Pasha And Kulitsa - Eastern Easter Delicacies

Pasha is a traditional Finnish Easter dish, especially in the eastern parts of the country. It was brought here by the Russian Orthodox Church hundreds of years ago, and it is eaten to celebrate the end of Lent. You may know pasha by a slightly different name, pascha, paskha or something similar. Pasha, or пасха, is the Russian word for Easter, and it comes originally from the Hebrew pesah. The different ways of transliterating the Cyrillic alphabet explain the small variations in the name.

Pasha is really energy-rich food, its main ingredients being quark (milk curd), cream, butter, eggs and sugar. Dairy animals produce milk fat whether you use it or not, so by the end of Lent there was a surplus of cream, and it was used to make pasha. I'm referring to the days when farming was what most people lived on, of course. So this is not light food, but once a year I can live with that, and very few of us have actually fasted for it.

Traditionally pasha is made in wooden, pyramid-shaped moulds. Since Easter is the biggest holy day of the Russian Orthodox Church, the moulds are often carved with religious symbols such as XB, short for Hristos voskrese (Христос воскресе), Christ is risen. The pyramid shape is a reminder of the Jews' slavery in Egypt.

I don't have a wooden mould, and you don't need one either. An ordinary coffee filter does the same job when it is lined with two paper filters. First the quark is drained in it overnight, and then the finished mixture is pressed into it and left in the fridge for a day. I leave the middle a little higher than the edges, because the pasha sinks as the liquid drips out. The coffee filter gives the pasha the blunt cone shape you can see in the picture, with cubes of candied lemon peel pressed into its sides. The one in the picture made it to the Easter table next to the daffodils, with two felt bunnies keeping watch behind it.

Kulitsa is also a Russian Easter dish, and it is often eaten with pasha. It is a sweet, buttery and incredibly tasty loaf, which is sliced like bread and topped with heaps of pasha. In Russia, I've read, kulich is baked tall and round like a cylinder, often in an old coffee tin, but this recipe makes one or two round loaves on a baking sheet, decorated with strips of dough, candied peel and raisins. The yellow tint and the smell of the dough come from saffron and cardamom. It takes only 1/8 g of saffron, so the ounce I ordered from San Francisco a year and a half ago will last a good while yet. I urge you to try this, it is absolutely delicious!

Update: This is Anna's version of the same recipe. The kulitsa is in the background, but it's really the star attraction here. Perfect for an artery-clogging Easter breakfast!