Darina Allen: My recipes for a traditional Easter Sunday lunch — including roast lamb

We love Easter Sunday lunch — it has to be lamb.

Forget perfect slices, cook to melting tenderness and just lift little chunks off the bone with tongs. The wild garlic aioli makes a tempting change from mint sauce.

Just as I was about to start my Easter column, I spotted this written by Myrtle Allen in the 1970s. ‘A late Easter, with warm, damp weather, upset the man who made our Easter eggs, as the chocolate was slow to set in the moulds. An early Easter made my butcher angry. The churches really ought to get together and do something about it, he stormed. This was the proper purpose of ecumenism. He was never known to kill a lamb before Easter, no matter how late it was. If the lamb is ready before my mint bed, it upsets me. It is essential to have one small secret patch in a sheltered place, unknown to friends, relations and kitchen staff.’

This is from Myrtle Allen’s The Ballymaloe Cookbook, published in 1977 and still in print 49 years later. The butcher referred to was the legendary Michael Cuddigan from Cloyne who supplied Ballymaloe House with exceptional meat for decades. If perchance you have the first edition of the Ballymaloe Cookbook, treasure it, it’s even more valuable now as a collector’s item.