Paaskelam: Lammekoelle med Hvidlog og Rosmarin

Easter arrives in Denmark with a shift you feel before you see it. The days stretch. The light turns from grey to something warmer, almost golden in the late afternoon. Crocuses push through in the parks, and in kitchen windows across Copenhagen, the first branches of forsythia appear in glass vases. This is when the lamb comes out.

Paaskelam is the centerpiece of the Danish Easter table, the meal that gathers the family after the long, dark months of winter. A whole lammekoelle, a bone-in leg of lamb, studded with slivers of garlic, rubbed with rosemary and thyme, and roasted slowly until the meat is rosa at the bone: pink, tender, full of juice. It's not complicated food. It's generous food, cooked with love, meant to be carved at the table and shared with people you've missed. Where flaeskesteg belongs to juleaften and mortensgaas to November, paaskelam belongs to this moment, the first real feast of spring.

Two things will make or break this roast. First, the garlic. You'll cut small incisions across the surface and push slivers deep into the flesh, so the flavor reaches the meat from within, not just from the crust. Second, the resting. When the lamb comes out of the oven, you let it rest for a full twenty minutes under foil. This is not optional. Resting allows the juices, which the heat has driven to the center of the meat, to redistribute back through the whole leg. Cut too soon and those juices run out onto the board. Wait, and they stay in every slice. You'll know when it's right.