A Greek Feast for Easter

Most years, Greek Orthodox Easter falls anywhere from a week to a month before or after Americans celebrate the holiday, as it is based on the Julian calendar rather than Gregorian. However, this year both celebrations occur on the same day, April 4—offering the perfect opportunity to incorporate some of Greece’s food traditions into your holiday menu.  

To start, there’s mageritsa, a traditional Easter soup. Big Yaya, my maternal grandmother, was the maker of mageritsa in our family. No one told me until I was about 16 what the ingredients were (organ meats like hearts and lungs), but for as long as I can remember, I licked my bowl clean—that’s how good it was. These days, organ meat is less common so the soup is prepared without it and is still delicious made with fresh dill and topped with avgolemono (a foamy egg-lemon sauce). But the meat added an earthy, indescribable flavor for which I long. I can still see my Popou (grandpa) carrying the enormous pot of soup into our house from his car. Once inside, Big Yaya would prepare the delicate avgolemono to top it.

Many Greeks serve mageritsa to break a 40-day fast after midnight on Easter. In my family, we break the fast with tsoureki, a flavorful sweet bread embedded with a symbolic dark red egg. Once seated at the table for dinner the next day, we also pass a basket of dark red eggs. Each person chooses one and then we start the tradition of trying to crack someone else’s egg. There’s good reason to try: Whoever ends up with the strongest egg gets good luck for the rest of the year. (This is a very competitive few minutes at the Shoukas table.)

After the eggs and the soup, we dig into the main event—roasted lamb. Someday I’d like to do it the authentic way and shock my neighbors by setting up a spit with a whole lamb in the backyard, but for now, roasted lamb done in the oven is an excellent main course. We serve it with my mother’s spanakopita, spinach phyllo pie, and other Greek staples, like roasted lemon potatoes, skordalia (a dip made of garlic and potatoes), chunks of feta cheese and Kalamata olives.

The meal is capped off with a deep dish apple pie flavored with Metaxa, a strong Greek whiskey. Some say it’s a curative given to those suffering from colds or flu. I say it’s best ingested in a sweet apple pie topped with fresh whipped cream.  

Below are some of my family’s favorite recipes for Greek Easter.—Denise Shoukas

Denise Shoukas is a regular foodspring.com contributor and is the author of foodspring’s food forager blog.