There’s a lot of cooking and feasting going on out there this weekend, and may your meals be blessed regardless of whether you are celebrating a religious holiday or not.
I can’t say that I have much emotional attachment to Easter. When I was really little, it was a holiday for dressing up in uncomfortable clothes for church, going to a bad pancake brunch somewhere and then a dinner with a few family members. By the time I was a teenager, we’d pretty much stopped with the church part, with the occasional blip because someone felt guilty about raising godless heathen children, and we had good breakfasts at home and a good dinner.
Though I have almost no food associations with Easter in that sense except for chocolates and jelly beans. I guess ham and maybe we had some lamb now and again. I don’t really remember how I felt about lamb when I was young except that I did like lamb chops. Oddly the thing I liked best about them was the little fringe of fat that runs down the chop bone—it was always crispy.
So this weekend, I’m going to make some lamb chops with some minty peas and mashed potatoes and Sunday I’m going to make a small ham.
Ham is mostly a depressing thing in the United States. The hams you can get, even at this time of year, are mostly squishy, tasteless chunks of mystery meat that are half composed of injected water. When I worked briefly as a cook in a restaurant, my boss would order a whole ham for Saturdays from Boar’s Head and it was my job to prep it—he trained me to take out the aitch bone and then I’d slather a mixture of mustard and apricot fruit preserve over the ham and we’d roast it just long enough to get that to crust up, not long enough to dry out the already-cooked and smoked ham. Then we’d slice off of that all day long for to go orders and put it on one of the plates for the day. This time of year, he’d usually order two hams. That was a great ham. I still remember the taste of it. Nothing you see in any market around here is anything like that. (I suppose Primal Meats’ house-made ham would be.) I picked up a small ham for tomorrow that I think will be ok; the key thing is not to roast one for hours, because they turn into hackingly dry leather. (I would guess that some people have to do that if they buy one of the ones with no flavor that have tons of injected water.) Someday I’ll get my act together enough to invite a whole bunch of people over on a weekend and get a quality country ham, but I never think of ordering one in time and it’s another thing you just don’t see in the market.
Anyway, I’ll be back in your inboxes on Monday.
Image credit: Photo by Stephan Coudassot on Unsplash
I was raised with delicious ham, most of it from my grandfather’s little smokehouse, so I was always surprised by that rather wet and pink stuff that was served to me outside of Tennessee. My Mom used to send John and me a country ham once a year, around Easter. That became a big production at our house. So, no ham for me tomorrow.
A toast of some appropriate wine to that little fringe of fat on the lamb chop. Curious that we will pay so much these days for that little bit of wonderful fat.