Never mind chewing the cud - chew the cow

According to a news report yesterday, organisations representing just about every single doctor in the UK have decided that obesity is a big problem and it needs tackling.

“News”, did I say? Sounds more like history, given the popularity of the subject in the mass media.

Well okay – all these organisations have agreed that it’s a problem and needs dealing with.

But the answer is surely simple? According to a billboard advert in Gloucester earlier last week, if you’re not ready to “meat your maker”, you should go vegan.

And as if that were not enough to make you split your sides, it was illustrated by a picture of a coffin-shaped pie.

The advert had been funded by campaign group Peta, which had chosen the city because a new mortuary that can take corpses of up to 50 stone had just been opened there.

According to reports, Peta’s Yvonne Taylor said the ad was designed to highlight a link between meat pies and pasties with obesity and other ailments.

With enormous panache and sensitivity, she continued: "The best thing that coffin dodgers can do for their health and to help animals is to go vegan.”

Ah. That’ll be the animals that won’t exist any more if everybody stops eating them, will it, Yvonne? What would sad people like you actually do with your lives then?

The thing is, if people want to be vegetarian – or even vegan – then fine and dandy.

Just don’t behave like a bunch of religious fundamentalists nuts and try to convert everyone else with claims that are, at the very best, spurious.

Mind, the advert did actually have an amusing aspect, since historically, pie crusts were known as coffins, but one doubts that Peta activists actually have this sort of knowledge and intended such a play on words.

It is, as I’ve said before, one of a series of new forms of Puritanism. And its followers are every bit as boringly intolerant and bigoted as those who believe their version of god is the only one there is and everybody else is wrong.

The claims that eating meat is the cause of obesity and assorted illnesses is piss poor – the French Paradox alone is evidence to the contrary.

But like religious fundamentalists, facts and evidence are not the strongest suits of Peta and its ilk, preferring the sanctimonious statements of faith of the truly saved.

Few people would claim that rising obesity is not an issue – but this is about as useful a contribution to any discussion as a Daily Mail article claiming that neon lights during night shifts give you cancer (but only during a month with an 'r'). It makes government policy on public health look coherent by comparison.

Anyway, I know that other people were irritated by the advert. And I suspect – with a wry smile – that it is exactly the sort of thing that produces the opposite effect that was intended.

Apart from anything else, going around telling people that pies and pasties are bad for you (ignoring ones that don't contain meat) is a bit of a stupid attack on a UK cultural icon.

From a personal perspective, I made sure to schedule plenty of meat for the weekend. Just to make sure that I die – and that I get fatter than I am and get lots of illnesses.

Yesterday – and utterly apt for a day of sport – I settled on good pork bangers from Henry Tidiman, which were cooked gently in a little lard and served with boiled spuds and peas, bot of which came with butter.

And today, after spending further hours in the garden, it was time for a steak and ale pie, with top-notch braising steak from Richard at Wild Dartmoor Beef.

Excellent beef – and even grass finished, unlike some other producers that make great claims.

The recipe came from the Hairy Bikers.

I sliced an onion and chopped some de-rinded, smoked streaky bacon, and cooked them gently in a little lard, before adding a finely chopped clove of garlic.

When golden, this was scooped into a casserole and replaced with the diced steak itself (around 450g for the two of us).

That’s browned and added to the pot. The frying pan is deglazed with approximately half a bottle of ale and this goes into the pot too.

Then the rest of the ale and a little beef stock, a tablespoon of tomato purée, a couple of bay leaves and some thyme are brought to the boil and join everything else in the casserole.

It’s covered and goes into a pre-heated oven (160˚C fan) for at least two hours until the meat is very tender and the ale has sweetened.

Take it out, add a little cornflour that's been blended with water and pop back to thicken.

Then add some halved or quartered chestnut mushrooms, let it cool and decant everything into a pie dish. Roll out some puff pastry and top with that. Brush with whisked egg (Argh! Another dead baby non-human critter!) and bake at 180˚C for 30-35 minutes until the pastry is golden.

Consume with something apt like mushy peas on the side. Go on – a few vegetables every now and won't do you any harm.

And as if that were not entirely bad enough, then later this week I shall be eating Bambi.

It all put a contended smile on my face.

But then, I’d be prepared to wager that Father Christmas isn’t a vegan either – and look at him for longevity.

Forgotten gardening exploits

Propped up on the sofa, nursing a sore throat and trying to fend off an incipient cold, I could look out at a garden that is both totally of me and totally surprising for the me that I see in my own mind.

