Traditional Easter food in Britain

Chocolate eggs are undoubtedly the most popular Easter food in Britain, but by no means the only one. Hot cross buns, roast lamb, Easter biscuits in the shape of bunnies and Simnel cake are not to be sniffed at. Today, we are going to have a look at some of these traditional recipes.

Egg hunt
Image by Simon Greig in Flickr

As we said in a previous post, eggs have traditionally been related to spring and the beginning of life, and from the early stages of Christianity, they symbolized the resurrection of Jesus Christ after his death on the cross. Today, boiled eggs are still eaten at Easter, but the chocolate egg has become the most popular in the last years, being the traditional present that people give away to family and friends.
In the following video, we can hear a short history of the Easter egg.


Apart from boiled eggs, Easter biscuits are eaten for breakfast and also for tea. They are traditionally made with currants and spices, but they can also be made with other ingredients and in the shape of eggs or bunnies. Here is a recipe for traditional Easter biscuits.

Easter biscuits
Image

For the main meal on Easter Sunday, roast lamb is served with mint sauce and vegetables. Lamb symbolizes Christ, who is known as "the Lamb of God". But before the Christians, lamb was already used by the Jews to celebrate Passover, which roughly coincides with Easter. It all started more than 3000 years ago, when the Jews were slaves in Egypt and Moses wanted to free them. The Pharaoh refused to let them go, so God sent a series of plagues, the last one of which was the death of the firstborn sons. To spare the Jewish children, God told them to sacrifice a lamb and paint the lintels of their doors with its blood, so that the angel of death would pass over their houses and leave their offspring unhurt. That's why the Jews call this festivity "Pesach", or "Passover". When Jesus entered Jerusalem he told his Apostles to prepare the Passover meal, and they probably ate lamb at the Last Supper.

Easter roast lamb
Image

For tea, in many households people like to make Simnel cake, which is a delicious fruit cake with layers of marzipan and decorated with eleven marzipan balls which symbolize the twelve Apostles except Judas, who gave Jesus away. In this video we can watch how to make one of these.



And last but not least, my favourite: the scrumptious hot cross buns, which are served hot with butter. They are traditionally eaten on Good Friday, but I start to eat them as soon as I see them in the shops, which can be as early as February! You can watch how they are made in this video.

One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns!
Image

Finally, try this exercise to see how much you have learnt.
Traditional Easter food

Happy Easter!

Meals and food

My students usually get confused with the words meal and food because they both translate as “comida” in Spanish. To help them understand the difference, I tell them that food is what you eat and the meals are breakfast, lunch, dinner... that is, the portions of food taken at a particular time. Thus, breakfast is eaten in the morning, and as its name suggests, it is the meal that breaks the “fast” or period in which you abstain from food (the night); lunch is eaten at midday and it is usually a light snack; and dinner is the main meal of the day and is eaten between six and eight at night. Some people use the word supper for the main meal of the day, but for others, supper is a light meal eaten shortly before going to bed.

Full English Breakfast
credits

Apart from these meals, you can also have a snack in between meals, and on Sunday an American custom that is catching in Britain is the brunch, which is a late breakfast or early lunch that is usually eaten in the late morning, making it perfect for those people that after a long night out want to stay in bed a little longer on a Sunday morning. The word brunch is a portmanteau of “breakfast” and “lunch”.

Brunch

Meals can consist of one, two or three courses (or sometimes more!). These are the parts of the meal that are served in different dishes and one after the other. A good meal can have an appetizer, a first course (soup or salad), a second course (meat or fish with vegetables and potatoes) and the third course, the dessert (sometimes called “pudding”), which is usually something sweet such as ice-cream, cake, trifle... Please, do not confuse dessert /dɪˈzɜːt/ with desert /ˈdɛzət/. Have a look at the pictures.

As we have seen in a previous post, you can “have” or “take” a meal, being the verb have more widely used in Britain, while the use of take in this context is more American.
There are quite a few adjectives that you can use with food. If you don’t like it you can say it is disgusting, yucky (slang) or unsavoury, but if you like it you can say that it is tasty or savoury, or, if you like it a lot, delicious, scrumptious, yummy (slang), or finger-licking good.

Let’s have a look now at this presentation about food and meals.

If you want to know a bit more about the traditional British dishes, go to this page.

Now you can do this exercise to see how many of the words we have seen today you can remember.

Well, all this writing about food has whetted my appetite. I’m going to the kitchen to see what I can tuck in. Fancy some scones? Enjoy your meal, or as the French say “Bon appétit!”.