This Easter Sunday, local eaters have their pick of restaurant brunch menus which don’t feature ham – unless you count a guanciale-and-roasted tomato frittata with housemade ricotta or scrambled eggs with chorizo, radicchio and green garlic.
But it’s not just the dishes which depart from tradition: Seattle restaurants are also devising cocktails specifically for the holiday which celebrates the resurrection of Christ. At Rione XIII, the drinks include two Prosecco-based spritzers and a mix of Moscato d’Asti and lime juice.
Although Easter doesn’t have a reputation as a very boozy holiday, the spirits industry has lately been pushing the concept of the Easter cocktail, emphasizing connections to springtime and festivity (and new products in the gin section of your local liquor store.) Cocktailians have responded enthusiastically: If the drinks featured on Camper English’s popular Alcademics blogare representative of the trend, swizzlers especially enjoy the chance to indulge in the bright colors and sticky sweets that they recall from childhood Easter parties.
When San Francisco cocktail hobbyists Rob Corwin and Danny Jacobs came up with the Sipping Seder, a cocktail-based reinterpretation of the Seder plate, they initially feared they would offend devout Jews (A rabbi assured them the concept wasn’t sacrilegious.) Perhaps predictably, there doesn’t seem to be as much hand-wringing over developing cocktails to pair with one of the holiest days on the Christian calendar, but Pastor Don Mackenzie approves of the practice for the same reasons that Corwin and Jacobs’ rabbi friend cited.
According to Mackenzie, a member of The Interfaith Amigos, there’s nothing wrong with making religious celebrations more relevant to a contemporary audience.
“Traditionally, of course, Easter, like Thanksgiving, is a time for families to gather and have something like ham or lamb,” Mackenzie says. “But it is just what cultural traditions have developed, not related to the meaning of the resurrection, which, from my point of view, is a metaphor for the conviction that God can always make everything new.”
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