 Secrets of Spanish Florida uncovers stories of America's past that never made it into the textbooks. WJCT is proud to feature additional local stories from Florida's history. I am Michelle Reina and I'm a descendant of the Menorchans. One of the many Menorcan food traditions known in this area is the fromajadas. It's a small cheese-filled pastry that's prepared only for Easter Sunday mornings. Now fromage in French means cheese and there's a 10% French influence into the Catalan language on the island of Menorca. The night before on Holy Saturday the young men would go through the community and they'd hold an open sack to the open windows of the houses as they went past. They'd sing a song the fromajadas serenade. They were asking for the cheese and the flour and the egg that they needed to prepare the fromajadas for the next morning. They'd literally carve a small X in the top of the pastry so that when it baked it formed a little cross on top. But at the end of the song, if the people in the houses had given them the eggs, the flour, the cheese that they had asked for, they would sing, oh a polite man lives in this house. But if they gave them nothing they'd sing a not-so-polite man lives over in this house. I was away from St. Augustine for 20 years of my life. I traveled the country as a storyteller and when I came home in 1994 and discovered that no one was singing any of the folkloric songs from the island of Menorca, I made it a point to try to start memorizing them fanatically. I thought it was very, very important to maintain this tradition and I wanted to make sure that our culture is remembered. Funding for this program was provided in part by the Last Inker Family Foundation, the Ha Family Foundation, Weaver Family Foundation Fund through the Community Foundation for Northeast Florida and the Joy McCann Foundation. Funding for Secrets of the Dead is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.