A Bread Story ( "the simple truth about the sweet it brings to me")

Easter bread is a tradition in many countries ...specially the Mediterranean of which the Italian "Colomba Pasquale" is perhaps the most easily found in shops...And more to the East, there's the Polish  "Babka", the  "Kulich" in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Bulgaria for example...

My memories of a particular smell and taste of Easter Bread this year go back to when many of the Eastern countries mentioned above were all one and by that, i mean a while ago. I suppose that's why what i mostly recall is the hours and hours spent sitting, head resting on my arms crossed on the other end of the table, (not far enough to avoid getting sprinkled with flour now and then) feet hanging from the chair observing our cook. She was a woman of powerful complexion with powerful pinkish white arms that scooped and poured and mixed and tossed and worked that wooden spoon in a way i kinda felt sorry for it. She was making "Cozonac", the local (Romanian)Easter Bread... 

The hours seemed endless as i sat quietly waiting for the dough to rise... She would come back to slap it and punch it (now that i think of the religious and symbolic significance of bread it's kinda ... well, it seems strange) only to leave it again to rest covered in a cloth close to the stove. I was eager to taste the lovely "yeasty" flavor i still love and would wait to be alone in the kitchen and pinch it here and there - yes i would eat it raw...the funny thing is that i was rarely discovered as the dough would swell and sponge back up leaving no trace of my crime, and that's when i discovered the importance of the slapping and punching ... That, and the quality of the yeast of course

I decided I'd made the "cutesie" pastel colored egg shaped truffles, the chocolate Easter eggs, the candied this and that, last year so... this year i was going back to what i consider a ritual in itself -  the making of the bread, a tradition passed form grandmothers to mothers to daughters...(or so the romantic in me likes to think)  and why not -  from special cooks that make impressions on young apprentices...

As the question"Where do I begin?"(so now you get the title of the post?)ran through my head, I decided to just mix and mingle the grandmother, the mother, the cook, the experience of one, the notes of the other, the cooking skills of all...Italian, Uruguayan, Romanian, who cares?Perhaps its the secret to the story of "how great a bread can be"...