Easter thoughts and a few good dishes

Spinach ramekins with parmigiana sauce; slow-roasted lamb

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forsythia in the rain, May 2, last year.

Easter is unusually late this year and it’s also unusual because both Orthodox and Western Easters coincide, coming together for the great spring celebration of regeneration. I’m never been a religious person. Nonetheless, I find there is something intensely moving about Easter with its focus on new life coming from death, new growth emerging from barren soils, a commemoration of the faith that even in the darkest times, light will eventually break through. These days, we need that more than ever.

Ram at Meadowcroft Farm, Washington, Maine

So this morning, like an Easter proclamation, there was a crack in the ominous gray that has hung over our heads for too long, and the merest sliver of blue sky and sunlight shone through. I seized the opportunity to drive out to Washington (Maine, not DC) to see an old friend, Nanne Kennedy, who’s kept an extensive sheep farm for, well, for long decades, for as long as I’ve known her. During that time, Nanne became a master shepherd, if such a category exists, with a formidable commitment to raising happy, healthy sheep on pasture land that is equally healthy. She practices what’s called regenerative agriculture. That’s a holistic practice that goes beyond organic cultivation to actually restoring the land, the soil, the cycle that bonds us as humans to the earth we inhabit, and binds us to the animals that we’ve chosen to share our lives. It’s a daunting task but I thank the stars, or whatever powers guide us, for people like Nanne and her sheep. They make the earth a better place and they make our lives better too. You can find out more about Nanne Kennedy here in an old but still pertinent profile.

The yarn that Nanne makes is equally holistic, dyed with natural colors in sea water. The range is extraordinary. Here she is in her Seacolors Yarnery:

What better way to conjure Easter than with a frisky, newborn lamb? Or how about a whole flock of them? These are Nanne’s latest arrivals and they are, without question, the sweetest little things you can imagine.

tags in the right ear are girls, tags in the left little boys.

The Easter Lamb

When I first met Johnny Apple, he was R. W. Apple, Jr., a Pulitzer-Prize-winning, highly respected foreign correspondent for the New York Times, a man whose charm and raffish air belied an extraordinary focus and discipline. But Johnny also had a reputation as an irrepressible gourmand as was evident from the gleeful manner in which he attacked both plate and glass, as well as his girth which was already substantial. After covering Vietnam, Iran, the higher levels of the British and French foreign offices, and several U.S. political campaigns, Johnny was re-assigned, at his own request, to roam the world for the Times, not investigating foreign matters so much as recording his gastronomic escapades with his wife Betsey. It was an assignment, with an expense account to match, that had almost every other Times reporter positively green with envy. We were all stumped by the question: How on earth did he get away with that?

But Betsey and the global eating assignment came later, sometime after our first encounter, which took place back in the 1970s, when I was planning an Easter feast at our family farmhouse in the hills of eastern Tuscany. Johnny was staying in Perugia with friends—of course they were the owners of the Perugina chocolate factory, and also great patrons of music and musicians. Johnny loved music almost as much as he loved food. Not quite, but almost.

I can’t remember now what persuaded him to leave the chocolate factory and the music, but leave it he did to drive up into our hills. We had gathered an assembly from near and far, friends who ranged from fellow journalists (the man I was married to at the time was one of those) to hippy English back-to-the-landers. Also, a pair of poets and a world-renowned feminist never shy of expressing her opinions who brought along an embarrassingly younger lover.

I think of that meal every year as Easter looms because I outdid myself -- not just because of Johnny, although of course I wanted to impress him. But somehow everything fell into place, as it sometimes does—the lamb was tender, the early peas and fava beans had all the immaculate delicacy of new spring vegetables, and the wine was a perfect match for the meal. (Don’t ask me what it was, I only remember that the husband carefully steered the best bottles toward his and Johnny’s end of the table, leaving the local plonk for the hippies and poets.)

What was most wonderful was the lamb, a couple of legs of a very young critter that I prepared from a recipe developed by an old friend, Sara Armstrong, once the chef-doyenne of the renowned Copper Kettle restaurant in Aspen. She too had traveled the world, but as a diplomat rather than a journalist, and had assembled a vast collection of recipes that were the backbone of that amazing establishment. It’s been years since the Copper Kettle closed, and Sara has long since gone to the great kitchen in the sky, but every year at Easter I try to make what she called simply “Roast Lamb with Dill.” I cook it in memory of her, and in memory of Johnny Apple, may he also RIP. He forever expressed amazement at what he called Roast Lamb with Coffee. And what do I call it? Slow Roasted Lamb for Easter. And this year I’ll make it with one of Nanne Kennedy’s lambs.

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