Lentorama 2020: Forty Days of Food

Day 14: pinca

Pinca is a bread made in parts of Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia (Istria and Dalmatia primarily). It's made with an enriched dough, and using eggs and sugar means it's not repentant enough to be eaten until the end of Lent. 

It's kind of like a cross between a large hot cross bun and soda bread, with the dough being more like a hot cross bun and the preparation more like soda bread (loaf-sized and with a cross cut through the top). 

This page gives a short history of the bread and links to several recipes. It looks like the Easter bread is commonly flavored with citrus, and might have some alcohol added in for extra flavor.  You don't get the dried fruit, icing, or nuts that you can get with hot cross buns, but a version made for Christmas is likely to have raisins (or more properly sultanas, based on the recipes in the link). 

There are a number of regional names for the bread, one of which, pogača, is also the last name of the winning cyclist from the 2020 Tour de France (note: this was written after the race; if I actually knew about this in March I would have hit the betting shops hard). I imagine he got some grief from the other kids about this growing up.