It was a typically English April day; showers interspersed with bursts of sun; a cast of faint spring green over the whole scene.

What I could see directly was a potted box, leafing pyracantha; a pale green, iron table and chairs, pansies and violas, and an ornamental canal boat milk churn lying on its side.

Beyond, there's the carpark and then the old, characterful wall that borders the park, covered in ivy; in between, a young silver birch that soars high and sways in even the gentlest breeze, and in the park itself, a plane tree that always seems to be one of the last things into bloom every spring, but which is now visibly on the way.

And because the schools are still on holiday and there is therefore less traffic around then normal, there is a soundtrack of birdsong to accompany this very English vista.

But now you've got that picture in your mind's eye, I feel the need to explain about that churn. Some years ago, we had a brief phase of going canal boating. After a number of short trips, we decided to do a longer one - the Leicester Ring. We had two weeks - a tight schedule for that route, meaning no days without cruising.

The Other Half worked on the basis that it is a canal tradition that Other Halves do the "complex, technical stuff " - or driving the boat, to you and me - and the women do the hard physical graft, otherwise known as doing the locks.

I did over 100 locks that fortnight, including the full flight at Foxton and a particularly stubborn one in Leicester one evening in the pouring rain as I realised that my supposedly waterproof kagool was anything but.

The weather in general was far from great and I spent much of the time between locks sitting on my own in the cabin, reading a biography of RFK, teaching myself to play solitaire and listening to the radio.

The churn and a jug were bought as souvenirs of a trip that increasingly - as far as I was concerned, at any rate - became our last canal trip. They have been gathering dust on a shelf for the time since.

But back to the here and now.

A week or so ago, it dawned on me that although I had long thought that, if and when I got around to it, I'd be trying to create a sort of Mediterranean influenced garden.

But in this weather at least, it has the look of a rather dainty English garden. Okay, accepting that the rusted, iron cat planter is a touch of tweeness that is hardly Med styling (I was never going to get away with a gnome), I would have thought that the terracotta pots and the lemon tree and a lot of the herbs would have gone down that route.

Yet even with the lemon, it looks rather more Surrey than the south of France.

It will, in the coming months, get even more so. One of the things that will be added somewhere is forget me nots.

I had forgotten those delicate little flowers, but once seeing a packet of seeds, I was soaring away on a Proustian flight of gardening memories.

My father didn't do gardening. And nor did my mother. In retrospect, I don't know how our gardens ever stayed the right side of wilderness.

Although when we lived in Fulham, it didn't. With an old air raid shelled at the back, it was close to being a jungle.

I don't have strong memories of the garden in Bolton before that and certainly not of Tebay before that.

After London came Mossley and that's where my memories take far more concrete form.

The house was on the side of a hill, facing the Pennines. A long drive ran along one side; a steep haul up toward a battered old garage that was pretty much impassable in snow.

Next to the garage was a little shed. The shed - I can almost smell it now - rather unofficially became a little den for my sister and I.

I cannot remember how or even why, but I grew forget me nots in empty yogurt pots. I can't recall where I got them from - not seeds - but I have vague memories of my mother informing me that I wasn't to plant them out as they'd run riot and take over. But somehow, I grew those dainty, blue flowers in recycled plastic pots.

Then, after that memory had popped back into my mind, more crept out of the woodwork between my ears.

I remembered weeding that drive, which would otherwise get ridiculously overgrown. And I also cut the privet hedge that ran the full length of that drive. Sometimes, if memory serves, I'd mow the small lawn at the back of the house. What I certainly did do was neaten up the edges with a half moon-shaped tool with a t-shaped handle with rubber grips.

I can't remember if these were chores I was given - or whether I did them off my own bat and at least partly for pleasure. And I can't remember whether I ever got any financial recompense for my sweat.

But it was odd to recall that my currents efforts are not my first green fingered outings. And that's why forget me nots will eventually find a place in my own garden before very long.

Roasted lamb, herbs and a windy garden

The Easter food didn’t stop with fish ‘n’ chips and pie, in case you were wondering – just as the weekend’s gardening didn’t stop with potting three small catnip plants.

For starters, there was the small matter of Sunday’s big dinner to celebrate the arrival of spring.

Roast lamb; there were no two ways about it – it just had to be roast lamb. Never mind the tradition thing: if it isn’t actually my favourite meat, it’s pretty near I and I’m struggling to think of what I’d actually put above it in such a list.

