EASTER DAY
Sergio Guzmán
The tradition of the Easter day is very old, for it is documented from the fifteenth century, although its primitive elaboration was different from what is known nowadays. Formerly, the "monkey" was a circular bread cake, but it could also have different forms: a lamb, a chicken, a moon, a boat, a mill ... but none of them lacked the chocolate egg.
Although the main ingredient of the "Mona de Pascua" is the chocolate, the first "monkeys" that appeared in Aragon, Catalonia and other regions of the Spanish geography, were made with common bread dough, to later pass to the dough bled and hard eggs, a symbol of fertility in the pagan world. Later, the chocolate that came into Europe from America through Barcelona was added. It was at the end of the nineteenth century when the custom of making pieces of chocolate in the shape of an egg appeared in France.
The tradition of cakes decorated with eggs was eclipsed in the middle of the 20th century by the chocolate with which fantastic figures are sculpted. The first pastry muffins were made more or less one hundred years ago. However, even today, in some towns in Aragon, the custom is celebrated from very distant times to prepare in community ovens for Palm Sunday, figures of bread dough to hang them in the palms and branches of olive tree.
The first chocolate molds were made of tin in an artisan way. Starting from the tin plate and passing through the tin, stainless steel has reached the current mold consisting of a thin layer of plastic that conforms to the current food standards.