Portuguese Sweet Bread

My grandmother, Mary Grace Deschenes, was an unusual woman for her day. An accomplished artist, she studied at Pratt Institute in New York in the early 1900s, eventually returning to her native New Bedford, Massachusetts, where she married and had her only child, my father.

As a little girl, I often visited Gramma at her home at 563 Dartmouth Street, the oldest house in South Dartmouth. There was a big, old-fashioned kitchen with a painted wooden table, and the whole place was full of brightly colored china, nautical decorations, and my grandmother’s paintings.The luscious smell of Sweet Bread in the oven and Soupash (Portuguese Kale Soup) on the stove was as certain as a big hug on my way in the door. Luckily for me, I inherited both her artistic talent and her recipes for these authentic Portuguese foods.

“Massa Suvada,” or Portuguese Sweet Bread, is traditionally served on Easter, with the eggs symbolizing new life in the Resurrection. Sometimes a whole egg is actually baked into the bottom of the loaf. We had it hot out of the oven, then toasted on a fancy wire toaster that looked like a four-sided pyramid. This bread is too good to eat only once a year.