Ruth Paget: Easter

Saturday, May 25, 2019

Easter at Home - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Easter at Home – Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

In Western France, I learned that the French do not color eggs for Easter and that bells bring chocolate eggs for children not the Easter bunny. Little Florence did hunt for eggs in her grandparents’ garden to fill her Easter basket.

Even the French eat some of their Easter chocolate before Easter lunch, but they do save room for a great afternoon meal.

First, you drink flutes of champagne in the living room before going to the dining room.

Then, you go to the dining room for a starter of white asparagus with homemade mayonnaise followed by seafood. My mother in-law served broiled scallops on their shells with butter and Parmesan cheese. (I made this dish with cream and grated gruyère cheese when I lived in Germany for holidays.)

The main dish would always be a five-pound leg of lamb with green lentils from Puy.

After the roast leg of lamb seasoned with garlic and rosemary would come a cheese platter including camembert, brie de Meaux, and gouda. The cheese course is a pretext for opening another bottle of wine usually.

Chocolate mousse would be the dessert.

I never got tired of that meal, but when we came back to the United States in the mid 1990s, I was in charge of the meal in Wisconsin, which lacked many of the foods I ate in France at the time.

So, I made an American meal with Italian and French additions to it. That is very American in our multicultural society.

I began preparing my celebration of Easter in Madison with a purchase of egg dying kits for little Florence. I put down newspapers in the kitchen, and let her dunk away in purple and green dye with her hands. I even let her color her toes.

Laurent brought home Cornish game hens for Easter lunch. I looked up how to cook those in Joy of Cooking – you need to bard them in bacon with onions and herbes de Provence inside to keep the meat moist. A light Beaujolais would go well with this dish I thought.

I made Mexican seviche as our starter. I marinated small pieces of orange roughy fish in lemon juice overnight to “cook” it. To the fish, I added tomatoes, onions, mildly hot yellow peppers, olive oil, vinegar, parsley, oregano, and black olives. This brightly colored dish was a feast for the eyes and tasted good, too.

I used Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook for a tasty side dish of mashed potatoes: add grated Parmesan cheese and butter to the mashed potatoes and top with chopped, flat leaf Italian parsley.

For our cheese course I served muenster, gruyère, and brie cheese.

Finally, we did have an Easter lamb on the table. I asked our local bakery to make a chocolate lamb cake with butter cream frosting for us.

My mother and I cleared the dishes while Laurent and Florence napped.

I smiled and thought of the quote from the German writer Goethe that was in my edition of Joy of Cooking:

That which the fathers

Have bequeathed thee,

Earn it anew,

If thou wouldst possess it.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Click for Laurent Paget's Book

Ruth Paget Selfie

Easter at Home - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

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.