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The centerpiece on the table is always the same: the butter lamb, a symbol of the Lamb of God watching over the meal, sitting on a bed of greens.

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Buffalo’s Broadway Market is a mere shadow of its former self since the Polish community has migrated from downtown to Cheektowaga. Now the endless rows of stalls selling baked goods, vegetables, and meat to ladies with market baskets over their arms have shrunk to just a few. But there’s one time of year when visitors can sense the place’s former splendor. During the weeks before Easter, the huge hall is packed with people selling molded chocolates, painted Polish Easter eggs, horseradish, pussy willows for Dyngus Day, and—of course—butter lambs. I stopped by Malczewski’s Chicken Shoppe to admire the rows of cute little lambs adorned with red ribbons and flags, in sizes ranging from a couple of ounces up to almost as big as a real newborn lamb. The friendly woman behind the counter, Beverly, told me that, since all their lambs are made by hand, they have to start molding right after New Year’s in order to supply all the Wegmans and Tops stores around the city and still have enough for their own market stand. They work in a specific sequence of steps, first molding the lambs, then adding the eyes to signify God’s lighting of the world, and finally adding the red ribbon around the neck representing Christ’s blood and the little flag saying Happy Easter. Bulk lamb making must immunize you against sentiment. When I told Beverly I couldn’t imagine actually eating something so cute, she said, “We call them Marie Antoinette lambs—the head goes first.” Be that as it may, in my friend Denise Szafran’s home, there is always a regular stick of butter available for the bread. The lamb sits on the table, then moves to the refrigerator until May or June, when someone finally gets up the nerve to take that first bite. Denise, displaced to Canton from Niagara Falls, kindly took a break from her preparations for the holiday to describe a Polish Easter dinner for me. The menu is set in stone: sausage (smoked and fresh), ham, horseradish to represent the bitter aspects of life, both hard-boiled eggs with shells dyed red and peeled hard-boiled eggs pickled in beet juice, and the classic Polish gifts of welcome to guests—the life-sustaining staples, bread and salt. The centerpiece on the table is always the same: the butter lamb, a symbol of the Lamb of God watching over the meal, sitting on a bed of greens. The day before Easter, all of these foods are carefully packed into a basket and taken to the church to be blessed by the priest and sprinkled with holy water. (Since the church’s exodus to Cheektowaga made it difficult for the older people who remained in Buffalo to find a priest to bless their baskets, the priest now travels to them, meeting them at the market on Saturday.) In spite of the thousands of butter lambs sold at the market and in grocery stores around the city, many more are made at home by women either using molds handed down in their families or working freehand. Denise showed me her mold, the little flag reading wesolego alleluja (Happy Easter), and the beautifully embroidered cloth she uses to cover the basket on its way to be blessed. In her family, ethnicity trumps religion. She was planning to make her lamb as soon as she got to her mother’s house in Niagara Falls, so the basket could go to the church for its blessing—this in spite of the fact that neither she nor her mother is Catholic. When I asked why, she replied, “It’s part of being Polish; you just have to do it.”

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