In the west of Ukraine, from the Polish border toward the middle, paska breads for Easter swell into lofty rounds, baked in cake pans with tall parchment paper collars. Sometimes they’re put to rise in high-sided saucepans, so that they emerge from the oven taller than they are wide. Shining with egg wash, they are crowned with fat braids, flowers and age-old symbols — almost always featuring a cross.
In the eastern half of the country bordered by Russia, the breads are tube-shaped, baked in various sizes of empty food cans. The dough puffs up and out above the rim of the cans so that the top-heavy loaves, dripping with sprinkle-bedecked glaze, look like a cadre of tipsy mushrooms about to lurch down the table.
Such feathery, butter-scented and slightly sweet loaves are the pride of households all over Eastern Europe. The tradition thrives in Pittsburgh too. More than 20,000 area residents are of Ukrainian heritage.
Thinking about bread-making may seem trivial with the brutality occurring in Ukraine. But the country has long been a breadbasket for Europe and beyond. Bread and wheat have been revered there since pagan times. In rural homes, a wheat sheaf would have stood in the corner on Easter. And wheat stalks abound as motifs on pysanky eggs.
Bread is a symbol and a reality. CNN reported in March about a baker who regularly fills a car with loaves and drives, all night, to deliver loaves to the hungry.
Modern recipes still ban slamming doors and kids pounding through the kitchen, lest the airy loaves collapse.
Easter in Ukrainian is Velykden, which means the “great day,” and marks a new beginning for worshippers and for nature. Butter is at its yellowest from cows grazing on nutritious spring grass. Outdoor-scratching hens have their fill of plants and insects, turning the yolks of their eggs a vivid orange. These ingredients set the paska bread aglow.
Not so long ago, Old World Ukrainians made loaves using double-digit cups of flour — 20 or more — and dozens of eggs. They made smaller ones to give away. On baking day, the baker knew to summon a cheery mindset or the bread would not turn out right.
Neighbors knew to postpone visits for another day. Modern recipes still ban slamming doors and kids pounding through the kitchen, lest the airy loaves collapse.
When I heard Rob Spikula, 56, descended from four Ukrainian immigrant grandparents, made paska bread every Easter, I was elated. A male baker carrying on tradition! But the news that the Mt. Lebanonite makes his paska in a bread machine was deflating, if only for a minute.
Rob, a cybersecurity specialist, works from home and makes his Easter bread year-round.
“We love it too much,” explains his wife, Amy Bumer, 52, who also works from home, as manager of a professional association. Kids Chloe, 19, is finishing her first year at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and Mason, 15, is a 10th-grader at Mt. Lebanon High School.
“The first thing Rob said to me, before we were really dating,” Amy recalls, “was, ‘I’m Ukrainian.’”
In the dining room, Rob’s pysanky collection gleams in a lighted cabinet. He shows a beautiful red one he gave to Amy on their first Easter together, pointing to a minuscule white ram on it. “If I had wanted to impress Amy’s father,” he says, “there would have had to be a lot of rams. Meaning, I’m wealthy.”
Rob’s streamlined bread machine recipe comes from his aunt, Judy Pretka. “She’s not Ukrainian, but she learned fast and became a great cook. She and her husband, Walter, now deceased, would host events for the Washington, D.C., Ukrainian community, which, in D.C., often included Ukrainian dignitaries.”
“The texture is great,” Rob says, of the simpler paska, “almost like my mother’s. And when I add the golden raisins, it tastes like hers.” He’s been tweaking his own paska dough, letting it rise in the machine, but baking it in the oven, which gives a better crust.
His mother used to tell him how, as a little girl, she loved the April air in Carnegie. “It smelled so good from people home-smoking their hams and kielbasa and from an outdoor oven that the Ukrainian enclave shared to bake their paskas.”
But when Rob was growing up, Easter meant that on Holy Saturday he’d carry his mom’s hefty basket – he gestures dimensions maybe two feet square — holding all that Nancy had prepared to be blessed at St. John’s Ukrainian Catholic Church on the South Side — the one with the golden onion domes you can see from the parkway. A fragrant feast lay under his mom’s embroidered cloth, not a bite to be tasted until after Sunday morning church.
“Everybody would be in that tight space with their baskets. The bells would toll and the priest would sprinkle holy water and give the blessing.” Rob would be lugging a ham, garlicky kielbasa, fresh sweetened cheese, beets and horseradish, apricot tortes, nut horns, and paskas for family and friends.
