting, which forces them to optimize energy and reduce laying to focus on renewing their plumage, and grateful for the comfortable temperatures after the harshness of winter, attacked the put back with verve and filled the rural pantries with proteins and calories packed in comfortable calcareous single-dose capsules.
The egg is not the protagonist of the Easter festivities because of its symbolic nature.
Where there are none, in fact, Easter pastry, if it is celebrated, is different.
First are the eggs, then, around them, symbology and gastronomy flourish, intertwined, synchronized, in a co-creative and codependent symbiosis.
Christian tradition dictates that it be the godfather who gives the Easter cake to the godson on Easter Sunday after mass, and specifies that it be tasted in community, bringing together different family and friends clans, in the countryside, on an outdoor excursion .
The etymological origin of the word "mona" is found in the Latin word
munda
, the plural of
mundum.
, bread baskets full of sweets and decorated eggs that the Romans offered to the goddess Ceres in April.
This theory seamlessly links our monkey with pre-Christian fertility rituals: in Roman mythology, Ceres is the person most responsible for agriculture, harvests and fertility.
Going back a little further in time to before the domestication of chickens, we can find the origin of the tradition of eating eggs in spring in the last Ice Age, when after the hard and long winter migratory birds returned from the south with the mild temperatures and the laying of eggs began, on which we humans fed, weak and hungry, with empty stashes of provisions, when leaving the caves, until we regained our vigor and could hunt again.
Leaving the shelter, the cave;
go to meet the egg, nature and the community;
meet up with friends;
reconquer public space, parks, squares;
go to town!
Celebrating the warmth, fertility and exuberance that spring promises are just as important ingredients in the Easter bun or the Easter bagel as the precise amounts of flour, sugar and milk that must be used to make them.
Gastronomy is our most direct means of dialogue with nature.
Knowing not so much the recipe book in particular but the reason for its specific form is to get a little closer to knowing who we are, where we come from, what is our place in the world and, why not, to understand why it is absolutely necessary that Let's have a vacation right now.
You have to go out into the field.
You have to watch the birds.
You have to take care of friends and chickens.
You have to share.
Have a great vacation!
