Easter Foods - Paska

Part I of III

The week before Easter is always a busy one at our house.

It is consumed with preparations for the church service to come and the blessing of Easter foods.

The Easter foods themselves are among the most elaborate and time consuming that I make.  And making them is a labor of love.

Because of the sheer amount of work involved, I started taking over a part of the duties from my mother years ago and now do most of the work myself, asking her for the occasional hand with this task or that.

One of my first Easter tasks was the coloring of eggs.  A task my grandmother held sacred.  Though I have few memories of the process I remember the row of glasses as they sat on her windowsill each filled with a dark solution of colorant.  I remember her paintbrush, sable with a red wooden handle.  Unfortunately I remember neither the process nor the eggs that resulted.  Because I left at the age of 7 there are a lot of traditions that she did not have the chance to pass on to me.  Traditions that are bequeathed to me in the form of stories spilling from my mother’s memory as we work in the kitchen.

Easter especially seems to bloom these memories as we make recipes steeped in tradition.  Memory laden scents loose her tongue welling forth tidbits of culture and history that sometimes seem foreign even if recognizable as my own.

For me the traditions are new, or relatively so as my attendance to them started here in America rather than being passed down mother to daughter as they were for my own mother.  Religion under communist regime was for old women and my own grandmother did not speak of it, though her own mother was deeply devout.

And the recipes we use are not old, but rather refined and revised from traditional ones to suit a much different and rarified palate.  These are the foods, after all with which we break our Lenten fast.

The first recipe is one of the first that my mother allowed me to make.  Labor intensive, the recipe takes several days to complete.  Though not difficult in theory and requiring no special technique, it is a recipe that I have been perfect for years.

Paska is traditionally made in a special pyramid shaped mold.  A rich, heavy dessert it is served smeared upon the traditional Easter cake called a Kulich which in and of itself is a butter heavy yeast concoction, resembling the Italian panatone.  But I will save the kulich for the next post.  This one is dedicated to the making of paska, which is also the Russian word for Easter.  The XB stands for "Christ has Risen" which is how the priest anounces the resurection and to which the people reply "He truelly has risen"

The original recipe I use was published in The Orange County register when they still had a food section.  I still have the original printing, though the pages are now tattered and yellowed from use.  Held together with tape the paper feels almost sueded having lost its hardness to loving touches.  Published in 1987 the recipe is from “Food of the World Russian Cooking.”

The original recipe was filled with nuts and candied fruit, something we quickly found distasteful.  The nuts became soggy and the candied fruit overwhelmed the delicate taste of the dessert.  But it definitely needed something, leaving out both made for a fairly bland if very tasty experience.  So year after year we experimented with different additions finally settling upon dried sour cherries.  The sour cherries balance the heavy sweetness with a chewy, palate pleasing tartness.

I also spent several years working on the texture.  Originally calling for all ricotta or farmer cheese, the resulting paska had a somewhat grainy texture.  An issue I smoothed by combining the farmer cheese with cream cheese, eventually settling upon a half and half mix.  But changing the mixture also forced me to change the proportion of custard mixture that flavored the cheese, requiring half again as much custard as the original recipe called for. 

And though I now have the recipe exactly how I want it, I can’t quite help tinkering with it.  This years I changed out the ricotta with a cheese that my mother made by souring milk with lemon juice.  This added a tangy note to the final result, not exactly lemony but providing a pleasantly sour finish.

I suppose that I will never stop tinkering with the recipe…nor any recipe for that matter.  If not out of boredom, then out of a mad scientist bent that seems to best express itself through cooking.  The results however are delicious no matter what.

Cheese Paska

1 ½ pounds cream cheese
1 ½ pounds ricotta cheese (farmer or cottage cheese may be substituted)
½ pound unsalted butter
1 ½ cups heavy cream
6 egg yolks
1 ½ cups sugar (I use vanilla sugar)
2/3 cup sour cherries (or dried apricots)
1 tablespoon vanilla
Fruits or nuts to decorate (optional)

3 days ahead:
Place ricotta cheese in a cheese cloth and allow to drain over night in the refrigerator.

2 days ahead:
Pour the vanilla over the cherries and allow to stand.

Remove all ingredients from the refrigerator and allow to come to room temperature (about an hour).

Pass the cheese and butter through a food mill with a fine mesh, alternating to create an even mixture.  Alternatively pass the cheese and butter through a fine mesh strainer with the back of a wooden spoon (this is not easy with cream cheese).  Mix thoroughly.

Add the sugar to the yolks and beat until the mixture is pale and runs off the whisk or beaters in lazy ribbons.

In a heavy bottomed sauce pan, heat the cream until bubbles form around the edges.  Remove from heat.

While constantly beating add a quarter of a cup of the hot cream to the egg mixture in a thin stream.  Repeat until all of the cream and egg is incorporated.  Pour the cream and egg mixture back into the sauce pan and return to a low heat.

Stirring constantly, heat the mixture until it has thickened and reduced.  DO NOT allow the mixture to boil or it may curdle.  The custard is ready when it has reduced by nearly half and is the nearly translucent color of lemon curd.

Remove from heat and set the pan in an ice bath to cool the custard.  Add the cherries and vanilla and continue to stir until the mixture is cold.

Mix the custard into the cheese and butter mixture and blend thoroughly.

Line a container with a perforated bottom (or a new clean flowerpot) with 3-4 layers of cheese cloth.  Carefully spoon the paska mixture into the cheese cloth, shaking and tamping to avoid air bubbles.  Fill to the top, cover with a plate and weigh down with cans.

Allow to sit one or two days to drain any liquid and allow flavors to meld.

Serve on kulich or pound cake (or sneak bites with a naked spoon…I won’t tell)

Keeps for two weeks in the refrigerator.

Comments

[johanna]

wow... what elaborate dishes. looks absolutely stunning. Thanks for participating in WTSIM!

[Pille]

I've been using craisins or dried cranberries in my paska - love the colour! But sour cherries also sound like a great substitute for raisins and candied fruit - and I happen to have a packet in my cupboard:)
Paska (or pasha, as we call it in Estonian) is a must-have dish on a Easter table here, too, so I'm looking forward to eating a lot of it this weekend..