Now that you know why gourmands and gourmets feast on beignets, bugnes, crêpes and waffles for Mardi Gras, you may be wondering why these same sweet tooths devour kilos and kilos of chocolate for Easter. In fact, you may be one of them yourself!
We're not telling you anything yet, Easter has its origins in Christian tradition, celebrating the rebirth of Jesus Christ. But what's the connection between Jesus Christ and the eggs, bunnies, bells and other chocolate sweets we enjoy during Easter?
As a reminder, Easter marks the end of Lent for Christians, a period of intense deprivation during which many foods are excluded from the diet, including eggs. So, to celebrate the end of Lent, Christians originally offered each other eggs laid during the fasting period. Similarly, as far back as Antiquity, the Persians gave themselves not chocolate eggs, but hen's eggs, symbols of the renewal of the world and the end of the winter days .
However, it wasn't until the middle of the 19th century that German and Alsatian merchants and chocolatiers decided to replace the tradition of hen's eggs with chocolate eggs; a change favored by theappearance of the first pastry and chocolate molds, and the beginning of work on cocoa paste!
You may not know it, but it's also in the Bible, and more precisely in theepisode of the "miraculous catch", that we find the origin of the famous Easter chocolate fry.
When Christ's disciples failed to catch anything in their nets, Jesus revealed to them a place where they could catch fish. His disciples caught fish in their nets, and saw in them the proof of Jesus Christ's resurrection. The chocolate fry, which has become an Easter tradition, recalls this episode from the Bible!
One last anecdote: do you know why parents tell children in some parts of France that it's the bells that bring the Easter chocolates? We'll explain! In the Middle Ages, it was forbidden to ring church bells during the Easter period.
As a result, the parents of the little ones told them, to excuse the silence, that the bells had gone to Rome to obtain a blessing from the Pope, and that on the way back, the bells laid eggs in the children's gardens!
