As part of the sourdough-making quarantine horde, I decided to make a traditional Easter bread as my aunt, who is 85 and the keeper of all of our family recipes from Calabria, always makes it. “Don’t use that dough you use, though,” she warned. “Use regular flour like Costco flour. And don’t put water in the oven when you bake it. It makes your bread ”tutti mudricchi” - all crumbs. 

“And,” she said, “don’t dye the eggs and put them in. They’ll be like rocks.” Then she hung up on me, because she was making bread herself. 

I did as she said, except that I couldn’t resist using dyed eggs, anticipating how cool the almost-neon eggs that I had made that morning would look in the bread, instead of the white eggs my aunt always used. I steeped them in the dye forever. 

Here is my aunt’s bread recipe, that I always ask for on principle but can never follow: put some water, oil, flour and salt in a bowl and mix it. Then let it rest. 

I don’t have the baker’s intuition to work from those instructions. So I back-engineered a similar recipe, taking it from a British baking book, measuring everything by the gram, and replacing the oil with butter. I let it rest just like my grandmother did, on the bed, heaped in blankets. 

Then, “make two snakes out of the dough,” my aunt said. “And then twist them.” This shape, in Calabrese, is called a curdacciu. In the spaces made by each cross of the snakes, I put an egg: red, blue, and green. 

The bread ballooned during the second prove, and lost much of its twist. There was little definition in the shape - no place for the dough to go gold in delicate corners, and no tapering edges, like it has when my aunt bakes it.  And the neon color from the dye bled into the bread. I couldn’t help but put my own twist on it, but what I came up with is another animal than what I was intending to recreate. It is sitting in my kitchen now, on a table in the sun, like an overfed cat, or a spoiled red-faced baby coddled in blankets. Still, here it is - and still, despite my crazy ideas about bread, according to my aunt I am still giuddiziusa - an old word for one of many talents. We’ll see. Buona Pasqua. –J