Christopher Pincher drinks fino sherry with Withnail and I

each dish and baking on a high heat until the whites set.

Having started with huevos flamenca, anyone who ends the meal with a liquorous soufflé and vanilla custard, or with îles flottantes, or crème brûlée will have no sense of an excess of eggs.

for a lone diner, small party, or inexperienced cook, a sweet omelette is a life-enhancing alternative. Ignore conventional recipes. The whites should be sergeant-major stiff and gently cooked in butter. If yokes slightly thickened with syrup are withheld until cooking is well under way, a buoyant, frothy mixture will rise in the pan, to be faintly browned or blushed under the grill. Walnuts in honey or bibulous griottes, bound with morello cherry jam, make perfect fillings.

If the omelette seems too chancy, or the party is too large, and a soufflé too difficult, Spanish monks and nuns have created egg-based confections, so rich in sugar that they make eaters feel gratifyingly abstemious: ordinary digestions cannot withstand large quantities, nor can ordinary palates crave indelicate portions.

For tocinos del cielo — literally, bacons of heaven — egg yolks are slowly blended with clear syrup and cooked to an almost solid consistency in a bain marie. Yemas de Santa Teresa, psychotropically powerful yokes, aptly named after Ávila’s incomparable Carmelite ecstatic, are best if the syrup is very thick but lightened in flavour with the aroma of lemons: rolled into balls, chilled and dusted with icing sugar, heart-threatening, creamy sweetmeats result. By stirring very finely ground almonds into the mixture, you can make marzipan of unrivalled intensity.

If you eat too much, you may feel as if Lenten penance extends into Easter. In judicious quantities, the confections will be as restorative as a resurrection, and will get you ready for spring as sure as eggs is eggs.