IN A sweet-toothed nation such as ours, one is never far from a chocolate bar. But it's as the snowdrops wither and the daffodils bloom that our love of the dark stuff takes on its most ritualistic aspect - and its most unusual shape. The annual Easter egg splurge is one tradition that even the most alarming obesity figures can't dent. Not everyone will be forking out the £499 Selfridges is asking for its enormous hand-made example, but few Scottish households won't be cracking open a chocolate egg at some point today.

In essence, the chocolate Easter egg is simply a sugary abstraction of a much older tradition which used eggs - proper ones, from hens - as an emblem of rebirth. Once they would have been hard-boiled, dyed and eaten with vinegar. Fragments of that tradition still exist in children's activities such as painting hard-boiled eggs and rolling them down hills.

But look deeper into the Easter festival and you realise that, across the Christian world and beyond, there are dozens of other culinary traditions vying for attention. Some are purely pragmatic, an acceptance that after the weeks of Lenten fasting, diets needed bolstering and spirits lifting by the addition of meats and sweets. But other dishes, such as the English Simnel cake with its 11 blobs of almond paste representing the 11 loyal disciples, are loaded with meaning and allusion. And for every one that has remained unchanged for centuries, another moves with the times. Take the Maltese Easter "characters" or figolli that fill the shops of Valleta at this time of year and which are made from ground almonds and lemon. They're now as likely to show cars or motorcyles as the fertility symbols of old.

Or how about the Genoese torta pasqualina or Easter Tart, a pie containing parmesan, Swiss chard, artichokes, hard-boiled eggs and spinach? It would once have consisted of 33 layers of pastry, representing the 33 years of Christ's life. But, as chef and restaurateur Antonio Carluccio notes in his book Vegetables: "Today only a few very conservative Genoese families make it in the traditional way. Most people make a much smaller version."

Italian cookery bible The Silver Spoon has a richer variant which adds ricotta but here too the troublesome 33 layers of pastry are reduced to a more manageable two.

Lamb is the meat most associated with Easter. It is, as Nigella Lawson points out in her book Feast, "emphatically symbolic: just as the lamb is sacrificed at the table, so the Lamb of God was sacrificed for us. You could say, then, that like the Eucharist, Easter incorporates an act of symbolic cannibalism, a strange mixture between the primitive and the devotional." Think about that today as you ladle on the mint sauce.

In the Greek Orthodox religion, lamb certainly plays a central part in proceedings. After the traditional midnight mass on Holy Saturday, congregations will eat mageiritsa, a soup made from the liver, lungs, heart and intestines of a lamb - with wild greens, herbs and an egg and lemon sauce thrown in for good measure. Then, on Easter Sunday, they will burn an effigy of Judas on a bonfire and gather to roast a lamb on a spit. The resulting dish is called arni pashalino tis souvlas. The Greeks will also eat tsoureki, a sweet Easter bread baked on Maundy Thursday, braided into long loaves, laced with orange zest and black cumin seeds and then studded with hard-boiled eggs that have been dyed red. The bread's origins go back to Byzantine times and it has remained more or less unchanged since.

The British hot-cross bun is said to date from Saxon times. They marked the buns with a cross to celebrate their goddess Eostre, after whom Easter is named. The hot-cross bun is deeply embedded in British folk traditions. It is celebrated in song, of course, and even today its blend of cinnamon, all spice, nutmeg and cloves give it a delicious out-of-time feel. It famously caused a near riot outside London's Chelsea Bun House at Easter 1792, when supplies ran out. So great was the commotion that the bakery didn't make any the following year, putting up a notice instead. "No cross buns," it read, "but Chelsea buns as usual."