But in my dentally-challenged condition, would I be able to cope?

I had wondered about lamb meatballs or even a kleftiko, but I really did want my lamb to be roasted.

There was one possibility that came to mind, and Bill King – regular reader here and alumni of Darina Allen’s famous Ballymaloe Cookery School – supplied the technical data.

The answer was a long, slow cook to produce meat that was roasted but perfectly tender and still moist.

Bill recommended pre-heating the oven to 230˚C, putting the meat in, immediately reducing the temperature to 160˚C and letting it cook for four hours.

So that’s what I did – in essence.

Since I’ve got a fan oven, I initially checked to see what 230 would equate to, but since it was only about 190˚C, I just whacked the dial up as far as it went and then turned it down to the oven’s equivalent of 160˚C (150˚C) when the joint went in.

I’d picked up a lovely leg from Matthew on Broadway Market on Saturday and, after letting it come back to room temperature, rubbed some mint olive oil into the skin and seasoned it before cooking.

In the event, it didn’t get quite four hours – simply because it didn’t need it, as a little taste test after two and a half hours revealed.

It was served with new potatoes and peas (frozen at this point), both of which were cooked with a few sprigs of mint from the crop in the garden.

The meat was tender and moist, and had produced a glorious jus. Most important of all, it was utterly gorgeous.

And if anything it was almost better the day after, served cold with more new pots and peas. Wonderful.

So a big thanks to Bill.

It wasn’t the only use of fresh cropped herbs this weekend, mind.

Earlier on Monday, I’d carefully snipped sorrel leaves, flat leaf parsley and chives, washed them all – there were greenfly on the underside of all the sorrel leaves – and after chopping finely, added them to an omelette that was inspired by the descriptions of a childhood Easter day lunch in Elisabeth Luard’s European Festival Food.

It was delightfully tasty, with the bitterness of the herbs combining beautifully with the creamy egg. It looked pretty too, and it had the added benefit of offering cause to be very chuffed with my developing herbs.

All in all, it was a very simple Easter in food terms – but enormously satisfying.

And the gardening continued too. Indeed, it proved to be the weekend when I moved out of the comfort zone of pottering around, potting plants in the sunshine to the rather less dilletanteish business of potting plants under chilly cloud and with incipient rain in the air.

I’d mostly brought pretty things on the morning’s visit to Columbia Road, but not entirely.

There was the catnip and then some herbs for humans. In this case, more sage and some rosemary.

The sage was needed because the first lot had developed a sort of mould on the leaves. It had been one of the first things to be planted in the newly revitalised garden and I potted it using a substantial amount of very rich ‘manure’ (plant matter).

Now that had been perfect for the mint, but I suspect it had hampered the drainage for the sage.

This time, after the pot and the crocks were washed thoroughly, the crocks went back in, with some gravel and then followed by lots of sand and only a little compost. Let’s see if that sorts it.

The rosemary had finally been bought after the means to protect it from those shiny beetles had arrived. There was mesh pegs and rubber corners to build a bamboo cage.

Which all sounds wonderful, but isn’t really designed for a single pot, as I rapidly found out.

With help from The Other Half, a rather wobbly cage was improvised.

Unfortunately, by the next morning, it had collapsed. In a woeful comment on our efforts, it couldn't even cope with a spot of traditional March winds and April showers in brief combination.

And so, rather than leave it lying around, I donned a cap and went out into the wet to clear up. The rosemary is probably not under any major beetle threat in this weather, so I’ll look at possible solutions this coming weekend, when considering protecting the catnip.

But one of the things I’ve discovered in recent weeks is that I love potting things with my hands. Oh yes, they get messy and it’s absolute death to manicured nails and a pretty big challenge to my skin, but I really enjoy digging into the compost.

The smell and the feel is just so enjoyable. And doubtless there’s some rather airy fairy sense of being ‘in touch with Mother Earth’ that I could make too, but I’ll resist that temptation.

Oh. And one of the other things I’ve discovered is that box has a smell like cat pee.

And gardening is a learning curve.

So there. Don’t let me hear you saying that this blog isn’t educational.

Won't somebody think of the felines?

Easter – like many another festival in the UK – is frequently described these days as being ‘really just for the children’.

Which is quite intriguing given that torture, betrayal and death by crucifixion feature rather highly in the Christian Easter story.

