Searching for the Easter drink
Eric Felten
Christmas has Santa Claus. Easter has an oversize rabbit. Christmas has gifts wrapped in colorful paper. Easter has hard-boiled eggs hidden under bushes. Christmas has an abundance of holiday drinks. Easter has…well, what does Easter have to drink?
True, it’s tough to try to compete with Christmas quaffs. There are Christmas punches such as Negus and Bishop. There is the great Tom and Jerry. There are Belgian Christmas ales. It is a shame that Easter has lacked a holiday drink of its own, something it can compete with. That’s especially true because Easter, marking the end of Lent, is an especially good drinking holiday for those who went without for lo those long 40 days leading up to the big celebration.
‘THE ONLY LIQUOR SO GOOD THEY NAMED A COLOR AFTER IT’
For Protestants in particular, but for anyone in 2023, it can be easy to forget that the end of Lent is one of the key features of the Easter feast. Ours is a time when the bacchanal of fat Tuesday rolls right into the following weeks. But it wasn’t always so. Not so long ago Lent played a much bigger cultural role, a role that was felt not just in church but in nightclubs. “Midwest cocktail bookers,” the showbiz trade paper Billboard reported in 1946, “are wailing louder than ever before during the usual Lenten biz fall-off.” It seems that better-quality acts were going begging. Skedders (slang for the talent agents who worked to get their clients on clubs’ schedules) were complaining that restaurants, clubs, and show-rooms had pared their entertainment budgets back to next to nothing “to keep their talent budgets to a minimum to keep their overhead down during the usually poor patronage of the pre-Easter period.” Yet at Easter, Billboard reported that talent buyers were taking solace in the expectation that bars and restaurants would “blow their wigs in a spending spree to take care of patrons who stayed away from bars during Lent.
What a different world we lived in then, when it was commonplace, even expected, that churchgoers would extend their Lenten observances beyond just giving up some certain pleasure, and cut back on the high life in general.
Those who do give up something for Lent deserve a great quaff for the most important feast day on the Christian calendar. What to have to wash down the ham? There is a drink popular in Germany at Easter, and which would make a fine perennial at Easter dinners for years to come. I have in mind Bowle, a fine and flexible wine and fruit punch.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The basic bowle starts with a bottle of champagne and a bottle of German white wine, both chilled, combined in a pitcher or a punch-bowl. Add some slices of orange, some strawberries, whatever other fruit you might like, and (here’s the semi-secret ingredient) some sprigs of woodruff. Let it all steep, but serve before the champagne has lost its fizz. Indeed, you might combine all the ingredients except the bubbly, and add that just before serving.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?