There hasn't been a food thread for ages, so how about getting back to our kitchen ranges? The Thanksgiving/Christmas season was pretty well covered, but what about Pesach/Easter?

Any cool Seder recipes? How many ways are there to make haroset?

And Easter? Here in Italy it's a BIG thing, with dozens of traditional dishes, starting with Good Friday (fish fish and more fish). Is it so in yonder (prevalently but not limited to)Anglo-Saxon lands?

I wish I could find the paskha and kulich recipes my Russian teacher gave us years ago. Several students in the class volunteered to make these Russian Easter specialties, and they were delicious. Kulich is a sweet egg bread, and paskha is the most delicious concentrated cholesterol I've ever had. It's a cheesecake-type dessert made of eggs, butter, cream, sugar, vanilla and tvorog (farmer's cheese is a good substitute), with maybe raisins and candied fruit added in. It's pressed into a cheesecloth-lined mold and allowed to drain -- and condense -- for a couple of days.

djb, do you remember going to Clement St to the Russian tea rooms at Easter? My mother would always take me for pashka and other goodies. Kyra Nyjinski also treated us to this yummy dish. I never really thought about the calories before now, yikes!

I found the kulich recipe! (I knew I was doing the right thing when I bought that Russian pastry cookbook a couple of years ago!)

Actually, it seems practically identical to Christmas panettone (see recipe in the Thanksgiving food thread) to me. The quantities listed in the book are for 20 kulics, so I’ll cut them down to a tenth, how’s that?
Being written by real pastry chefs, liquid and solid measures are all in grams, as well as the eggs.
But: 500 grams is slightly more than a pound (18 oz) for solids, and slightly less than 2 cups (15 fl. oz) of liquid. Sorry, I can’t do any better than that. Here goes.

500 gr flour
200 gr sugar
150 gr butter
150 gr eggs
150 gr milk
20 gr baking powder (I have a feeling they really mean yeast)
pinch of salt
200 gr sultanas or raisins
100 gr candied orange and citron
60 gr powdered sugar
40 gr water
10 gr toasted almonds
a drop of lemon juice

Warm milk. Dissolve baking powder/yeast in it. As soon as the chemical reaction starts, add half of the flour, SIFTED. Mix well. Heat to 30°C (that is, just warm it up a little bit). Let rise in warm place, covered, for at least three hours.
Add eggs, sugar and salt. Mix in the rest of the flour, sifting it in bit by bit. Add raisins (previously soaked in warm water) and diced candied fruit. Mix and knead well for 7-8 min.
Add melted butter and knead well into dough.
Let rest for 1 hour.
Distribute the dough in deep buttered baking pans (the pan shouldn’t be more than halfway filled up).
Let rest again in warm place, till the dough reaches ¾ of the pan’s height.
Bake at 200°C/390°F about 40 min.

Prepare sugar and water icing: put sugar in small pan, add boiling water and mix till smooth. Boil, skimming the foam off, till you have a soft mass. Add a little lemon juice just before taking it off the fire. Cool quickly mixing continuously: the mass will become white and thick.
Spread a first layer of it on the kulich with a spatula; use a pastry cone to festoon it with more decorations. Tastefully fit the almonds into the pattern.

- Definitely not Kosher le Pesach, but starting Tuesday night I’ll stop making featherweight matza balls and devote myself to kulic, which really seems wonderful and way better than the traditional Italian Easter “Colomba” (dove).

<small>[ 07 April 2004, 07:14 PM: Message edited by: Rennie ]</small>

Thanks, Rennie. Traditionally, you should then decorate the kulich with the initials "X.B." with icing. (That's in the Cyrillic, not Latin, alphabet.)

<small>[ 07 April 2004, 10:50 PM: Message edited by: djb ]</small>