Kulich and Paskha and a curious case of mistaken identity

with orthodox easter coming up this weekend, Katrina Kollegaeva of Rosehip & Rye shines light on slavic Easter traditions and offers a modern take on the treats of the Easter table

Photography courtesy of Rosehip & Rye

Kulich (a Panettone like bread) and paskha (a cheesecake) are the two dishes that Slavic people always have for Easter. And eggs, of course, often decorated with the natural dye from onion skin (just boil your eggs in a saucepan with onion skin - easy!).

But there’s a curious case of mistaken identity when it comes to kulich and paskha. Is kulich the bread and paskha a cheesecake, or is it the other way round? Read on.

Easter is the biggest Orthodox celebration with roots in pagan festivals of spring. Even during Soviet times, when religion wasn’t officially allowed, Easter was widely celebrated. After an abstemious 40 day Lent preceeding Easter, no wonder people are eager to indulge in food and a bit of jamboree.

When I was growing up in Estonia in the 1980s in a Russian-Ukrainian family, who had a certain disdain for religion, characteristic of the intelligentsia of that time, I still recall us marking Easter by eating kulich and paskha and (did any of you do that?) going to the cemetery to ‘see’ our relatives. Traditions and rituals remind even the most hard-nosed atheists among us of our place in the universe, I think.

I remember my mum getting out her well-used cake tins, factory-made biscuit boxes in their previous life, to bake the kulich. The traditional cylindrical shape could only be achieved this way (baking tins of this shape weren’t commercially available in those days). She’d also start collecting the onion skins weeks before, with bags of brown mulch awaiting their fate in the fridge.

Photograph courtesy of Rosehip & Rye

Paskha, the cheesecake, was always bought though. “Too difficult to make!” my mum insisted and so did most of the people around us. The authentic paskha has a pyramid shape with the letters XB (the abbreviated Христос Воскресе!/Christ is Risen!) marked out with nuts and dried fruit, and it needs many hours of patient draining in order for the cheese to lose its water so that it will keep the shape.

So, this year, after the difficult year we’ve all had, Rosehip + Rye decided to brave the making of the paskha. But we’ve modernised it somewhat: retaining the essence with the lush tvorog curd cheese, nuts and decoration, but ridding of the need to drain or bake.

Here you can watch us making our Golden Pasochkas (a diminutive for paskha): a cute thing in a dome, the perfect size for a family of three or four. We call it golden because we filled it with chopped dried apricots and a sprinkle of bee pollen, but you can decorate the pasochka with so many other things. Try different dried fruit, chocolate, even edible flowers (which we also use)! You can also enjoy pasochka by slathering it on a slice of kulich, the way we do.

But what about the mistaken identity?

Well, if you are from Ukraine or the south of Russia, you are more likely to use the word paskha for both dishes, the brioche-like bread and the curd cheese dessert, differentiating the two with the word syrna, cheese. The bread-like kulich is historically unknown there. You can read more on the Karaway bakery blog about the history of kulich.

 Enjoy the food this coming Sunday. Enjoy the human contact. We keep saying how food never feeds the belly alone.

This food blog is part of our ‘Food of the New East’ series curated by Katrina Kollegaeva of Rosehip & Rye.

What is special about Russian food that the world needs to know about? This question is at the heart of our quest. Together with Pushkin House we are travelling through the seasons and regions of Russia and beyond, sharing the recipes of chefs and well-known writers, interviews with Pushkin House followers and stories of people making Russian-ish food across the UK - did you know there is someone making salo in Wales?

And an important disclaimer. When we say Russian, we often refer to the whole of the so-called ‘New East’ region, the former USSR. Whilst being very much aware of how problematic this ‘Russifying’ of so many countries can be, we choose the word as a shorthand and in recognition of the fact that millions of people who live outside Russia across the post-Soviet space, think of themselves as Russian, at least in part.

Katrina (Katya) Kollegaeva is a chef, food writer (Guardian, FT, Time Out restaurant reviewer 2009-2012) and sustainable food specialist with a background in food anthropology. She grew up in Estonia to a Crimean dad and a Ukrainian mother. Together with Karina Baldry she runs Rosehip & Rye, a catering and food delivering company specialising in the 'Soul food from the New East'.