Easter table: traditions, customs, recipes with photos

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

“Light the snow, play the ravines” – this is how the people called the month of April from time immemorial. The last snow is coming down from the fields, the rivers are breaking and carrying the winter ice chains into the sea, the streams are ringing. The trees are already touched by a green haze. In the clear spring sky - slender shoals of migratory birds. A holiday is coming in nature.

The holiday comes to man too: after a long seven-week fast, the bright Resurrection of Christ, Holy Easter, comes.

Easter traditions

Each year, Easter falls on different days and months, from March to May. Prepare for Easter ahead of time. On Maundy Thursday (Thursday), housewives clean their houses, wash and clean, bake bread as a sign that it is not transferred to the house all year. Maundy Thursday is called "clean" not only because of putting things in order. On Maundy Thursday, every Orthodox is spiritually cleansed.

Eggs are dyed everywhere on Maundy Thursday. This is a family occupation, the kids are happy to remove the husk from the onion for a decoction. Easter cakes are baked on Good Friday, and on the night from Great Saturday to Sunday they are consecrated.

Before Easter, it has long been customary to do goodaffairs: collecting money to ransom debtors from prison, handing over alms to prison prisoners and treats to guard soldiers. The poor bought birds from birders and released them into the wild.

On Tuesday in the week following Easter comes Radonitsa, from the word "joy". This joy is brought to people by the Resurrection of the Lord, and they hasten to share it with those who have left this world. On Radonitsa, all Orthodox Russia went to the cemeteries to commemorate the dead. They broke green-dyed eggs and immediately crumbled them. They distributed pastries, cakes, pies, and other dishes from the Easter table to the poor. Part of what was cooked was brought to the church, where requiems and masses were served.

Easter Treat

In the old days in Russia, Easter tables were laid in the houses throughout the festive Easter week. Guests were invited for them, brought to treat the poor, and large families gathered. "Christ is Risen!" - this is how the Orthodox greet each other on this day.

The symbol of Holy Easter is a painted egg. The consecrated egg is eaten first at the Easter table. Eggs are exchanged with relatives, neighbors, left in the temple.

Colored eggs

Eggs should be washed well before dyeing. Traditionally, hard-boiled eggs are cooked in a decoction based on onion skins or young birch leaves. Depending on the intensity of the onion broth, a beautiful color is obtained, from golden yellow to brown. If you tie parsley leaves to the egg before dyeing, pretty patterns will remain.

Nowadays, food coloring is more often used. The paint must be dissolved in boiling water, lowered intohard-boiled eggs for a few minutes, carefully remove and lay out to dry.

You can dye eggs in patches and colored threads. A pre-soaked egg is wrapped in silk or wrapped with natural colored threads and boiled.

If there are children in the house, boiled eggs as a base and paint brushes will delight and turn Easter table decoration into a fun and memorable event.

Vegetable oil, if rubbed with dried eggs, will give a beautiful shine.

Kulich among the Slavs was considered ritual bread. The prototype of Easter cake is artos, church leavened bread in the form of a large cylinder. It was customary to distribute it to parishioners on Bright Saturday after the completion of the prayer. There is an opinion that earlier in Russia, Easter cakes were baked several times a year before big holidays, and used in rituals and fortune-telling.

Preparing Easter cake for the Easter table should be done with bright thoughts and good mood, without haste and fuss.

Kulich

What you need:

• base: flour (six hundred grams), cream (one and a half cups), sugar (a couple of cups), six eggs, butter (two hundred grams), yeast (fifty grams);
• additives: raisins, any nuts like almonds, vanilla, rum, cognac, orange or lemon peel, saffron, cinnamon;
• for decoration: icing, egg whites whipped with powdered sugar, melted chocolate.

