Easter at Home – Part 1
- by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Snow
usually covered the ground at Easter in Detroit (Michigan) when I was a child,
which meant I wore a new turtleneck sweater and pants instead of a dress to
Easter lunch.
My
family always spent Easter with my mother’s best friend’s Polish family.
Our
hostess and her family members put together a meal that featured baked spiral
cut ham with a huge bowl of hand-mashed potatoes with little pools of butter
and paprika. Hand-mashing the potatoes
makes them creamy without any lumps. I
loved those and had several helpings.
Other
Polish dishes would sometimes appear, too, like kielbasa pork sausage seasoned
with garlic and salt. To go with the
kielbasa, there would be fresh, sharp horseradish flavored with beets along
with rye and pumpernickel bread.
My
mother and I liked to contribute to the food offerings and would a buy a loaf
or two of sweet, Polish Easter bread (egg bread made with raisins and currants)
in Hamtramack (called Poletown for the large number of Polish immigrants who
settled there to work in the auto factories).
Every
so often, a lamb made of butter with a red ribbon around its neck would
decorate the Easter table.
I
always admired the other table decorations: the Polish Easter eggs. I liked the glistening dark brownish red eggs
that obtained their color from being boiled with onion skins.
“Rubbing
the eggs with vegetable oil gives them their sheen,” my mother’s friend told
me.
One
year eggs with a black base color and yellow, red, and green flower designs
appeared on the buffet table. These
pysanky eggs came from eastern Poland near the Ukraine, which is famous for its
egg decoration. The Polish traditionally
took their decorated eggs to church to be blessed.
My
celebration of Polish Easter ended and my celebration of Greek Orthodox Easter
began when I went to the University of Chicago and shared a dorm room with my
Greek-American roommate.
On
Greek Easter weekends, I went to my Greek roommate’s home in an outlying
Chicago suburb. No matter what the
weather, a whole lamb is roasted on a spit in the backyard for Greek Easter
lunch. I especially liked the fresh
salads with crumbled pieces of feta cheese, black Kalamata olives, and healthy
dose of rigani (oregano relative) in oil and vinegar dressing.
We
did not eat one of the most attractive Easter specialties: large, lifesaver
shaped loaves of bread with bright red colored eggs baked into them. All the women relatives compared their
golden, brown Easter loaves to see who had made the most elaborate latticework
to encase red eggs baked in the circular loaf.
I
no longer celebrated Greek Orthodox Easter when I married my French husband and
moved to France.
End
of Part 1
To
be continued.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
