For Easter cooks, there is one fundamental question: Is yours a lamb family or a ham family?

Like most Americans, mine are ham people. My mother grew up on a dairy farm in northern Wisconsin. When the weather turned cold, they slaughtered a few pigs and hung the hams in the curing room. In the spring, after a long Lenten diet of self-denial, they pulled out a ham and it became Easter dinner.

We should have probably been a lamb family. My parents’ roots are in Italy and Norway. Italians do all kinds of great things with spring lamb, some of the best of it coming from Abruzzo, the region my maternal grandparents were from. The Norwegians go wild for lamb and oranges at Easter.

But the family tree never came into play. (And I’m sure they had no idea that some scholars link Easter ham to an ancient Babylonian myth about a god named Tammuz who was killed by a pig.) For my older relatives, the choice was simply a matter of economics and agriculture. Like most of their neighbors, they raised pigs for the family table, not sheep.