How to cook:

• Add one tablespoon of sugar and two hundred grams to the yeast diluted with creamflour, sifted through a sieve three times. This is a dough, it needs to be placed in a warm place.
• Five yolks grind with sugar. Melt and cool the butter.
• In the dough (already well increased in size) add butter, yolks, vanillin, s alt, chilled and whipped proteins and the rest of the flour. Knead the dough and return to heat to rise.
• Supplement the dough with raisins, candied fruits, any other additives you wish.
• Distribute the resulting mass in pre-oiled forms, where to allow to rise. Bake at 180°C for 40-60 minutes. Cool and cover with your favorite icing, as your imagination tells, and the Easter cake will become the main decoration of the Easter table (photo).

Easter is also called the dish itself, which is made only for the Easter table. Easter is prepared in a special form - a pastor, resembling a truncated pyramid. On the inside of the form, the XB (Christ is Risen) and the cross, images of flowers, sprouted grains, personifying suffering and resurrection, were traditionally carved.

In the 18th century, by order of Prince Vyazemsky, the Church of the Holy Trinity, nicknamed "Kulich and Easter", was built in the city of St. Petersburg. The name of the temple is due to its shape in the form of a rotunda, while the bell tower looks like a pyramidal easter.

Easter Royal Custard

Ingredients: fresh fat cottage cheese (half a kilo), egg yolks (three pieces), one glass of sour cream, one hundred grams of butter, one hundred grams of sugar, vanilla, raisins, nuts.

First you need to prepare the raisins: pour boiling water overhalf an hour, then dry. Grind cottage cheese, add yolks, sour cream, sugar, vanillin, softened butter and beat until the mass becomes fluffy.

Then put on a slow fire and stirring, wait for the start of boiling (do not boil). Cool, add nuts, raisins and transfer to a bowl. For a couple of days, put under oppression in a cold place. Remove the finished Easter from the mold, transfer to a dish, decorate and transfer to the Easter table (photo).

One more dish - lamb figurines. They were made from sugar and decorated with Easter cakes, the silhouette of a lamb was attached to gingerbread. Previously, the menu of the Easter table was without fail a lamb, as a symbol of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Now the Easter lamb can be cut, for example, from chilled butter, giving the desired shape with a warm knife, or cut according to a stencil from dough.

According to ancient traditions and customs, the Easter table can include up to 48 dishes, according to the number of days of Lent. In addition to the main attributes of the holiday, there were always salads, snacks, various muffins, kissels and sbitni on the table.

Meat dishes of the Easter table were considered obligatory for cooking for housewives (recipes with photos below).

Baked lamb

Products: Leg of young lamb (about two kilograms), thyme, rosemary, mustard (four tablespoons), honey (one tablespoon), garlic, vegetable oil (a couple of tablespoons), lemon juice (one tablespoon), s alt, black pepper.

Lamb wash, clean and dry. Grate with s alt, pepper and marinate from three totwenty hours in a mixture of oil, mustard, honey, lemon juice, garlic, rosemary/thyme leaves. Bake in the oven at 100°C for three to four hours, covered with foil.

Easter meat ring

You will need minced beef and pork (one kilogram), seven eggs, one onion, garlic (a couple of cloves), mayonnaise (three tablespoons), sunflower oil, s alt, dill, parsley, black pepper. Ring shape for baking.

Six out of seven hard-boiled eggs, remove the shell. In minced meat, beat a raw egg, fried to a golden color onion, finely chopped greens, mayonnaise, chopped garlic, pepper, s alt and mix. Put half of the minced meat in a mold, spread whole boiled eggs and the second part of minced meat on top.

Bake, covered with foil, 30-40 minutes in the oven at 180°C. Then carefully turn the form over, put the ring on a baking sheet and brown until golden brown for another twenty to thirty minutes, pouring over the meat juice. Decorate with greenery.

Stuffed chicken

You need two chickens, two cups of breadcrumbs, four chicken eggs, half a cup of cream, a little chicken broth, one hundred grams of butter, parsley, s alt, pepper.

Chickens wash, dry, s alt. Mix two-thirds of crackers, a couple of boiled and chopped eggs, fifty grams of butter, cream, parsley or dill, s alt and pepper. Stuff the chicken with this stuffing and sew up. Dip the carcasses prepared in this way in an egg, roll in breadcrumbs and fry in the oven.closet, turning over. Remove the threads from the finished chickens, put the minced meat in a slide, chopped meat on top.