Or if you have a more folksy, pagan-stylee idea of what this spring festival is about, then those will probably be rather more sensual ideas, and pretty much an invitation to behave like one of those rampant bunnies that populate popular Easter imagery.

Now obviously the Christian religion has had a large impact on the traditions and culture of the UK – and the rest of Europe. It would be plain daft to suggest otherwise.

But I do start wanting to growl a tad when people pretend that somehow it’s the only part of our history and heritage that has had any real impact and has any relevance today.

For starters, such people seem to have a remarkably poor comprehension of just when the country was declared Christian – and even an idea that it happened within some very brief period of time.

It didn’t happen overnight and it didn’t happen in such a way that it acts as some sort of definitive end to primitive life and start of civilisation. And there was no such primitive ‘before’ – any more than there was an instantly ‘civilised’ after that can only be put down to a specific religion.

In many cases, it was a situation of the aristocracy converting – and then Christianity living alongside other religions for a number of years.

Some of what I have skated over in recent posts on the roots and traditions of Easter illustrates this: the pagan traditions being either borrowed by the church to encourage conversion or simply continued by the ordinary people – and in particular, those in rural communities.

And indeed, at perhaps the most simplistic level, one could say that everyone in the UK use days of the week that still carry names derived from non-Christian gods – which is far more than regularly attend Christian church services.

Don't get me wrong – believe what you want to believe, and I\ll defend your right to do so. Just don't try to make me believe the same thing – or try to have your beliefs foisted on me.

But setting all that aside, even if all such interpretations of Easter fail to give adults something to enjoy at Easter – won’t somebody think of the cats?

This was a very good weekend for our trio. It started on Thursday, when both The Other Half and I won raffle prizes at work. His was an Easter egg from Cadbury, with (at least) one of those sickly sweet crème eggs in it.

Mine was a plastic ‘suitcase’ of eight plastic eggs, made to look like chicks, with little plastic bags of strawberry jellybeans in each.

I don’t do jelly beans. But the plastic egg-chicks are proving hugely popular with The Kittens – and particularly Loki.

She spent much of yesterday evening batting one around the flat; occasionally having to inform one of us that it had got stuck in a corner or under some furniture and that an Easter egg hunt was not what she was after.

I never had envisaged a career as a toy retriever for cats.

But we were most fascinated when, somehow, she managed to pick it up in her mouth and carry it around: when she put it down, she made a specific noise that we’ve only heard before from Boudi, when she’s carrying her favourite toy around.

It seems as though there is a specific sound – a word – for use when carrying things.

Not that that was the only festive fun on the feline front.

The weekend’s gardening saw the arrival from Columbia Road of three small pots of catnip – or ‘drugs’, as cats know it.

It’s remarkable stuff – providing an upper when snorted and a downer when eaten.

Apparently. And for cats, that is.

Many years ago, when we still had ‘flower beds’, we brought some from the market to plant. Getting back home, we plonked our big market bags down, only for Mack to hurl himself straight into the bags holding the catnip plants.

Amazingly, they revived. And he didn’t do it every day, but intermittently, he’d throw himself into them and sniff and rub away, sending himself into a totally bonkers, zoned-out state.

Neither Boudi nor the kittens had seen catnip in its natural state, only having enjoyed it previously in its dried state, in toys. But it didn’t take long before they were all snuffling around the garden table onto which I’d emptied my bags.

Snuffling from below – and then jumping up for a closer inspection, followed by taking it in turns to pretend to be guarding the plants (that's Boudi in the picture above).

In Otto’s case, this meant taking surreptitious opportunities to rub her face against the leaves when she thought my back was turned.

Although it has to be said that the irritating thing was getting home this evening to find that Other Cats had been in the garden and pretty much wrecked the catnip, with two of the little plants now pulled up – doubtless in a frenzy of druggy delight. I have to rethink this. I have ideas, but I can't do anything until the weekend.

And much as I have little inclination to hurt Basil, Reggie or The UnNamed Mystery Cat, I also have no intention of providing their drugs for them. It's drugs for my girls or for no cats.

But setting that aside – you see? It really isn’t just a festival for children.

A touch of northern sophistication

Classy and sophisticated food doesn’t only mean haute cuisine. It doesn’t even have to mean that you have to have slaved over a hot stove for hours and hours either.

The weekend produced a number of dishes that, I’m willing to assert, were as classy as owt, even if they were not likely to grace the tables of La Gavroche.

