It has dawned on me that the limiting factor of nostalgia is the narrowness of one's memory. With Easter upon us next weekend, I entered into this week's newsletter full of fond memories of my childhood Easter weekends. Not for their bucolic universality, the type played out on greeting cards or in rose-tinted prose, but instead for their uniqueness to me. That is how nostalgia works, I suppose.
Having scribbled a good few pages of notes, revelling in reminiscence, I found there was a tiny piece of gravel in my shoe though, as I walked down memory lane, and this stopped me from bounding headlong into impassioned prose on the subject of one of my favourite weekends of the year. I circled and circled the thing, but couldn't make myself start. In a fit of desperation, I went back to last Easter’s newsletter, to what I managed to write then, to what angle I found that resonated with me.
I found myself dumbstruck. I had written, almost word for word, the same meandering story about the Easters of my childhood, about their oddness, in many ways, and their specific charm in others. The narrowness of my memory on full display. I have one version of my own past and it is all I can draw upon.
As I wrote it better last year than I was in the process of writing it this year, I’ve included the gist of it below, it’s what informed my Easter cooking last year, and it is what I’ll be drawing upon this year, and no doubt I won’t veer much from the path in years to come.
I suppose this is how little personal traditions are built. And there is something lovely in that. Much like those nice precarious piles of rocks (stone Johnnies I’ve always known them as, but I think they might be called cairns), you find at random when walking along scraggy coastal paths or up rocky hills, tradition is just this year's stone placed upon last years stone, placed upon the stone from the year before that. Sometimes the whole precarious thing becomes unwieldy and topples, and in those moments the tradition is either put back together in a version of what was there before, always new though in some small way, or other times the whole thing is thrown out, the tumbling of the thing liberating you to start anew, to see all the niggles and frustrations that were inherent in that barely balanced pile of stones. So you place a new stone, and you start a new tradition.
I suppose my looking back to last year’s newsletter allowed me to stumble again on the stone Johnnie that for me represents Easter. The cairn that was built from the experiences detailed below. And for now, I feel happy to add one more nice stone to that pile. Last year's pleasing stone was a recipe for a frangipane schnitte that I have also shared below, and this year's stone to be added is a hot cross bun loaf that I’ll be making this year and for which I have also included a recipe.
So here is my pile of stones. Happy Easter:
As a kid I loved Easter, my grandparents gave us presents and there was chocolate, what else could one want. I was blissfully unconcerned with its religiosity.
For some unbeknown reason, we would more often than not spend Easter at the Hythe Imperial on the East Kent coast. A hotel in the Grand old style, but even then one whose grandeur was leaning towards faded. Easter there was commercial, not a scrap of religious ceremony, instead a mardi gras of celebratory tropes and activity, an unhinged display of cliche and stereotype that was nothing if not soothing to give yourself over to. And my word were they good at it. Yes, there was an egg hunt, yes there was a fancy-schmancy lunch of lamb, mint sauce, blah, blah, blah; but mainly there was fun - table tennis competitions, Scalextrics, indoor bowls, outdoor putting competitions, go-karts, egg painting, swimming races, the works. If you can, for a moment, imagine the sheer joy of a morning that went something like: wake early and watch the African cup of nations on Transworld Sport whilst gorging on an illicit early easter egg; destroy the evidence before being caught by a parent; open a gift, something like a Hyperglow t-shirt or a Man Utd goalkeeping top; Coco Pops and a ham and cheese omelette for breakfast; head down to the leisure centre for table tennis, then Scalextric, then out to the putting green, then up to the ballroom (when last had it been used as such?) for indoor bowls, then outside again for croquet, inside again for swimming races, out in the car for go-karting, then back down to the leisure centre for the finals of the table tennis and the Scalextric, before finally being corralled for a very late lunch of grey lamb and a heady mint sauce that always reminded me of my grandmother's chest of drawers. There was always bingo, a quiz and dancing in the evenings, we always somehow found time for the crossword with my Grandfather, one unseasonably hot year there was an outdoor barbecue replete with lamb burgers and a bucking bronco.
At some juncture in my childhood, this strange English hotel idyll was swapped for a trip abroad at Easter. We were going up in the world, and as such, we kept up with the Joneses. Easter was a different proposition out there amongst the international well-to-do. And I was having much too much of a good time to even really process that Easter, in any sense I used to recognise, was happening at all.
As such, when as an early adult my Easters came crashing back down to earth, I was struck initially by how quaint and claustrophobic it felt as a celebration. It became a festivity I had little truck for.
Once I was gainfully employed in kitchens I was invariably working, and the cloying religious stuff, on the one hand, the stilted and limited traditions of the food on the other, combined to put me right off the Easter period altogether.
And then, out of nowhere, I started dating an extraordinary woman who rather liked Easter. Her family took it seriously, and they elevated it. Yes, Hot Cross Buns were on offer, but so was Stollen, and marzipan fruits; and dishes of lamb and fish weren't limited to the stuffy suburban rigidity that led to a heavy lamb roast with thick gravy and gloopy mint sauce being served up on what was often a beautiful spring weekend, their dishes instead were often drawn from Turkey, Iran, Japan or Vietnam. Suddenly the undercurrent of religious pomp and ceremony became more appealing too. In restaurant kitchens I was now exposed to Easter across the world; Italian colleagues indoctrinated me into Pasqua and its colomba di pasqua and torta pasqualina; one chef’s Danish traditions sounded charming with plenty of painted eggs and a marzipan slice that I still make to this day; the Greek kitchen porters told tales of tsoureki, koulourakia and red eggs; Benôit’s chasse aux oeufs just sounded better than our Easter egg hunt, despite being exactly the same thing. Largely it seemed the Catholics were having more fun at Easter, and I began to link high-church pomp with a prevalence for sanctioned gluttony, and I saw I could access and adopt any of the customs I wanted, without even needing to acknowledge the accompanying religious hang-ups.
And so in this spirit, here is the Marzipan shnitte that I adopted into my Easter stone Johnnie a few years ago:
As mentioned above, I think this came into my repertoire from a colleague. The name would suggest it’s German, although I feel in my bones it’s Nordic. Anyway, it's brilliant. As someone is often making a simnel cake for Easter, one can quite often find themselves in possession of a nugget of excess marzipan, which just so happens to be exactly what you need for this extraordinary sweet titbit. So long as you have some sugar, jam and eggs, which you will, and can make or buy some shortcrust pastry, then this eccentric indulgence couldn’t be simpler.
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