I was thinking about the ham on the way home from work today. This is not strange for me. I think about food - and, more precisely, meals - a lot. In the morning when I get up, I'm already thinking about lunch and dinner. When I'm sitting down to dinner on a Monday, I'm contemplating dinner on Tuesday. It's not an obsession or anything, it's just one of those things I do. But, anyway, back to the ham.
I was thinking about the ham on the way home from work today and thought of something odd. You know how Easter already has the colored eggs and the chocolate bunnies and the jelly beans. I know that there are stories for why those things exist (the whole idea that Easter kind of co-opted a Pagan rite of spring, with eggs and bunnies representing fertility, and jelly beans representing really sweet chewy... beans), but why is Easter a day for the eating of ham?
Truth be told, Christopher would prefer to have good ham for any major holiday. Well, maybe not a grilling-out holiday like the Fourth of July, but definitely for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Me, I'm a turkey guy - I love having turkey on those two days, although ham has always been the New Year's Day centerpiece for my parents' open house.
I know that in a lot of places, the Easter dish is lamb. Which, frankly, has always kind of freaked me out. What with the whole "lamb of God" reference to Christ. I mean... really? He's put to death, he rises to eternal life, and then - after the hunt for the eggs left behind by the bunny - we eat his representation? That's just a bit weird - even for me.
Which brings us back to the ham. And my drive home, today.
It dawned on me that while we're eating ham at Easter, those people celebrating Passover are... well... at least most of them... are NOT eating ham. Not sure if it's a marketing ploy ("Hey, we're not selling any ham for Passover, let's push it for Easter.") or maybe a really passive-aggressive way for early the Easter-celebrants to thumb their collective noses at the Passover-partakers. Or maybe someone mis-heard the orders for lamb and sent out a bunch of ham. Or maybe, just maybe, hogs are the thing most likely to have been slaughtered in time for a nice cured ham for Easter each spring.
I bet it has something to do with the bunnies.
*The bacon we love, and the ham we're hoping to love, come from Fischer Farms in Waseca, MN. We buy it at The Golden Fig in St. Paul, which prides itself in finding really good mostly-local foods.
1 comment:
Okay, here's my two cents. Roasted meat is for celebrations. Traditionally, throughout the Middle East and Greece, that meat was sheep or goats. Springtime, kill a lamb to celebrate (I won't go into why a lamb here.)
But for ham... well, I've heard the various ideas that it was a Christian effort to distinguish themselves from the Jews, but pork has always been THE meat for Northern Europe. Goat was considered a "low class" meat for celebrating, so let's bring out the pork.
But there's another element that's more important here. Most famines occur in the Spring. If you didn't put up enough food to survive until middle summer, you're in trouble. So, what meat would you still have hanging about in your smokehouse... a ham. Keeps very nicely through a winter. What do you serve with it? Peas and asperagus, which are the first things to show up to eat in Sping.
So, ham for Easter because it was one cut of meat that could make it from butchering in Fall to Spring without going bad.
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