In fact, although this was never a particular intention, it all went a bit northern over the last few days.

The mood was established early on Friday with a visit to Broadway Market – a far quieter experience than can be expected on Saturdays.

Fin & Founder now seem established as residential fish merchants. I still use Vikki wherever possible on a Saturday, because she’s been there since shortly after the market arrived to change out lives. But a permanent fishmonger is an absolute boon.

It’s not cheap and it’s clearly aimed primarily at the growing rather more middle class residents that have moved into the area in the last eight years.

For a while, I wouldn’t go in. The shop had originally been Spirit’s general West Indian store, which used to have a small amount of fish.

Spirit, however, was shoved out in – how to put it carefully? – dubious circumstances by our favourite greedy local landlord, Dr Roger Wratten, whose mere name always puts me in mind of Bill Tidy’s dastardly villain, Roger Ditchley.

One such occurrence might be construed as an accident, but the countless times Wratten has hiked rents to push out businesses makes it very far from that.

He’s done it on at least four other occasions that I know of – and that’s just on Broadway Market.

Spirit’s shop lay empty for ages, before being done up and becoming home to Fin & Founder. The dreadful doctor is apparently no longer the owner of that site so one can’t exactly hold them to blame.

I rather enjoy shopping there. On Friday, it was to get some thick cod fillet for dinner.

“I’ll just pin bone it for you,” said the young man serving me.

“Oh, no need for that,” I replied. “I can do that.”

He looked surprised.

“OH, I have my own pin-boning pliars,” I explained. “Wüstloff ones.”

He made no further query.

Obviously, preparing the customer’s fish in such a manner ‘adds value’ and helps justify the prices. I know I’m not going to get a discount, but I really don’t need it done.

In some cases – such as prepping squid – I downright love doing the job myself.

Fin & Founder is, I think, symptomatic of so much that is happening in British food – certainly in the cities.

Were it not for shops like this, run by people like this, there simply would not be a fishmonger on Broadway Market. And there are no proper wet fish shops within walking distance either.

The traditional fishmongers’ died off over a number of years – yet more of the collateral damage caused by supermarket expansion, plus the greed of those commercial landlords.

So it could be claimed that good food – proper food – has unfortunately become elitist in such areas.

The tragedy with this is that now it’s apparently considered a middle class, well off thing to actually want good food.

How on earth did we reach such a depressing point – depressing, indeed, on so many levels? It’s not the case in every other country, that quality food is considered only the preserve of some perceived elite.

And indeed, what I wanted to cook on Friday was light years from being ‘elite’.

The intention in this case was to make something I do rarely – fish and chips.

Rarely, that is, because I don’t have a deep fat fryer or chip pan, and therefore have to use fresh fat every time. Which ups the cost a bit, but it’s worth it.

In this case, that meant a dozen 250g blocks of lard, since I’ve given up deep frying in vegetable oil.

It’s such an easy dish.

Cut your chips and soak them for 30 minutes or so in cold water. Drain and dry thoroughly.

Make your batter. Pure Delia at this point: 110g of self-raising flour, a good pinch of salt and 165ml of water – all whisked together until it’s lump free.

In this case, thinking that some people use beer instead of water, I made use of some sparkling water that was in the fridge.

Now it’s just a case of melting and then heating the lard.

You need it to be at a temperature of 190˚C. This used to mean relying on chucking a cube of bread into the shimmering fat and seeing it if cooked in a minute.

But since I’ve actually got a jam thermometer these days, it’s a darned sight more scientific.

In go the chips for up to five minutes. In reality, I found that they were well on the way by three minutes, so they were decanted onto a paper-towel lined plate and the fish, which had been waiting in the batter, was slipped carefully into the second pan.

Once the fat in the chip pan is back up to heat, the chips go back in for about two minutes.

And real chips are not a pale yellow.

The only processed thing about the meal was a tin of mushy peas. And the only downside? The smell, which I managed to keep in the kitchen alone.

But goodness me, it was good.

It amazes me that we have come so close to losing sight of what a fantastic dish this can be.

Near us, in Dalston, Is Faulkners fish and chip takeaway and restaurant. It’s supposed to be good, but is poor for anyone who has had the real thing.

The same goes for the North Sea Fish Restaurant (and takeaway) in Bloomsbury.

Neither are cheap and yet the chips aren’t even hand cut for starters.

Both would be left standing by the very down-to-Earth, dock-side chippy we ate in in Scarborough, last spring.

