Let me just get this out of my head first. Whew.
What families put on their Easter table is a lot more flexible than, say, Thanksgiving. Which I really enjoy. It tends to be a more creative and colorful meal (while I don’t knock the wonderfully beige Thanksgiving plate, I’m ready for something a little brighter come spring.)
The main dish of Easter seems to vary wildly from household to household. Many families serve turkey, even though no one ever seems to really be in the mood for it. Vegetarian families have tons of great options with spring produce, bless ‘em. The majority of families seem to go with ham (to answer the why without making a whole post: hogs were slaughtered in the fall and preserved through the winter, so they’d be about ready to eat in early spring. Also? Ham is great… and relatively inexpensive, yet special enough for a holiday.)
But lamb has been a main course for Eastertime for much longer.
The tradition began with Passover. The story goes that a lamb was sacrificed on the eve of the first Passover in Egypt and the Jews marked their doors with its blood, saving their households from the tenth plague. Jewish people would roast a honking leg of lamb – on the bone – for their seder meal.
Paul called Jesus the Paschal lamb, and thus Christians have since referred to Christ as the Lamb of God. So naturally, they started eating lamb at Easter. (Sorry not sorry: yikes.)
Lambs aren’t actually particularly seasonal for Easter dinner in the northern hemisphere. They tend to be born in February and March, but most prefer the meat of a lamb that is between 5 months and 12 months in age. If Easter is in late March or April, last year’s fold will be aging out of deliciousness while the new crop will still be too young. Much of the Easter lamb is shipped in from New Zealand.
How did we move from honkachonka legs of lamb to crown roasts? Blah, blah, blah, King of Kings. I posit that it’s less meat (though not necessarily less expensive, but fewer leftovers to contend with) while making far more of a show-stopping centerpiece. The “Edwin Smith Papyrus” mentions a rib roast that scholars think refers to a crown of lamb – on a scroll that was written during the Second Intermediate Period of Egyptian history, roughly 1650-1550 BCE. Suggesting that we’ve been makin’ ribs fancy-lookin’ well before Jesus was alive – so any explanation about symbology is just an excuse.
Why isn’t lamb more popular in the US? As a meat, it never really caught on here – mostly because we’ve prioritized raising cattle, pigs and poultry, which tend to produce more money per square foot. During WWII, the American sheep industry saw an uptick due to rationing, so wool became an important commodity and thus lamb, hogget and mutton became a more plentiful meat. (Here in Kentucky, we specialize in mutton barbecue. Scotch-Irish settlers brought sheep to Western Kentucky for wool production and ended up creating a niche barbecue speciality with the strong, tough meat.)
We didn't eat a lot of lamb growing up, but more I think than the average American family. It was always the "leg'o" and not the crown. In fact, I think the first time I saw a crown my initial thought was "where's the rest of it?" ( And also: why are there silly little hats on it? ) I don't think I had a "lamb chop" until I was well into adulthood.
And nothing could have prepared me for the idea of mint jelly with lamb ( or even the existence of mint jelly ). I have a love hate relationship with mint. When I was young I completely hated it, could only tolerate it in toothpaste. Since then I've opened up to some mints, chocolate installations and some beverages. But for anything "savory" it's a hard hard NOPE.