You can even postpone Easter without a crispy loaf: it will never go out of fashion. But what makes it different from other pastries and bread?
What makes a loaf a loaf?
All loaf is based on wheat flour, milk, butter, egg and yeast (or other fermenting agent) as the raw material, and the dough kneaded from it. It can be both savoury and sweet, and it is not only the savoury that is eaten at Easter ham and torma next to it. Many people particularly like the contrast of flavours that the shredded, sweetish loaf provides to the salted ham, horseradish and fresh spring onions, Horsetail, next to month-old radishes.
It is not mainly the appearance of the loaf that distinguishes it from other pastries, as it can be shaped in many different ways. The traditional Hungarian plait is made by interlacing three or four dough rolls of kneaded, risen dough. It can also be plaited on top, but with a rectangular, rounded bottom.
As many houses as there are loaves of bread
So spinning is not an optional extra. In some regions - in South Transdanubia and the Tisza Plain - it is baked in the form of a loaf, and is even called a loaf (not a loaf of bread). The point is not the spinning, but the base and the lining of the dough.
Round scones are also baked without spinning in a ribbed baking tin, and without exaggeration, there are unique festive varieties in every part of the country and region, from round scones with holes to huge bride scones that can feed the whole wedding party.
Sometimes even the walls of the oven had to be demolished to bake the grandiose lagzis cakes: „the mouth of the oven had to be enlarged by demolition to make the cakes, which often weighed 15-20 kilograms. The size of the giant square cake was often 60×40 centimetres,” says the magazine. Arcanum Digital Library.
At this time of year, around Easter, it is baked in countless bakeries and households in the shape of a wreath, which also has a sacred meaning. The Easter table is a symbol of resurrection and the cycle of life, and one of its main characters, the embodiment of abundance.
Always a festive treat
It's not difficult to recognise the Serbian kolač or the former Transylvanian Saxon Klotsch pastry in Hungarian. The early versions that appeared in Hungarian areas at the end of the Middle Ages probably did not contain eggs. On the contrary, they were also made from wheat flour in regions where breads were still made from the more sour rye flour.
The finest wheat flour grains were sifted through hand sieves, so the best quality, fine wheat flour was the basis for scones and strudel (hence the word wheat flour). Coarser flour was used for bread and cooked dough.
Post-Lenten abundance
After the weeks of Lent easter the resurrection, a celebration of renewal, a celebration of life - also in the gastronomic sense.
Even today, the ingredients for this pastry are expensive, even centuries ago in the peasant world. In the old days, when bread tasted hard and sour, with a thick dough, the soft, flaky, sweet pastry was the embodiment of abundance - in some Christian traditions, the body of Christ himself.
The crust of a flaky loaf kneaded with milk, butter and eggs is soft and dense, but not choking. These ingredients cannot be omitted. If the milk or butter is spared, which is typically done under industrial conditions, the dough becomes drier, more porous and characterless.
Puszta bread, peasant bread, horn bread
Up until the late 1700s, scones were baked without filling. When stuffing was introduced - with nuts or poppy seeds, for example - the old, unstuffed originals were given the name "pusztakalács". The main difference between the traditional and the horn-baked bread is that the former was baked on the floor of the oven in a hot air medium (now an oven), while the horn-baked bread was baked over the embers of an open fire, turning.
Many people also like kuglof at Easter. This pastry is a relative of scones, but the basic difference is that the dough is not kneaded, but mixed and left to rise in a special kugel oven with ribbed walls.
No Easter without scones, ham, eggs and horseradish, so get them from a quality place!
