when the rabbit passes the bell

Sebastien gaudard, pastry chef in Paris, remembers very well the days leading up to Easter in his grandparents’ village. The village bells no longer rang between Maundy Thursday and Easter Saturday, and children replaced them as they passed through the streets with rattles. The bells had gone to Rome, tradition said. On Sunday, they would be back, with chocolate eggs.

Go get some Easter bells today. The eggs are there. Chocolatiers praise their magical, universal, ecumenical form. Perfect for creativity, mold release, filling, decoration and international markets. But the bells have disappeared from the windows. This is what sells the least to the famous Provencal chocolate factory in Puyricard. Same story in franchise stores From Neuville, where they make less than 5% of sales. In Jeff from Bruges, every year, the question arises of stopping the bell …

Goodbye chickens, goodbye bells: the critters with long teeth have nibbled everything

Whose fault is it ? “Behind the egg, there is the rabbit”, we answer at Cemoi, third seller of chocolates in France. Goodbye hens, goodbye bells: the critters with long teeth have eaten everything. “It’s historic. From the first outings this year, we were aware of the turn ”, confirms Gilles Werlé, marketing director of the Salpa group, owner of Schaal, a company that supplies your chocolatier with artisanal chocolate. The director of the group, Guy Treguer, also has memories, as a child in Brittany, of bells that left for Rome which returned with chocolate eggs to Finistère. It would never occur to him to tell such a story to his children. The online catalog of Salpa chocolates presents an offer of an incredible variety, and only two unfortunate bells… Who let the rabbit enter the paschal fold? It is a question of globalization, secularism and technicality.

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Whiplash

The rabbit is not new in “the collections”, as we now say at Schaal, a company based in Alsace and created in 1871, at a time when the region was German. In eastern France, as in Germany or the United States, the Easter bunny, a symbol of fertility, was responsible for bringing the eggs. Historically, it wears a basket and ears large enough to qualify it as a hare in some countries. “The concept of the rabbit, we believed it for a long time confined to the east of France”, continues Gilles Werlé. But leporidae have invaded the whole country.

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