Everything but the boar's head.

A mildly contrived spring tableau.
Photo by Kelly Hughes

The Easters of my past have come and gone and are now not more than blurred memories of the brown carpeting of my childhood,  punctuated with shiny foil eggs that called to me from under the couch.  After spending the better part of the day ingesting gooey Laura Secord eggs, it is amazing that any of us had any room to enjoy my Mother's sumptuous feasts, started no doubt the day before for my family and our extended circle of relatives.  Along with Thanksgiving and Christmas, Easter was the first in the Holy Trinity of grand dinners that followed the course of any given year, and all day we looked forward to the slowly cooked smoked hams, pans of crusty scalloped potatoes, steaming bowls of vegetables, salads, soft warm rolls, lemon meringue pie, and ice cream.

We all long for the ceremony of a meal that has been cooked all day, with ingredients we started gathering long before that. It's exciting to put out china settings of salad plates and side plates and dinner plates, water goblets and wine glasses, salad forks, dinner forks, butter knives and gravy boats.  Paper serviettes (or none at all) give way to linen napkins, and the tablecloth makes its first of three yearly appearances.

I don't go to church anymore, and no longer practice the Catholicism that shaped everything from what I did on Sundays to what I wore to school.  For whatever reason, the origins of the great feasts of the past and of my childhood were always connected to religion. Mrs Isabella Beeton, in her giant tome of Household Management, dated 1859, wrote "The Greeks, too, were great diners:  their social and religious polity gave them many chances of being merry and making others merry on good eating and drinking." She also included a menu and table arrangement for a Christening "breakfast" (for a mere 80 persons) where among the dishes served are decorated hams, pigeon pies, two roast fowls, assorted creams and jellies, six bowls of cut-up lobsters, shoulder of lamb, and a boar's head.

Tonight we will enjoy a more modest feast at home of lentil soup, vegetarian cabbage rolls, boiled potatoes with smoked paprika, sour cream, and bread.  We always use china plates, albeit the slightly chipped, mismatched ones I've collected over the years, and cloth napkins are in regular use here.  But I plan to cook most of the day, and we will eat at the large dining table under the sparkly chandelier.  Trends in food will always come and go, but our inherent desire to dine grandly, I believe, is here to stay.