I consulted 3 different recipes before deciding how I should go about making pogača (Croatian Easter bread) for the first time- one from Martha Stewart’s Ukrainian bread, the standard in my family but slightly impractical with no stand mixer or 12 cups of flour in my tiny flat, one from Spasia Pandora Dinkovski’s book Doma that takes a more savoury nod to our Balkan Easter bread through the Macedonian lense, folding briny cheese and egg into the dough before baking, and one from a random Serbian woman’s blog that I can’t seem to stop looking at. I don’t know what it is about her and her old fashioned website that makes me trust her, maybe the emphasis on quality ingredients and broken English throughout.

Before I know it I am kneading dough in my kitchen and all of my Babas and Tetas are watching me. I hear polako, polako, as I forget to add oil to my dough and have to run to the store to get more yeast, more flour, and throw my dry ball of dough in the trash on the way out the door. Ne tako as I pour the milk too fast into the chipped blue bowl on the counter to let the yeast dissolve, spilling only slightly over the edge into the sink.

I am eating bits of cheese and crackers and cheap cherry tomatoes with hunks of cucumber like a miš in my living room while I let the dough rise in front of me. I have been indoctrinated without even realising to the world of ancient Croatian women, succumbing my day to fits of work between breaks to prove and knead, to fold rosettes and triangles neatly into my pans before getting back to the thing I was doing, my responsibilities getting lost alongside me at the sunny kitchen table.

I have been saying I will make pogača this year for about 5 years, putting it off until it is too late, letting Easter pass by me and focusing on anything but the puffy bread I want to make and dip into my coffee after filling up on too much lamb. This week I have felt my kitchen staring at me, pulling me in to knead dough between Zoom calls and practice sessions - uskoro, I hear myself say and I walk to the store to buy a new bread tin, I will actually do it this time. Pogača for me always felt significant - a huge glistening loaf brought over beautifully by my Teta Dina and savoured in the the post-Easter mornings.

Whilst visiting my family back in New York for a whopping 48 hours a few weeks ago, I spent at least 3 of the hours in the back of our basement looking at photos. It wasn’t in my itinerary with this short trip, but I found myself walking around the house to find my place in it after 14 months, the steps to the basement feeling smaller as I plodded down with my mom to chat while she packaged olive oil, both of us awake at 5am.

I found myself transfixed by photos of my family way before I was even a thought, photos of Babas and Didos and Tetas leisurely drinking in the afternoon, my Baba goofing around in the kitchen with the same casserole dish I have now inherited, lined with sketches of fruit like the ceramic ones she used to hang on her walls.

The house now smells of butter with a hint of sweetness. I keep running back and forth to the oven with glee to see that it’s worked, it is rising in all the right places and I have somehow never felt more Croatian in my life.

In the wake of a spring that seems to keep on giving, whirlwind trips that seem to fly past my eyes, the ups and downs of life pushing me to move away from a perception that is tenuous, to feel like it belongs to me, I feel myself calling to these people who once were, the great cooks and characters of my family to help me finally sit, and stand, rather, to make pogača za meni, for the people around me, for the little Croatian cura in me waiting for switch on Narodnia radio for our family to come over for Easter lunch.