Are you looking for ideas for your 2026 Easter meal? Discover our best lamb recipes, our festive cakes and our tips for successful chocolates. Delight your guests!
Easter is undoubtedly the most anticipated celebration of spring: it is the perfect opportunity to gather around a generous and colorful table. More than just a culinary tradition, Easter marks renewal and the end of Lent, mixing religious celebrations and symbols of life such as the egg or the lamb.
Whether you are a fan of the essential traditional leg of lamb or looking for a touch of creativity for your desserts and chocolate eggs, the challenge is the same: to create a menu that will delight all generations. From the origins of the celebration to the most gourmet recipes, we have selected for you the best of Easter 2026 to compose a memorable festive meal.
Easter Sunday takes place on April 52026, followed by the Easter Monday holiday on the 6th avril. How is the date of Easter scheduled each year?  For a long time, Christians celebrated Easter at the same time as the Jewish Passover, which could fall on a Sunday as well as a Monday or Saturday. The Jewish Passover is in fact calculated on the lunar calendar (the month begins with the new moon) and falls on Nissan 15, the first month of the year, straddling March and April. But in 325, the ecumenical council of Nicaea decided that Easter must henceforth take place on a Sundayday of the resurrection of Jesus. To do this, he established a clever calculation known as “Comput”. Easter Day is set on the first Sunday after the full moon following the first day of spring… Like Ascension or Pentecost, Easter is therefore a movable festival, celebrated between March 22 and April 25. Another difference: for the Orthodox who use the Julian calendar and not the Gregorian calendar, spring arrives on April 3 and not March 20 or 21. Each year, Orthodox Easter (which is also used in the singular) is therefore celebrated a few days later.
What are the traditional recipes for the Easter meal?
At Easter, lamb, rabbit and eggs are the three star products of the traditional meal. Easter lamb is the most traditional option for your menu. For those who don’t like lamb, opt for rabbit. As for vegetarians, they will prefer eggs! At Easter, in addition to a menu including traditional dishes such as Easter lamb and chocolate eggs, you can also prepare innovative dishes. Find several recipes below, as well as their meanings.
How to cook Easter lamb?
It’s up to you to select the piece, between the shoulder, the leg, the rack or the shank of lamb, and discover the recipe that makes your mouth water the most:
What are the best Easter chocolate recipes?
Also discover our recipe, simple and easy to make, homemade Easter chocolates via this tutorialor check out our best recipes on the subject:
What are the different Easter cake recipes?
Know that there are not only chocolate eggs as Easter sweets. If you want to stay in tradition, then opt for the petit agneau de Pâques alsacien baptisé osterlammele. These little Easter lambs, rich in eggs, were originally offered the morning after Easter mass. Tradition dictates that they be topped with a small tissue paper pennant in Alsatian colors. If you want to stay in the spirit of chocolate bunnies, why not prepare Easter cookies with them? carrots in the shape of rabbits or an Easter carrot cake, a must-have among the English? For those who prefer more chocolate cakes, try your hand at the chocolate Easter nest, the Easter chocolate Oreo cookies in a flower pot or the Bavarian flavored with orange and decorated with chocolate eggs…Yum! And if you want to be more inventive, why not get molds in the shape of animals like lamb? Don’t forget to decorate your cakes with Easter eggs or mini chicks!
What do Easter eggs, bunnies and bells symbolize?
If since the Middle Ages, the Church has forbidden the eating of eggs during Lent, they were preserved and decorated at the end of the fast.e century, the eggs were emptied to be filled with chocolate at the end of the Lenten fast. This is how the first chocolate eggs appeared, a tradition which continued over time with techniques offering varied flavors and shapes. Russian and Ukrainian Easters are true works of art today, with incredible patterns and colors, sometimes representing the cross of Christ.
Between Maundy Thursday evening and Easter Sunday, church bells do not ring as a sign of mourning. But it is during the night from Saturday to Sunday of Easter that they begin to chime to announce the joy of Christ’s resurrection. According to tradition, children were told that the bells were going to be made blessed by the Pope in Rome and that on their return, at Easter, they chimed and scattered eggs and bells in the gardens. The tradition of the rabbit comes from eastern France and Germany. The Easter hare, called Osterhase, is symbolic of fertility and renewal in the Germanic pagan tradition. In German-speaking Lorraine and Alsace, it is the Easter hare that scatters the eggs in the gardens.
What is the meaning of Easter Sunday?
Easter Sunday, the date of the end of Lent, marks the end of a period of food deprivation for practitioners. In the past, this tradition was more respected than today. And during the 40 days of fasting, the faithful did not eat eggs. At the end of the period, the believers offered themselves the productions of their chickens that they had accumulated. Eggs which could be decorated, since the Renaissance. As for chocolate, it would have first appeared in egg shells before all-chocolate eggs emerged in the first half of the 19th century. Since then, with a little help from marketing, chocolate eggs have become the symbol of Easter in the collective unconscious, as are the Epiphany pancake or Candlemas pancakes.
What is the Easter tradition?
For all pagan cultures, the egg seems to have been the emblem of life, fertility and rebirth. Some sources report that the Persians were already offering eggs to each other 5,000 years ago as spring approached. It was then the turn of the Gauls and the Romans. These traditions were then assimilated by Christianity. This Sunday is, for Christians around the world, a day of celebration during which all the prohibitions of Lent are lifted and the egg, symbol of life, is omnipresent. The resurrection of Christ is welcomed in joy, which is why a traditional festive meal is prepared with the return of the bells.Â
