Breakfast most fowl: An Easter treat
The Hindu
After a 40-day dalliance with vegetarianism, Easter was always a time to indulge
There’s more to the Easter feast than chocolate bunnies and painted eggs. In fact, the real hero of Easter — apart from the Risen Christ himself — is the meat! As Easter is the culmination of 40 days of fasting and penitence, it’s only fair that the feast is one of grand indulgence. I remember how, growing up in the 70s and 80s in Madras (now Chennai), the season of Lent was a time of complete abstinence at home, when even eggs were off the menu. Stretching into 46 days (to include Holy Week), it was a time to embrace a variety of vegetarian dishes, pachchadis, pickles and vadams, which blended quite well with the onset of spring and summer. Surprisingly, this brief dalliance with vegetarianism would be quite spiritually uplifting, and I wouldn’t really miss the meat — until Easter. But the dawn of Easter awakened the senses in more ways than one, and the first dish for breakfast on Easter morning was our cook Shankar’s green chicken kurma with soft, melt-in-the-mouth idlis. Lunch was a different story. But that kurma, with its profusion of fresh greens and succulent chicken pieces, brings back many fond memories of festivals and the coming together of family and friends. Now, with both my parents gone and community gatherings becoming increasingly rare, it is memories such as these that I find myself reliving often.More Related News