Ham or Lamb? The Easter Choice May Be Changing

For Easter cooks, there is one fundamental question: Is yours a lamb family or a ham family?

Like most Americans, mine are ham people. My mother grew up on a dairy farm in northern Wisconsin. When the weather turned cold, they slaughtered a few pigs and hung the hams in the curing room. In the spring, after a long Lenten diet of self-denial, they pulled out a ham and it became Easter dinner.

We should have probably been a lamb family. My parents’ roots are in Italy and Norway. Italians do all kinds of great things with spring lamb, some of the best of it coming from Abruzzo, the region my maternal grandparents were from. The Norwegians go wild for lamb and oranges at Easter.

But the family tree never came into play. (And I’m sure they had no idea that some scholars link Easter ham to an ancient Babylonian myth about a god named Tammuz who was killed by a pig.) For my older relatives, the choice was simply a matter of economics and agriculture. Like most of their neighbors, they raised pigs for the family table, not sheep.

My mom married my dad, and they eventually moved to the suburbs. Each Easter, she would reach into the refrigerator case at the supermarket for a ham that had been sweetened and smoked through the miracle of modern food science.

These were big hams, even for a family with five kids. In the days and weeks after Easter, ham starred in scalloped potatoes, filled our sandwiches for school and, finally, became the only reason to make pea soup. And every year, it afforded my father the opportunity to tell a favorite joke: You know the definition of eternity? Two people and a ham.