Easter is the principal festival of the Christian year. Both Easter and its long prelude Lent have traditions associated with food. Lent is traditionally a time of giving up food, especially meat and dairy. Easter is, by contrast, a feast.
The accounts show the amount of hay required for horses, allowing an estimate of at least 70 guests for the feast. Preparations include an unquantified amount of bread and ale and 11 sextaries of wine . And then, two and a half carcasses of salt beef, a bacon, two boars, one live ox, two fresh beef carcasses, five pigs, six calves, 27 lambs, 12 capons, 148 pigeons, three fat deer, milk, cheese, flour, suet, three bushels of salt and 4,000 eggs.
Richard Swinfield’s Easter feast includes, as we should expect, lamb, which was almost certainly roasted. A near-contemporary recipe details how to prepare a roasted lamb – filled with spices and ginger. “Instructions for roasting kid in its skin. Take the kid and slaughter it; scald like a young hog, clean and dress it; then put it on a spit; in it, put fine spices and a good filling made with the same spices, adding saffron and salt; then put it to roast; when it is hot, lard it with long lardoons; when it is cooked, remove it from the spit and serve it with the filling and good ginger.”
And while chocolate eggs had no place in the Middle Ages, decorated eggs did. A very early example comes from, who, according to his household accounts, spent some 18 pence on 450 eggs decorated with gold leaf or dyed. This was for Easter in 1290 when these eggs were offered to the royal household. There were, however, definitely no Easter bunnies.
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