Easter Panatone

We are getting towards the end of lent. In Kastela the mothers are buying up bunny and duckling serviettes and putting them away in the credenzas. The annual cleaning of all things living and dead has started . Walls are being re-painted, carpets are being scrubbed on the balconies, and great grandmother's teeth are removed from the beer jug and polished as everyone is reluctant to throw them out despite the fact great grandma is already living up there on a cloud.

When all is clean and tidy, fresh cheese and cured prosciutto will be ordered form the country, whilst the crescendo of the pre-Easter operation will be the production of Pantone.

Learning to make Pantone, is not like the learning how to ride a bike, where once you learn, you know for the rest of life how to make them . No. Let me tell you I have witnessed once how a woman taking a bit of Pantone as hard as bone, lost her tooth. Indeed the fluffiness ,the sponginess, the smell of a good pantone is a thing one can only arrive at trough practice, exercise and the right genetics.

All women are borne with a natural competitive spirit, but the older they get the more they start to show it through their cakes, and they relish a good holiday-sporting occasion.

In England before Easter, women in high heeled- shoes meet in the centre of town, at a running course marked for such occasion. At the shot of a gun, the hoards of women run through as fast as their legs will carry them, with frying pans in hand and pancakes on the pans. All in order to prove who is the fastest and thus best.

The church from time to time invites women to bake cakes for charity events. Of course many women respond, by investing time, money, and good intentions to make the cakes. But there is no woman amongst them who does not secretly compete with the rest in the quality of her cakes. When they add their tart to a table top full of cakes, they stretch out their ears and listen out for sounds of mastication, chomping, slurping and coughing. The sounds are a type of idiolect which they can translate into compliments or insults. When a complete cake has been eaten the maker is never quite sure whether to be ecstatic about it or annoyed at the fact they had not managed to try a piece of their own design. The one thing they all love to hear is compliments and flattery.

Pantone belongs in the heavy duty category of cakes. The dough needs to be boxed with fists and this can not be achieved adequately by thin young girls, which is why pantone is a job for the mature Kastelan woman. A kastelan woman she liked it or not will at some point inherit the genetic grand-arms. At a certain time in her late thirties over night the upper arms will podge up and can never again become thin, but they enable her to be able to bash out the yellow pantone pastry.

This is the moment in the life of the Kastelan woman when she grows out of being just girl who knows nothing of life and into a mature woman who knows absolutely everything there is to know, and is not afraid to insist on it. The first pantone to a Kastlean is a ritual of maturity or as the tribes of Africa and Papua New Guinea call it „a rite of passage. When she succeeds at making her first pantone, the kastelanka will renounce colouring of Easter eggs for the rest of her life. With a king kong like glance at little bags of pigment she will frighten her young to automatically start dying hard boiled eggs and decorating them with stickers of bunnies and chicks. The scenes of fluffy animals will soothe her and she will relax into creating the traditional plait,goose, and circular formations out of the dough.

All women put their pantones in a basket on the Easter Sunday, surrounding them with coloured eggs, and crocheted serviettes, they will basket in hand, drag their neatly brushed and ironed children to church to get blessed. Along they way the will not fail to sneak a glance at the pantones’ of the other women placing them into an automatic mental hierarchy of cakes, which they will at some point later comment on. Ambitious girls are better off not taking on the tradition until they grow the adequate equipment to be able to do it with,and until that day dawns stick to painting their mothers eggs . As for the poor women who had never managed to make the million egg dough rise, they might as well poach a pantone made by the bakers wife as the Easter breakfast everyone here awaits for a whole year, despite all the other delicacies, simply would not be compete without the pantone to dip in to the sweet vine.





Info: Panantone made in Kastlea is called Sirnica and is only eaten or sold at Easter.