In his coverage of New York journalism, humorist A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker frequently ridiculed The New York Sun and its largely suburban readership as anachronisms whose tastes and politics had not changed since the 1920s. It was, he said, the newspaper his father had read back in the day. He was surprised that so many of its readers were still alive.
Edith Michael Barber had written the newspaper’s daily food column since 1927. In addition to cookbooks, Miss Barber had written a guide to hiring, training and managing household help called Speaking of Servants. She was a consultant to food companies and prominent enough to merit inclusion in the 1946 edition of Who’s Who. Every Thursday, she offered a full week of menus in her column, three meals each day. Her menus for Easter were matter of fact and practical.
Breakfast
Boiled grapefruit
Fluffy omelet
Easter bread or kuchen
Coffee/ Milk
Dinner
Watercress and carrot appetizer
Chicken or roast lamb
Browned potatoes
Asparagus
Ice cream with pineapple sauce
Coffee
Supper
Toasted open cheese sandwiches
Salad bowl
Gingercake
Tea/Milk
Edith M. Barber also taught Food History at Columbia Teacher’s College and her columns had a bit of a pedagogical tone. In April 1946, she was running a series of cooking lessons for the new cook and on the week before Easter this included two columns on making bread and rolls, including recipe variations suitable for Easter kuchens and breads and her great-grandmother’s recipe for Pennsylvania rusks.
On the 17th she devoted her daily column to “An Old Time Easter Feast,” noting that in the days when Lent was a time of serious fasting, Easter was an elaborate feast that began immediately after midnight. In modern times, she wrote, Easter breakfast always meant eggs and, while ham and lamb were the traditional dinner meats, “this year most of us will still probably use chicken, and if we have a large group, turkey.”
The old-time accompaniment, she wrote, was “corn salad,” based not on what we call “corn” but a field grass. The Brits of yore also ate bittersweet tanzy pudding on Easter. A Tanzy, or tansy as it is usually spelled, is a common bitter herb that was dedicated to the Virgin Mary in medieval times but may have had pre-Christian associations with birth, death and resurrection. A “tansy pudding,” or “tansy,” was made of young tansy leaves, eggs, cream, flour, sugar and wine and eaten on Easter to mark the end of Lent. She offered a recipe for a more appetizing but also traditional English custard-based dessert, trifle, flavored with sherry or rum, as well as a more modern option, a pineapple sauce, using corn syrup and rum, for the American dessert favorite, ice cream.