Tiverton — Marshmallow Peeps and Cadbury’s chocolatey cream eggs may be a sure sign of Easter for some. But for Portuguese bakeries, it’s all about the egg — the real kind.
Starting last weekend and continuing up until Easter, Prim Rose Bakery owners Maria Connie Silva and her husband, Manuel, will make more than 20,000 loaves of sweetbread dotted with eggs baked in the shell along with the bread. “The egg is a symbol of birth. At Easter, Jesus dies and he’s born again,” said Maria Connie Silva of the Easter tradition of adding the symbolic egg in all the different sweetbread varieties, from the single-sized loaf with one egg, to the ring with six eggs.
She learned the recipe for the moist sweetbread from her mother, Maria Alberto, who baked it and sold it locally back in the Azores. The tradition of adding the egg at Easter started in the sweet loaves made in the Azores. A local favorite in Greater Fall River and Rhode Island, Silva is proud to make it known that her sweetbread — from her mother’s recipe — won the top prize at a sweetbread competition at the former International Institute of Culinary Arts in Fall River in 2005.
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