Meat abundance will diversify and complement vegetable salads, which will not only decorate the festive table, but also help replace lean food with more abundant food.

Potato salad with pickled mushrooms

Salad products: potato tubers (six to seven pieces), pickled mushrooms (two hundred grams), pickled cucumbers (five pieces), onions, green peas (two hundred grams), parsley, dill, vegetable oil, black pepper and s alt.

Boiled potatoes, pickled cucumbers, mushrooms crumble into cubes. Onion cut into half rings. Mix all this with green peas, chopped herbs, s alt and pepper. Fill with a couple of tablespoons of oil.

Holiday prunes salad

Boiled chicken fillet (two hundred grams), steamed prunes (one hundred grams), peeled walnuts (one hundred grams), boiled eggs (two pieces), one fresh cucumber, s alt, mayonnaise.

Chicken, eggs, cucumber cut into cubes and mix, add chopped prunes, chopped nuts, s alt and mayonnaise.

Easter recipes have been passed down from generation to generation, from mother to daughter and from mother-in-law to daughter-in-law. Good housewives know many secrets to make the dishes tasty and truly festive. When kneading the dough in the house, do not make loud conversations, make noise, open windows and slam doors.

Fish pies

Yeast dough, three hundred grams of fish, rice (one glass), eggs (three pieces), butter (one hundredgrams), s alt, water.

First, prepare the minced rice: add finely chopped boiled eggs to the boiled rice with oil and mix.

Roll out the dough into circles about half a centimeter thick. Put a small amount of minced rice in the middle of each mug, on top - a boneless fish fillet, a little s alt and a small piece of butter. Let stand for fifteen minutes, bake at 200 ° C, brush with oil and transfer to a ceramic dish.

In the church tradition, a beautiful and generous holiday table is a symbol of joy. To decorate the Easter table, a snow-white tablecloth and the best sets were used. Decorated with fresh flowers, candles, lace napkins, bird figurines (the dove in Christianity personifies the image of the Holy Spirit).

Larks

These are lean yeast dough buns. The dough is divided into small pieces in the form of a tourniquet about twenty centimeters in length. A knot is made from the flagella, on the one hand, a bird's head with raisin eyes is fashioned, on the other, a tail, cut with a knife. Such larks are baked for half an hour at a temperature of 180 ° C.

Of course, the Easter table is impossible to imagine without desserts and festive drinks. Despite the fact that alcohol is not approved by Orthodox canons, not a single feast in Russia is complete without liqueurs, tinctures, traditional birch trees and mead.

Petersburg style apple pudding

Ten apples, one and a half cups of sour cream, five eggs, one tablespoonflour, two large spoons of sugar, zest of half a lemon, one glass of jam, thirty grams of butter.

Remove the core from the apples and place in a baking dish. Fill the empty center with jam. Mix the yolks with sugar, zest, sour cream, flour and whites, pre-whipped. Pour this mixture over the apples. Bake at 180°C. Serve with chilled milk.

Cranberry mousse

Semolina (two hundred and fifty grams), cranberries (a couple of glasses), sugar (three to four large spoons), mint leaves.

Boil cranberries with sugar in four glasses of water. Boil a little and strain through a sieve. Put it on the stove again and pour in the semolina, stirring until thick. Once completely cooled, beat until fluffy mousse. Divide among bowls and garnish with mint leaves.

Sbiten with wine

Dry wine (one liter), honey (one hundred and fifty grams), cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg.

Heat the wine with the addition of honey, spices and let it brew well for half an hour. Cookies and pies are served with sbitnya.

In some Russian villages, the Easter table setting was complemented by a dish with sprouted oat seedlings and eggs laid on top according to the number of deceased ancestors. After the arrival of Radonitsa, the eggs were given to feed livestock, and oats were planted.

Another of the traditions of the Easter table is a respectful attitude towards Easter food. She was credited with miraculous properties and never left even a small piece unharvested,to block access to rodents. Crushed eggshells were taken to the fields to bring a good harvest.