Celebrations: Post Easter Wrap Up

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Post Pasqua Thoughts

Of all the holidays I love to celebrate with a meal – Easter is my first choice.  Thanksgiving (which, by the time I found  space for the leftovers, I renamed it “Thanklessgiving”). Christmas,  New Years, yes, of course, how can you not plan some special menus and honor family traditions and decorations? Memorial Day, July Fourth, Labor Day all scream something al fresco – picnics, barbecues.  Plus,  I take a ghoulish delight in serving something frightful for. Halloween – it’s a toss up between my creepy black pasta and the dead hands punch.

But Easter is  our  reward after suffering through March, the month of Forlorn Hope. We so deserve a fresh,  bright table with whomever we choose to invite – the Italians  have a charming expression. Natale con i tuoi, Pasqua con chi vuoi. Christmas you celebrate with your family but at Easter you celebrate with whomever you wish. 

 What I Miss

When we lived in the U S, I loved setting an Easter table – always for lunch, not dinner or brunch. You want the afternoon light and brunch is just not festive enough.  I would go to the Old Town Farmers Market and get a small  potted flowering plant  and an herb for each guest. Always a decorated cookie from MariBeth’s Bakery  An excellent chocolate shop always provided us with Valrhona chocolate bunnies. For some reason in the US you can buy the most garishly colored straw Easter baskets and fill  it with an equally garish green and pink grass. Each guest gets a filled basket at the table. I humorously(or so I thought)  once served rabbit  – a meal my unamused daughters remember as the nadir of our Easter celebrations. 

We preferred to roast a leg of lamb to a baked ham – actually we don’t have real leg of lamb in the US – more like the leg of a surly teenage sheep. Once, when I asked for small leg of lamb, I was presented with a 7 or 8 lb leg. I meekly told the butcher that I wanted a smaller one. He turned around and went to the meat saw and cut a chunk of the leg off and returned with the same but smaller leg and said “Here ya’ go, Ma’m”. 

 Asparagus flans became the winning Easter appetizer and one year KD’s sharp penciled editor’s daughter made incredible broken egg cupcakes – extraordinary! Cupcakes were a serious baking trend in the US partially due to their regular appearances in the TV series Sex And The City and the crush on Bleeker Street’s Magnolia Bakeery, which I dutifully visited.  Later  I made Camille Glenn’s carrot cake – that  has become our favorite version of this American classic. 

Oeufs a la neige became the winning Easter dessert.  Poaching individual meringues shaped like eggs or one giant meringue egg – more like floating egg island- creates a heavenly finish to an Easter lunch.  I have flavored the “creme anglaise” with orange and garnished the top with candied orange peel.  Once I flavored it with coffee and used chocolate shavings as a garnish –  but it looked and tasted too wintery  for a celebration of spring and rebirth. Tried lemon flavoring and candied lemon zest, but the orange remained the favorite for this dessert that simply sings Spring. I tried my hand at spun sugar with the cut-off whisk, but the ethereal cloud I achieved was offset by the amount of hardened sugar spread throughout our kitchen.The following French video recipe (English subtitles are available)  is one I am going to try – the demerara sugar “tuiles” she adds are such a brilliant substitute for the spun sugar mess I created. 

New To Me In Italy

But this year, we went to Milan to celebrate Easter with my son-in-law’s family and discovered  Italian families celebrate Easter not only on Good Friday through Sunday, but also on Monday –  which is called La Pasquetta or Lunedi dell’Angelo. Rather than Easter Bunnies and Egg Hunts, the big Easter Deal here is chocolate Easter Eggs with little surprises inside. And these chocolate eggs can be HUGE!

Good Friday for us was spent on a bunnyless train to Milan where we would meet up with my son-in-law’s family, who have wholeheartedly adopted the American anziani (older people – us). I should note that public transport is alive and well here. We use the SalaBlu options – this is a cheerful and thorough boarding assistance that you can reserve when you purchase your tickets. 

On a cultural side note, Milan has some extraordinary art collections, one of which I described in a previous post, but you should take the time to visit at least one after the obligatory look at the Duomo and The Last Supper. The Pinoteca di  Brera offers an easy-to- digest tour of their staggering collection of Italian  Renaissance, Baroque and 19th century Romantic art mixed in at this moment with an intriguing collection of Armani designs.

You’ll see the drab greige working pattern designs first and then a series of stunning dresses and suits from his collections over 50 years. The curators cleverly displayed the clothing without mannequins so that the clothing itself really is your focus. 

After a morning of cultural exposure, the family had arranged an Easter lunch at Ribot Bistrot (named after a famous racehorse)which was a joyous multi-course, multi-hour experience for us. This too is a common occurrence  in Italy – Restaurants stay open for Easter Sunday and offer set menus for large groups of con chi vuoi.  The tables were filled with not only parents and  children, but also grandparents, teenagers, twenty somethings, family friends,  all spilling out for occasional smoking, phone conversations, and general hopping around.

Just for starters, bowls of fried Tropea onion rings, sage leaves and strips of zucchini. Large platters of prosciutto,  grilled artichokes, wedges of tomatoes,  mozzarella and huge olives were served alongside etageres of tiny portions of beef tartare, crispy fried polpette di pollo and a new to me salad of paper thin slices of celery mixed with lemon, olive oil and mint. So refreshing. This was followed by a course of risotto milanese and and a pasta with ragu, The main course were platters of roast sirloin of beef (a platter of rare and one of well done) with roasted potatoes and  celery. You could smell the singed branches of thyme. Just heavenly. To end the meal, slices of Italian Colomba and whipped mascarpone arrived along with large shards of chocolate Easter eggs.  A post-Easter passeaggiata is traditional with your group, but I required a nap. 

The Little Easter (Pasquetta) Monday is the day of families sharing yet another meal, but this time at home.  It happens to be the birthday of a Pallotta Principessa and both grandmothers brought in dishes  from their respective regions, and of course there were two different birthday cakes. Rather than walking after our superb meal, we opted for a canal boat ride through Milan’s Navigli. This is an area that had long been covered and neglected, as Milan, like many cities, had traded urban waterways for highways. Milan’s is actually a large circle of restored canals that are surrounded by new apartment buildings, restored palazzi, bars, restaurants, and shops. Altogether a perfect post-Easter, with nary a bunny in sight. 

Nancy Pollard

Kitchen Detail shares under the radar recipes, explores the art of cooking, the stories behind food, and the tools that bring it all together, while uncovering the social, political, and environmental truths that shape our culinary world.