Termini Bros Bakery: Pesce d'Aprile

It’s been a crazy week and a half here at Termini’s as we are preparing for Easter. Breads, cakes, pies, cookies and all of our regularly featured products have got us busting a move all over the kitchen from before sunup to well after sunrise. Since we’ve been telling you all about our Easter product line for as long as we’ve been making it, we figured we’d tell you a little story instead:

Yesterday, in places all over the world, people celebrated April Fool’s Day. In Italy, the day is referred to Pesce d’Aprile, meaning April Fish, because a long-standing tradition involved adhering a dead fish to a person’s back as a prank. Whether the person found out he’d been duped by someone engaging him in the following conversation— “L’hai visto? (Have you seen him?)”, “Chi? (Who),” “Il pesce d’aprile! (The April fish/fool!)”—or later smelling the dead beast against his back, the prank was played all the same. Nowadays, children still honor the tradition, but are far kinder about it; on April 1^st in many areas of Italy you’ll see people wandering around with paper fish stuck to their backs.

The tradition of April Fool’s Day is thought to have origins in the 16^th century when the Gregorian calendar was adopted over the Julian calendar. Before the Gregorian calendar went into effect, New Year’s was celebrated over the week of March 25^th through April 1^st. The stubborn folk who were unwilling to make the shift to the new calendar—which was put into effect to help track Catholic holidays more easily—were made into pesce by their neighbors. Empty gift parcels were delivered to help friends “celebrate” the “New Year,” and, over time, more pranks began to emerge.

The holiday is so widely celebrated that even the Italian Media gets into the mix and spreads false stories, which they then rank the following day based on how many people fall for it. Our favorite that we’ve heard: In 1957 a popular show said that due to climatic changes and food shortages, Swiss farmers engineered and grew a bumper crop of “Spaghetti Trees.” The show received mail for weeks asking where to get the special seed to make the popular pasta grow on plants!

Pictures of the Spaghetti Tree hoax...here a woman is "harvesting"!!

So, while it all sounds like it could be a lot of fun, we just did not have any time to participate in the Pesce d’Aprile festivities as we’ve been baking away in the kitchen, without any preservatives or pesce to be found! Here are a few snapshots of what we were up to this weekend that we hope will make you smile. Come visit us soon and share your pictures and stories on Facebook! We can’t wait to see and hear from you.

All our best,

Termini Brothers Bakery