Feast after fast

Rich and hearty Easter food follows hungry Lent and winter.

Easter is a celebration of such complicated ancestry that it’s hard to make out where the paganism ends and the Christianity begins. For one, it’s linked to a pagan spring goddess; and spring is when all sorts of fresh foods, in the days before refrigeration and international shipping, used to become available after the scarcity of the long European winter. So it combines a celebration of new life with elements of the Jewish Passover celebration (the escape from Egyptian slavery) and the end of Lent, the long, hard Christian fast.

All this is represented in the food — such as roast lamb, made from spring lambs, and the famous Easter eggs, possibly derived from the hard-boiled eggs and roast lamb of Passover. Lent is meant to prepare the believer, through prayer, penitence and self-denial, for a suitably joyful commemoration of the resurrection of Jesus. Therefore, for roughly 40 days beforehand observant Christians stay away from meat, eggs, alcohol and sometimes even dairy products; usually, fish can be eaten. Customs vary enormously in different parts of the world and in different sects, of course.

Easter food includes, apart from the decorated eggs (nowadays more often egg-shaped pieces of chocolate) and roast lamb (despite the concept of Christ as the lamb sacrificed for human sins), hot cross buns (spiced and decorated with a cross on top) and the highly symbolic Simnel cake — a fruit cake with 11 marzipan balls, representing the 11 faithful Apostles of Christ.

As for the egg: from it hatches new life, so it represents rebirth, just like spring. Eggs are often painted red to symbolise Christ’s sacrifice. There’s a small trend, now, away from unhealthy, sugary chocolate eggs which may contain as many as 1,000 calories each, and back to the old-fashioned decorated chicken eggs.

If you’re making colourful chicken eggs, be sure to use fresh or well-refrigerated ones. Then the eggs must be hard-boiled. Don’t keep them out of the fridge long, and after painting them with food colours, put them back in the fridge. Get rid of cracked eggs for safety’s sake.

If you’re sticking with chocolate eggs, then go with good dark chocolate, which has antioxidants and other health-promoting compounds like folic acid. Joyful excess is the very point of Easter, but there can be too much of a good thing.