My French mother, marrying an Englishman during the Second World War and settling in England, brought her recipes and culinary tastes with her as trousseau. She roasted lamb for Easter Sunday lunch, dished up with flageolet beans, garlic and rosemary. She served it rare, the French way, the blood tipped into the gravy. From Normandy, our grandparents sent us packets of bitter-chocolate fishes, and beribboned bags of tiny Easter eggs stuffed with praline. Our English grandparents completed the feast with hot cross buns and simnel cake, in gentle competition with the French Easter bunny who crossed the Channel to hide our eggs in the garden.
As an adolescent, I occasionally spent the Easter holidays in France. The religious symbolism of Good Friday was marked by a fast, so-called. We ate salt cod for lunch. Not as penitential as it might seem, since it came to table swimming in hot cream. While Christ lurked in the tomb, my aunt got busy in the kitchen, whipping up butter, eggs and flour in her electric mixer, a status symbol proudly brought back from America by my engineer grandfather in the 1950s. It lived, when not in use, on top of the enormous American fridge he had also had shipped back. Nobody else in the village had such glamorous equipment. My aunt baked trays of feather-light gateau de Savoie from which she sculpted her magnificent gateau de Paques, layered with creme patissiere and coated with dark chocolate butter icing. One year she made a huge Easter bell, another year an enormous egg. After the midnight Easter vigil, we woke to our breakfast of brioches tasting of salt butter and yeast, listening to the church bells summoning us to yet another Mass.
French people still take Easter seriously, although, even in the countryside, fewer of them than ever participate in all the associated lengthy religious rituals. But the pagan side of the festivities is still pursued with gusto, and the proper celebration of the arrival of spring entails creating a suitable and worthy lunch for all the family.
I do as much of my shopping as possible in the local market, which opens all year round on Thursday mornings. The big supermarkets are convenient, especially for busy wives and mothers who are also full-time farmers, vegetable gardeners and raisers of poultry, and, since the supermarkets are obliged by law to source much of their fresh produce locally, their vegetables actually taste as they should. But it is more fun to buy from the stalls outside the basilica, to dawdle over choosing a chicken from the old lady who also sells bunches of tulips, eggs and bags of walnuts, and then to sit on the terrasse of the cafe enjoying a petit Muscadet. This week, the organic-veg man had young cabbage greens, spinach, carrots and potatoes. I got cooked beetroot, too, and fat bunches of frilled parsley. As Easter perhaps celebrates the pre-Christian goddess Eostre, I bought a cheese recalling one of her namesakes: Voluptueuse Aphrodite. Pursuing the theme of sensual pleasure, I bought a second cheese called Tentation de St Felicien, and a third called Vierge Folle. This came wrapped in greaseproof paper printed with a poem, in rhyme: "Prod me, sniff me, eat me while I'm plump and ripe, before I go off and go all peculiar."
I bought mackerel from the fishmonger, intending to poach them in a court-bouillon and serve them cold with mayonnaise. When I told the fish-man not to bother cleaning them because I wanted to keep the heads and bits for stock, he became very enthusiastic. Why don't you make a fish soup? What else can I give you? He chopped off the head of an enormous cod: here, have this. The cod had big black eyes. I didn't like them looking at me, so as soon as I got home I threw the head into the pot and clapped on the lid smartly. There were oysters to bring back, too, and mussels for moules marinieres. And this year's sacrificial Paschal victim: a lively crab, to be lulled asleep in the freezer for ten minutes, poor beast, and then briskly boiled. Bon appetit.
Michele Roberts's novel The Mistressclass is published this month by Little, Brown
