Day 21: Easter Bread

The secret to delicious tsoureki (Greek Easter Bread) is the mahlepi. Mahlepi is the seed of a cherry tree that can be found in the Mediterranean. The tree is stunning, with beautiful white blossoms, not unlike the cherry trees that bloom in the U.S.

The taste of mahlepi is impossible to describe. It is almost bitter, but also nutty, and fruity—see, that doesn’t do much for anyone who hasn’t tasted it. Its seeds are utterly ordinary. The recipe never calls for very much, if any. But there’s a clear difference between tsoureki without the mahlepi and tsoureki that includes it.

This year, I made a loaf for American Easter and forgot to include the mahlepi, and it was good—but it just tasted like an ordinary semi-sweet bread. Luckily, my cousin Connie who raised me after my mother’s death has my mother’s recipe, and sends me a loaf every year. We cut that one after Easter Liturgy for Greek Easter and the difference was immediately palpable.

Rising in a corner of our kitchen, as I type this, is attempt number two. We’re in charge of refreshments for coffee hour at church, as well as Sunday School, tomorrow. The theme of the Sunday school lesson is living joyfully.

How in the world are we going to plan a Sunday School lesson and make dessert for 100 or so people,  and why in the world did I volunteer to do both the same Sunday? I lamented earlier today. (Nothing like a little procrastination).

And then, I had an idea. We’re going to learn about making tsoureki, or lambrokouloura, the bread of Pascha. The children will then help us make koulourakia, the cookie version of the tsoureki. We’ll talk about the symbolism in the bread: the three braided strands are a metaphor for the Holy Trinity, separate and one, and the red egg in the center signifies the blood of Christ turned to something sweet and beautiful. 

We’ll talk about how important every ingredient is to make the bread, and all of the people we need to make bread possible—the family who harvested the cherry trees, the people who harvested and ground the flour, and so on. 

We’ll talk about how yeast is a microscopic organism related to the fungus that someone in some earlier age figured out how to use for food, and how our bread would be flat and dense without it. A fungus—imagine that. That will probably inspire a little interest, laughter, or perhaps disgust.

We can’t do all this, of course, without talking about Jesus’ parable of the yeast, maybe his shortest parable of all. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough,” Jesus said. We’ll talk about what this parable means—that something big and holy can start out small.

And, we’ll eat bread, and cookies.

It’s not what’s in the curriculum, but spontaneity is part of living joyfully, right?

P.S. Sunday school committee and parents, sorry in advance for not following the curriculum, and for the inevitable mess. We'll try to clean up after as best we can.