Yet such experiences are few and far between. Which is sad, I think. Very sad.

But on to more weekend fodder.

My new friends, Si King and Dave Myers of Hairy Biker fame, were the source of Saturday’s dinner – a meat and potato pie.

Not that they’re just my new friends – The Other Half has been the one remembering when the current series is on and tuning in every week.

And the ‘bakeathon’, with the duo intrepidly biking and baking their way around Europe is certainly most enjoyable.

This wasn’t bad the first time I did it, last autumn – but it was even better this time: moister and, err, wittier.

The pastry, as previously, was made using lard. I used good beef mince (400g for the two of us).

A good squeeze of tomato purée was substituted for the ketchup, since I didn’t have any of the latter in the cupboard, but Worcester sauce and HP sauce were used exactly as the recipe specified.

I kid you not – this is also good. Very good.

Oh, it might not be haute cuisine but, just like the fish and chips, at its best, a proper pie is a thing of enormous pleasure and very high quality.

And since I made up the amount of pastry mentioned in the book, I have just under half to use up later this week. What a dreadful problem to face – what pie to make next?

Easter starts here – but what does it mean?

Of course Easter has really been going on for almost a week, but in reaching Maundy Thursday – as we call ‘Holy Thursday’ in the UK – I found myself wondering just what traditions existed for the day.

Most scholars appear to agree that the English word ‘Maundy’ has come to us through a combination of Middle English and Old French, from the Latin mandatum.

This is the first word of the phrase “Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos”.

You didn't think you were going to find yourself reading Latin here, did you?

Well, in case you can't translate it, it means: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you” and it's from John 13:34.

Now in the Bible, this was about Jesus washing the feet of the disciples and this has been ritualised by certain Christian denominations to see a priest or bishop wash the feet of 12 others during a mass.

On the other hand, some people believe the name of the day comes from the “maundsor baskets” or “maundy purses” of alms that the king of England distributed to certain poor at Whitehall before attending Mass on that day.

Of course, that explains why Brenda goes and hands out a bit of non-legal tender to some people at a church somewhere every Maundy Thursday. And did you know that the Maundy purses that HM gives away include a groat and a half groat?

Which won't help anyone much in these austere times.

Unrelated to such religious connotations is the good old fashioned wayzgoose.

Quite apart from being an absolutely fantabulous word, the wayzgoose started out as an entertainment given by a master printer for his workmen on or around St Bartholemew’s Day, which is 24 August.

That was partly because St Bart was the patron saint of leather workers and, therefore, book binders. It was also the end of summer and the start of the season of working by candlelight.

There is some speculation that the first wayzgoose bash was held in Mainz, Germany, at the Fust-Schöffer shop, after the first Gutenberg Bible had been printed – on 24 August, according to legend.

Later, wayzgoose came to refer to an annual dinner or outing for the staff of a printing works or the printers on a newspaper.

And in terms of the latter, it was often held on Maundy Thursday, since that was a day off because there would be no paper to print for the following day.

Back in the days I worked on a national newspaper, we regularly used to consider hiring a charabanc and going off on an extended pub crawl somewhere by way of marking a wayzgoose. But unfortunately, we never quite got around to it, and I don’t work in such an environment any longer.

But surely there’s some sort of Maundy food traditions?

Well, not really.

Some high-church Christians hold a form of seder – the traditional Jewish meal that starts the Passover – as this was what Jesus was doing at the Last Supper.

According to catholicculture.org, the centrepiece is a white, frosted cake that’s been moulded in the shape of a lamb.

You’ll also have the symbolic foods – matzos in memory of unleavened bread, some wine, bitter herbs, “greens” (parsley or watercress) with salt water to dip both these in, and haroses, a dish of apples, nuts, cinnamon and wine, which is chopped and mixed together to look like a mortar that the Hebrew slaves used.

You might also display the bone from a roasted leg of lamb – but you won’t have eaten any if you’re still strictly observing the Lenten fast. It symbolises the lamb the Israelites apparently sacrificed and ate on their departure from Egypt.

The bitter herbs is reflected in German culinary tradition, which sees either a chervil soup or a dish of eggs in green sauce – the sauce being made from a selection of herbs.

In fact, in Germany, Maunday Thursday is known as Gründonnerstag – ‘Green Thursday’, although the ‘grün’ bit might actually come from the word ‘greinen’, which means ‘to weep’.

But whatever the background, Germans often eat green-colored foods, such as the dishes mentioned above, on Gründonnerstag.