When the family began attending church in Carnegie, both his mother and his father, Dan, now deceased, had much to do with starting the cultural programing there.
Rob likes the story that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, after decades of Soviet rule-making — when Ukrainians had not been allowed to practice their religion, share cultural life or even speak their own language in public — American-born Ukrainians traveled back to the homeland to re-teach the arts and traditions that had slipped away.
Rob’s brother Mark, 68, for his part, upholds the paska tradition in a big way every Easter. He assists the head baker at St. George Ukrainian Church on the North Side through an arduous 24-hour bake-a-thon for the annual paska sale that is life-blood to the church. Rob will join in this year, helping out, something he’s wanted to do for a long time.
Telling family heritage stories is some comfort to Rob, but with things as they are in Ukraine, it also cuts deep. He tears up as he describes a state of mind that alternates between sadness and fury.
He brightens at the news that his daughter, Chloe, has caught the family fever. She tells her family that as soon as she moves in a couple of months from her dorm to an apartment, she’s going to teach her friends to make “pyrohy,” just as her grandmother, Nancy Spikula, taught her.
“For my mom,” Rob says, “paska, the old-fashioned, hand-kneaded kind, was a never-ending quest for the perfect recipe. She was about feeding people, making them happy. And she was the last bastion for passing on culture and heritage for our family. That’s why I make paska, to keep that going, as well as her memory.”
Aunt Judy's Bread-Machine Paska Bread, Modified
PG tested
If Rob Spikula’s mother spent her life perfecting her paska, how do I dare, at 81, to begin?
I give credit to a recipe that came by way of Korena in the Kitchen, for the Daring Baker. Baking specialist Korena Vezerian began with, and improved upon, a recipe by Martha Stewart. Stewart’s recipe came, Korena says, “from a woman who is both curator of the Ukrainian Museum and Library and librarian at Saint Basil Seminary, a Ukrainian Catholic college in Connecticut—quite a pedigree.”
Korena supports the novice with her own extremely helpful hints and commentary, including how best to handle a much larger volume of dough than would fit in anybody’s stand mixer, along with easy instructions that really work on making the showy decorations. All steps are illustrated with splendid photos from start to finish.
So, here’s to you and me, in our paska-making debut. May we be as fierce as Martha Stewart, and almost as fierce as Ukrainians. Let us keep our sense of humor too, when put to the test, as they seem so often to do.
After all, making paska will consume but one entire day of our lives. And we will need to laugh as we go if we want our bread to rise.
Rob Spikula has modified his aunt’s simpler recipe. He lets the dough rise the first time in the bread machine's pan. He then takes it out, lets it rise again and bakes it in the oven. Makes a 2-pound loaf.
— Virginia Phillips
⅓ cup of milk
1 8-ounce bar of cream cheese, room temperature, cut into smaller pieces
¼ cup butter, room temperature, cut into smaller pieces
1 large egg, room temperature, need not beat
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 teaspoon salt
4 cups bread flour
3½ teaspoons yeast
Butter the bread machine’s pan and place the wet ingredients into it in this order: milk, cream cheese, butter and egg.
Add the dry ingredients in this order: sugar, salt, flour and yeast.
Add ¼ cup yellow raisins before starting cycle. These will be mostly dissolved but add flavor.
Select “2 pound” cycle on bread machine. Select “white light” bread setting, and press start. Total cycle time is 3 ½ hours. Add an additional ¼ cup raisins when the machine beeps that it’s time to add nuts or other inclusions. This will be when rising has finished, about an hour into the cycle.
To prepare dough for the oven
Lift the dough out and place it on a floured work surface for a moment. Gently round it into a ball, using open hands to stretch the sides lightly down and under. Then place back into the pan and let rise again until double in size, about 30 minutes.
Bake at 400 degrees for 10 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 for an additional 15 minutes. The bread should slide easily out of the pan. Rap the bottom to see that it feels firm and has a hollow sound, which means it is done. If not, bake it an additional 8 or 10 minutes. The top should have the color of a brown paper bag.
Makes 1 loaf of bread.
— Rob Spikula
Virginia Phillips is a Mt. Lebanon freelance writer.
First Published: April 11, 2022, 10:00 a.m.
