FOOD RESOURCE COLLEGE OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SCIENCES, OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
EASTER
The Wide Encyclopedia of Cookery. An Encyclopedic Handbook for the Homemaker covering Foods and Beverages-their Purchase, Preparation, and Service. 1951. Wm. H. Wise & Co., Inc., New York.
Like many other church festivals, Easter is a mixture of both pagan and Christian customs. In old Norse mythology, the day was associasted with the spring festival to welcome the return of new birth and awakening in crops and cattle. In fact, the very word "Easter" is derived from an old Saxon word meaning "rising".
Also, in India and China rabbits and eggs were symbols of reproduction and fertility, and were important features of another festival closely corresponding in date to our Easter. Therefore, it required little transition to include these symbols in a Christian festival occurring at the same period of time.
Corn salad, which is also known as field salad, served with a herring cut in the sape of a man and known as "herring on horseback," was a customary dish in some parts of the world for Easter Day. Sometimes tansy was used to flavor cakes and sometimes it was put into the Easter pudding, which was a "custard greate."
Eggs, hard-cooked and colored, have been exchanged as Easter gifts for many centuries. Sometimes they are designed for eating, but more often for rolling on the green. Sometimes the Easter feast began as soon as the church clock recorded the midnight hour on Saturday. The food for the feast was brought to the church to be blessed.
"The roast their flesh and custards
great, and eggs and radish store,
And trifles, clouted creame, and cheese and whatsoever more,
At first they list to eate, they bring into the Temple straight
That so the priest may hallow them
With wordes of wond'rous waight."
Great roasts of young lamb, of ham and fowl, turned on the spit, graced the Easter feast, which, following the Lenten abstinence from meat, was as elaborate as means permitted.