#bread stuffing

I just couldn’t wait until Holy Week to make my first Easter stuffing. Stuffings and bread puddings are one of my favorite dishes, and like the hubník at Christmas, I know I’ll be making more than one batch of Easter stuffing.

Traditionally sekanice/velikonoční nádivka is made on White/Holy Saturday as a transitionary food from Lent into Easter. It was one of the foods taken to the church in an Easter basket to be blessed by the priest. It would have been made with lots of smoked meat and eggs and foraged spring greens like nettle.

I don’t actually have a lot of meats on hand right now (a serious grocery store visit hadn’t been made in a month) so I used a couple handfuls of crumbled bacon and made lyreleaf sage with a little purple deadnettle the star of the dish.

I rinsed my greens in water first and then soaked them in a vinegar water bath and rinsed them again.

I sautéed them before adding them to the bread mixture.

“Lyreleaf sage (Salvia lyrata, cancerweed, lyre-leaved sage) is an herbaceous perennial in the Lamiaceae (mint) family and native to the eastern and central United States. It may grow 1 to 2 feet tall, with leaves that originate at the base of the stem. Each basal leaf is lobed like a lyre, hence the species name, and lavender flowers occur in rings around the stem from mid-spring to early summer, attracting butterflies. The name Salvia is derived from the Latin term salveo, which means ‘be well’ and refers to the plant's medicinal properties.”

“It’s edible – the young tender leaves can be eaten in salads or cooked as a ‘pot’ herb cooked like spinach with a slightly minty flavor – even the older leaves. The seeds can be gathered, ground, and added with flour to make bread. It was considered a staple food traditionally by the Catawba and Cherokee peoples.”

“Salvia Lyrata is a medicinal and edible herb. As alternative medicine, it is carminative, diaphoretic, laxative, and salve. Lyre-leaved sage has some of the same properties of the other sages but is very weak. It is used mainly as a gargle in the treatment of sore throat and mouth infections. Medicinal salve made from root is applied to sores. Warm infusion of herb is taken as a laxative or for colds, coughs and nervous debility. This sage is not very strong tasting, and has a rather pleasant minty flavor, fresh young leaves are edible in salads, or cooked as pot herb.”

Bread Stuffing for Two

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