April/Easter Column - Homes & Gardens magazine

I woke up with a start. It was Easter Sunday, and I had the day before managed to buy sufficient small, shiny chocolate eggs to provide an adequate hunt, but had not had the residual strength to go out and hide them as dusk fell.

I leapt out of bed, checked the children were still asleep, and rushed out with the carrier bag, heedless of my bare feet and nightie. The sun was shining, and the air felt springy, cool and warm and promising. I rushed wildly about, stuffing little eggs into every inviting crevice in every tree, and running out of crevices, merely scattered them in the grass. Panting with my exertions, I heard a window open, and looking up, saw a puzzled neighbour watching me – a bag lady en deshabille. I retired in shame back into the house.

Easter, like Christmas, has its origins far back in the essentials of human survival, ritualised, Christianised and now, trivialised. The midwinter festival celebrates light, in the shape of the fire that cut us off irrevocably from animals, and ensured our development into the sentient beings we are today. Sometimes. The came the Light of the World, followed by fairy lights. The spring festival celebrates fertility, as life comes back to the land after deathly winter. Then Jesus rose from the dead to redeem us from sin. Then I rose from my bed to distribute chocolate eggs around the orchard.

There is a lot of commercial pressure to turn Easter into a spending bonanza equivalent to Christmas. So far it has stubbornly resisted. Gift ideas for Easter, apart from chocolate, have simply not taken off. Are the marketing men aware that the Easter bunny is celebrated for extremes of fertility, not for distributing prettily decorated basket of chocolate eggs? After stuffing hot cross buns, dripping with melting butter, down the children for breakfast, we rushed to church to admire the Easter garden created by Maud and her class. The Holy Land never saw anything like the overscale triffid-like flowers so beloved of small children, thickly encrusted with bright green powder paint, and leaning drunkenly. Somehow the serious message of Easter had got through to her, in spite of an interest in chicks and chocolates. Sitting on my knee, she said indignantly, “Do you know what they did to Jesus? They put a bonnet of nettles on his head!”

Friends were coming to lunch, with children to participate in the Easter egg hunt. Carried away by my urge to do a Martha Stewart – you know, clever things with daffodils while standing up a step-ladder in full-make-up - I decided to do an exciting seasonal lunch. Pascaline fitted the bill, a regional French dish of lamb so traditional that it hasn’t been done much since the French Revolution. I could see why as I researched it, although I have to add that, should I have wished to proceed, the local Halal butcher would have supplied the necessary. “The lamb, stuffed and roasted, is served whole, like the paschal lamb sacrificed by the Jews for the feast of Passover”.

On the other hand the great chef Careme’s version consisted of stuffed lambs’ heads arranged on a round dish with lambs’ feet, and other bits that I won’t go into – suffice it to say that they are usually out of sight. Adaptation is the soul of my culinary activities, so I took the traditional stuffing recipe – minced lamb, bread crumbs, fresh herbs and hard-boiled eggs, flavoured with quatre epices (ground pepper, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon) - and stuffed a boned leg of spring lamb.

For pudding, I glanced at the Russian Easter sweet, Pashka, and balked at the cholesterol levels of the ingredients – cream, soured cream, cream cheese and butter mixed with candied fruits and nuts and pressed in a mould to concentrate the fats. Instead I bought some good vanilla ice-cream, let it soften, whipped in the fruits and nuts, and froze it again. When the Iron Curtain fell and US ice-creams found their way to Russia, the ice-cream mad Russians were seen licking their Rocky Road or Chocolate Chip and spitting regularly into the snow. When they were asked why, they replied that the bits in Communist ice-cream were anything from rat droppings to bits of metal from the machinery, so it was traditional to spit them out.

The friends arrived, their children straining at the leash with the idea of rushing straight through the house and out the other side in pursuit of chocolate. They had to be restrained to eat lunch. The pressure built up around the table, with the usual comments on my lovingly prepared food: “I-don’t-like-it-what-is-it?” Like the Russians they were very suspicious of the bits in the ice-cream.

It was an extreme relief to open the French windows and let them explode with wild cries into the orchard. The tension visibly drained from the parents. Wine and coffee were poured, voices softened and slowed. For minutes only. Small figure at the door with eggs held up in skirt to reveal drooping knickers, “It’s not fair…..”