And that’s about it for Europe. Elisabeth Luard, in her European Festival Food doesn’t mention anything else, except an Hungarian paprika soup.

Indeed, for a festival that is preceeded by a month’s fasting, the main event seems pretty thin when it comes to big, set-piece meals to break that fast – apart from the lamb that I mentioned yesterday.

One of the few quirks to mention is that only us Brits apparently break the fast before Easter Sunday itself, with sweet, fruity hot cross buns being eaten before then.

So for the first evening of this short spring break, I don’t think there will be any food with a traditional meaning.

After the heatwave of last week, the temperature has dropped quite dramatically.

So tonight could well be something as warming and comforting as pie.

The sacrifice of the lamb

With Easter now only a couple of days away, it seems like I might actually have to do some proper planning for the festive fodder.

There are some aspects of this that are nice and easy. This afternoon, for instance, I nipped to St Pancras on the way home for the chocolate run.

Nestling under the platforms is a Neuhaus, a premier Belgian chocolate chain with a history going back to 1857. It is a wonderful experience. Not one you do every week - or even every month. But when you do, then even the selection of your chocolates is a wonderfully voluptuous experience.

But the big question is what to eat on Easter Sunday. Roasts are traditional throughout Europe – well, apart from anything else, you want to make a bit of a splash when ending Lent, don’t you?

And lamb is particularly popular. Of course, it’s available at this time of year, but it also works nicely from the Christian symbol point of view.

The Lamb of God, sacrificed for us all – a sacrificed lamb to mark the end of the difficult winter and the beginning of spring.

Like other festivals, the early Christian church purloined a lot of pagan and non-Christian religious pageantry and celebration for itself: good sense, of course – it made selling Christianity to the people as a whole far easier.

Indeed, the word ‘Easter’ comes from Ēostre or Ostara, who was Germanic goddess and also lent her name to Ēosturmōnaþ, which was, in essence, the Anglo-Saxon name for April and which, by Bede’s time, had become ‘Paschal month’.

The centuries since have seen considerable debates about Ēostre, but one train of thinking appears to link her with the Norse goddess of fertility – who gave her name to Friday – Freya (the Germanic version was Ing, which may be where the name Ingham originates – the ‘ham’ bit is ‘home’ – and is the name of one part of my own family).

Both, it seems, have had customs involving hares and rabbits linked to them by some scholars.

For instance, in Leicestershire, “the profits of the land called Harecrop Leys were applied to providing a meal which was thrown on the ground at the ‘Hare-pie Bank’, according to 19th-century scholar Charles Isaac Elton, who went on to suggest that this was a link to the worship of Ēostre.

And in his work of the same period, Charles J Billson lists a number of incidents involving hares around the Easter period in northern Europe.

According to Joseph Bosworth and T Northcote Toller, in their An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1898), Ēostre was “the goddess of the rising sun, whose festivities were in April. Hence used by Teutonic Christians for the rising of the sun of righteousness, the feast of the resurrection”.

Of course those great icons of the festival, hares and bunny rabbits, are just there for cuteness – and have nothing whatsoever to do with celebrating the arrival of spring and, in its sidecar, a certain rising of the sap.

But such a thought doesn't really tie in with our rather infantilised incarnation of Easter. We have forgotten, as adults, how to celebrate - beyond a spot of booze - and have delegated most of the pleasure to the children. Christmas, for instance, is 'for children,' we're so often told. Of course, that helps to promote all these festivals as spending opportunities.

Yet the older and uglier and (hopefully) wiser I get, the more I have a sense of the seasons and of the need to celebrate the rise and fall of each year - even if without any specific religious content.

Gradually, I am reconnecting with the Earth - and please, that does not mean I have become or am becoming a hippy or a New Age convert. But there is a real joy I'm discovering to that sense of the cycle of the seasons.

However, let’s get back to the big question. I want to have roast lamb – I love roast lamb. Yes, I love the little springy-wingy fluffy things in the fields too, but most of them wouldn’t even be born were it not that we also love the taste of their roasted flesh after a few months of that gamboling malarky.

With mint sauce.

Or lemon.

Mouths watering yet?

But there is just a slight question mark: in my dentally-challenged state, can I eat roast meat?

Should I, perhaps, make minted lamb meatballs instead? Or even a kleftiko?

The answer may be near – but for that, my loyal readers, you’ll have to wait a day or two to find out!