Happy Easter

by Marion Watson

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
A E Housman, A Shropshire Lad

Easter, for some the most sacred festival in the Christian calendar, for others the welcome signs of spring and warmer days ahead and for most people the first bank holiday after the dreary winter months following Christmas. For many of us it is perhaps a mixture of all three. But like most festivals it has its fair share of traditional dishes, some of whose origins have been lost in the mists of time or have been transferred from one religion to another.

Everyone associates Easter with eggs but their use goes back to much earlier times being a symbol of new life which came with the spring and was celebrated by Romans and other pagan worshippers. Originally a festival in honour of Easter, the goddess of spring and dawn, the date of its celebration was decided on by the position of an imaginary moon. The early Christians craftily incorporated this spring festival into their Easter celebrations and the egg came to symbolise the stone rolled away from the Sepulchre. In the north of England coloured eggs are called Pace or Paste Eggs and in various parts of the country children still roll them along the ground, although they probably no longer realise that this symbolises the rolling away of the stone covering the tomb entrance.

In medieval times both Christmas and Easter followed periods of fasting although the one before Christmas was not so long. The season of Lent before Easter lasted for forty days and was a hard time to endure, especially as foods preserved in the autumn for the winter months would have by then been severely depleted. Until the eighth century when Ash Wednesday was named as the official day for the start of Lent it sometimes began fifty or sixty days before Easter so that there could be up to two months when no meat or eggs were eaten. As an extra penance in monasteries dinner was eaten much later in the afternoon during Lent.

Fish could be eaten during Lent. Unless there were fresh water varieties available it had to be salted if required inland. One of the most common sorts was the red herring. It was cheap and plentiful but not popular and needed copious helpings of mustard to make it at all palatable. In the French town of St. Rémy on Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday, clerks walked in procession to the church each pulling a red herring on a string and each trying to tread on the herring in front whilst attempting to protect his own from the man behind. Until the nineteenth century at Queen’s College, Oxford, on Easter Sunday the first dish sent up to the high table was a red herring made to look like a man on horseback riding away, a symbol that all the fasting and penance of Lent was over, there were several days holiday to anticipate and then things would be back to normal.

Eggs were eaten on ordinary fasting days but not in Lent. They were not even used in recipes in medieval times. Records for a household in 1415 show that whilst normally a lot of eggs were used, from Ash Wednesday until Easter Sunday none were bought. But then on the latter day boiled eggs in green sauce were served However skilled cooks in some families served ‘mock’ eggs in Lent. They were made by blowing hens’ eggs and filling the shells with thick white milk of almonds mixed with sugar, ginger and cinnamon. Part of this mixture was coloured yellow with saffron to represent the yolk and inserted in the middle. The ‘eggs’ were then roasted in the ashes of the fire. It was the custom to bring hard-boiled eggs to church on Easter Sunday to be blessed and sometimes the vicar claimed one tenth of those brought. During the reign of Edward I four hundred eggs were boiled and distributed to the royal household on one Easter Sunday. Most were coloured with vegetable dyes, but some very special ones were covered with gold leaf. The Romans decorated eggs and Crusaders discovered that the Arabs did too. Today sometimes we decorate eggs still, but mostly we leave it to the chocolate manufacturers to provide our Easter eggs although it is something that is easily done with a mould and some good quality cooking chocolate.

Lent also meant that the eating of meat was forbidden. Wealthy people could prevent their diet being insipid and monotonous by the inclusion of dried fruits, nuts, herbs and imported spices such as pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom and saffron. The latter, having come all the way from the Orient, were extremely expensive and were often heavily taxed. As early as 982 Aethelred imposed an extra Christmas and Eastertide toll in the form of ten pounds of pepper on traders who came to London Bridge from Germany to sell their goods.

A remnant of these spiced dishes remains with us as Hot Cross Buns, flavoured with mixed spices or cinnamon and candied peel and traditionally eaten on Good Friday. Originally made as one large bun, cut into pieces and eaten warm at breakfast, they are now produced in individual sizes and the cross on the top can either be marked with a knife, with two strips of short crust pastry or piped with a flour and water paste. At an inn in Bromley-by-Bow in London there is an annual Easter Bun ceremony on Good Friday. A sailor adds a bun to those already hanging from the ceiling to commemorate a poor widow who baked a bun for her only son who was expected home from sea but never returned. On the same day the Butterworth Charity presents hot cross buns and coins to ‘poor widows of the parish’ after the eleven o’ clock service at St. Bartholamew-the-Great, in London.

Spice is also used in Easter Biscuits, still sometimes called "Cakes", which are eaten on Easter Sunday. Containing currants and sometimes grated lemon rind, they are like Shrewsbury biscuits but much larger

Lamb is the traditional roast meat for Easter Sunday. In times past all the meat salted in the autumn would all have been eaten together with those animals kept alive through the winter. Early lambs reared on lowland pastures would be ready by Easter and the first shoots of mint would provide the appropriate accompaniment of mint sauce. There may be too an echo of the pastoral lamb served to celebrate the Passover.

Spring also meant the return of green shoots in the fields and hedgerows. Although they did not know it by name what our ancestors desperately needed was a rich source of Vitamin C. Being water-soluble it cannot be stored in the body but needs to be taken in food every day. This is no problem to us with shops full of citrus fruits, black currant juice, green vegetables and salad ingredients all the year round. But for our forebears, once the stored fruit and vegetables had run out by late winter it was a very different matter and prolonged deficiency of Vitamin C led to scurvy rickets. Even as children we used to pick and eat the first tender shoots on the hawthorn bushes which we called, I do not know why, ‘bread and cheese’. There must have been some residual folk memory which prompted us to pick and eat them as our ancestors would have done instinctively, without knowing that they provided the nutrient they so urgently needed. There are still places in Britain where those early, precious plants are harvested and used to make traditional dishes. Samphire is a succulent plant which grows on coastal marshes and mud flats and is eaten raw or boiled and served with butter like asparagus.

Sorrel and dandelion leaves make salads or can be boiled as vegetables and there is a traditional dish still made in the North of England, known as ‘Dock Pudding’. This is made from the plant Polygonum bistorta, or bistort, in the Lake District they are called ‘Easter Ledges’ or ‘Easter Giant’. There are many recipes but generally the green bistort leaves are boiled and mixed with cooked barley or oatmeal, bound together with beaten egg. It can be eaten hot or allowed to go cold, then sliced and fried with bacon for breakfast or high tea. There are even Dock Pudding contests and Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire holds the annual World Championship.

One dish which has slipped quietly from Lent into Easter is the Simnel Cake. In medieval times it was a light biscuit-like bread made from fine flour which was first boiled and then baked. Towards the end of the seventeenth century it became a rich fruit cake with a layer of marzipan in the middle made for Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent. This was the day when boy apprentices and girls working in service in large houses were allowed to return home and visit their mothers and would take them a cake. There is also a suggestion of visiting one’s mother church on that day. Gradually it acquired a marzipan top and became associated with Easter. The top is browned under a grill or in a hot oven and is decorated with twelve balls of marzipan to represent the twelve apostles. Some people suggest that it was named after an elderly couple, Simon and Nellie, but the reality is that it comes from the Old French simenel, which originates from the Latin simila, ‘fine flour’, from which we also get the word ‘semolina’.

Whatever our beliefs Easter marks a time of renewal, a time of celebration and refreshment. Our ancestors realised the importance of special food to observe the end of the hard season of winter and even though we do not have to endure the cold, the darkness and the limited, monotonous diet which they suffered, nevertheless it is good to regard it as a special time. As Emily Dickinson said:

"A little madness in the Spring
is wholesome even for the King."