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What may be surprising, even shocking to some, is that many of these justifications use such verbs as "gives", "brings", "protects", "provides" or "guarantees". Apparently, the blessed victuals are not only charged with symbolic meanings, but also associated with magical properties. I've found most of such supersticious superstitious claims on the website of one Roman Catholic parish,<ref name=parafia/> but they crop up in other sources too. And so, bread and butter are said to bring good fortune and affluence; eggs provide fertility (a chocolate bunny may have a similar effect); cold meats bestow health and fertility, and affluence! Salt and water cleanse you of your sins, horseradish makes you strong and black pepper promotes healthy growth of your livestock.

So eggs are a sign of new life, but it's clearly linked to Christ's resurrection this time around. And that's it: only three formulas. BUt But then, why do folks put salt, pepper, horseradish, sugar and so on into their baskets, if these foodstuffs are never going to be blessed anyway? Perhaps they are included in the ``and all fare" from the second blessing formula, but if so, then technically you could fill your basket if any food you want. And yet, someone or something makes people pick only a few very specific kinds of comestibles. So who or what is it? If it's not the blessing formulas, then maybe we should look into a source even more authoritative: the Holy Scripture.

The honeycomb is omitted in some Biblie Bible translations. It all depends on which ancient Greek manuscript the given translation was based on. It's hard to tell whether some scribe added that honeycomb out of his own initiative or removed it from an earlier version. In any case, there are at best only three foods we know Jesus ate that Sunday: bread, broiled fish and honey straight from the comb.

That's quite meagermeagre, but we can infer from the Gosples Gospels that Jesus had been on a rather unsophisticated diet his entire life. He mostly hung around simple fishermen on the Lake of Galilee after all and ate what they ate: bread and fish (mostly tilapia, probably), washed down with water or -- on special occasions -- with wine. Occasionally he would indulge in some simple sweets, like honey or fresh figs pilfered straight from a tree. You might think it's these few foods, sanctified by being part of Jesus's limited menu, which should take centre stage in the Easter basket. Yet none of them, save the bread, have found their way into the traditional set of Easter fare. Looks like nobody wanted to have broiled fish for the holidays after weeks of having to live on fish instead of meat throughout [[Packages of Goodness#Fat Days|Lent]].

What was Jesus doing in Jerusalem in the first place, though? In the times when the Jerusalem Temple still stood (it was demolished in 70 CE), Jews were obligated to make a pilgrimage there at least once a year, for one of three holidays: Passover (''Pesah''), the Feast of Weeks (''Shavuot'') or the Feast of Booths (''Sukkot''). As a pious Jew, Jesus never failed to fulfill fulfil this obligation, even though he knew he wasn't as safe in Jerusalem as he was in his native Galilee. Eventually, during one of these pilgrimages, he ended up being charged with blasphemy, sentenced to death and executed by crucifixion; it all happened on the first day of Passover.

''Matzah'', or unleavened bread, is eaten in memory of the Jews escaping Egypt in haste and thus having no time to wait for the dought dough rise. ''Zeroa'', or a lamb shank, commemorates the lambs whose blood the Jews used to smear on their doorposts as an identification marker just before the escape, as well as those later sacrificed in the Jerusalem Temple; nowadays, it's usually substituted for with a chicken wing. ''Beitzah'', or a chicken egg that is hard-boiled and the additionally roasted, is another memento of temple offerings. Two kinds of bitter herbs -- ''maror'' and ''hazeret'' -- symbolize the bitterness of slavery in Egypt. Ashkenazi Jews (those from northern Europe) typically use romain romaine lettuce for ''hazeret'' and horseradish (often dyed red with beetroot juice in the style of Polish beet-and-horseradish relish) for ''maror'' -- even though horseradish is neither bitter nor a herb. ''Haroset'' is a sweet paste of apples, walnuts and honey, meant to stand for masonry mortar to remember that Jewish slaves in Egypt were mostly used for contruction construction work. Finally, the seventh food is ''karpas'', or some green vegetable (ege.g., parsley leaves) which is dipped in salted water, a symbol of the tears shed by the Jews in slavery. All of this is paired with wine.

While the seder table has ''matzah'', the Easter basket contains sourdough bread and yeast-raised babas. The lamb shank is replaced with a chicken wing for Passover and with ham or pork sausage for Easter. And a lamb figurine lest anyone forget it's all about the Lamb of God, not a Pig of God. Rather than a roasted egg, the Easter basket has dyed or painted eggs. Bitter herb have their place in the basket too, in the form of horseradish and black pepper. A bed of garden cress on which the lamb figurine usually stands can be seen as equivalent to ''karpas'', the green vegetable, while sugar or even chocolate may be taken as corresponding to the sweet ''haroset''. Salted water get recontructed reconstructed as salt and water. And what about wine? Catholic priests have called dibs on that, never allowing their parishioners to bring any kind of alcohol for blessing.

In Western Europe, the tradiation tradition slowly died out due to the Reformation. Protestants criticized the Catholics for treating the food blessing as equally or even more important than the sacraments. The Church had to remind people that the consumption of blessed food is not a substitute for receiving holy communion during Eastertide. Protestant Reformation was doing quite well in 16th-century Poland until the Catholic Church stroke back with its Counter-Reformation in the 17th. Polish Renaissance-era Lutheran moralist Mikołaj Rej wrote sarcastically of Catholic food blessing: