A Vegetarian Easter Dinner

What’s Easter without a haunch of ham or leg of lamb? (For those born since Watergate, “haunch” is a cool old term for “large end of animal meat with a bone in it.”)

Well, it’s still Easter, with or without meat. Or even eggs. Here’s a simple Easter menu inspired by Mediterranean cooking of solely vegetables (with a sprinkling of sheep’s milk cheese).

The centerpiece is Pasta alla Norma, yet again a Sicilian eggplant-centric preparation, such as caponata or what we call “eggplant parm,” but they refer to simply as “parmigiana.” I prefer to roast, rather than fry, my chunks of eggplant. Doing so minimizes their oil saturation and also renders them into little pillows of pudding.

Also, the choice of pasta shape is important. Tubular shapes allow the chunky pieces of the thick sauce to secret themselves inside the pasta. Delicious.

No other vegetable signals Spring so much as asparagus, so here’s a link to preparing Asparagus Five Ways. I especially enjoy asparagus roasted, brightened with ample curlicues of lemon rind.

Finally, an all-celery salad. When I was growing up and saw “pascal” (sometimes Pascal or Paschal) celery in the produce section, I thought, understandably, that the adjective had something to do with Easter, or even Passover. Our English adjective for Easter, “Paschal,” comes by way of Aramaic and Greek (pascha), the Hebrew (pesach), and the ecclesiastical Latin (paschalis)—all referring either to Passover or Easter.

However—and especially for Coloradans— so-called “Pascal” celery has nothing at all to do with Easter or Passover.

An Oct. 17, 1938, article in The Denver Post relates how tenderizing or even “sweetening” celery came about in our state during the late 1800s—and furthermore quickly became nationally extremely popular.

Celery is natively bitter and tough-fibered. An Italian immigrant to and gardener in Colorado, with the last name of Pascal (no first name given), developed a way to wrap and trench celery by burying the plant in mounds of soil just up to the leaves. This further blanched the celery as it was deprived of light. These two methods brought about a tenderness in the celery that conventional methods of farming could not.

You’ll find Pascal celery for sale in Colorado produce sections come harvest season, not in spring. Celery Root, Heart, and Leaf Salad uses the three main parts of the common celery bunch, a simple mix of close to equal parts of matchsticks of celery root, inner celery ribs, both celery and parsley leaves, all dressed in olive oil, light vinegars, and golden raisins.

It’ll be “Paschal” celery if you make it for Easter.

Pasta alla Norma
Asparagus Five Ways
Celery Root, Heart, and Leaf Salad