Decorated ostrich egg, rebuilt from pieces from a grave in Naqada, Egypt. c.3600BC. Source: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Just for fun, I thought I’d sketch a very brief history of Easter eggs, their relationship to the Easter Bunny, and throw in a few Easter-themed culinary ideas at the same time.

In Britain we eat over 12 billion eggs annually, mainly the standardized brown hen’s variety (and standardization, of course, means that our eggs are graded and priced accordingly), but we also have the opportunity to enjoy those special breed varieties that produce smaller eggs with coloured, speckled shells.  We also enjoy the much bigger and richer white-shelled duck eggs and the much smaller and more delicate quail eggs.  We are a very eggy nation.  So why did such an everyday item become such a fixture of a religious holiday?

The earliest known eggs were laid by dinosaurs.  Today ostriches are the layers of the largest eggs. In the prehistoric savannahs of the eastern Sahara, before the deserts claimed the land at around 4500BC, ostrich eggs were valued for the dietary value, with high protein and fat content, and their shells were used to make beautiful bead bracelets and necklaces.  A friend of mine was given one by his friends when his Sahara archaeology PhD was awarded.  I have no idea how he cooked it!

A hen posing on the grass, 1447. Bibliothèque d’Amiens Métropole (Bibliothèque Louis Aragon), Ms. 399 (Livre des propriétés des choses), folio 145r.  Source: The Medieval Bestiary.

Eggs were only seasonally available, laying during long periods of sunlight.  Today artificial light permits year-round farming, but prior to modern farming methods, hens laid eggs between spring and late autumn.  Winter was largely egg-free.  The first eggs of spring were something to celebrate.  Before the arrival of intensive farming with artificial lighting all year round, eggs were still prized rather than being taken pretty much for granted as we do in Britain today. Both chickens and hen eggs were much smaller. English chickens started increasing in size from the late Middle Ages and continued to do so throughout the post-medieval period.  In the earlier Middle Ages, when payment could be made in products rather than coinage, eggs were an important contributor to livelihoods, supplementing purchase prices, salaries, taxes and loan repayments, and serving as offerings and gifts.  For a wonderfully exotic Medieval stuffed eggs from the Mediterranean (with saffron, herbs and spices and curd cheese) see the recipe on the Lavender and Lovage blog.

1899 German postcard showing an osterhase couple carrying eggs. Source: The German Way

Although chicks are now associated with Easter, in the 1600s the Easter egg was connected not with chickens, ducks or quails, but with hares.  The first recorded discussion of the egg-producing hare is in a medical essay by Johannes Richier published in Germany in 1682. The Osterhase, or Easter Hare, was a mythological hare from the Alsace region, producing and hiding colourful eggs for children to find.  One might wonder why an egg-laying hare myth might emerge, and one interesting theory connects to the fact that the hare’s ability to conceive whilst pregnant (called “superfetation”).  This was sometimes believed to be evidence of self-impregnation, which morphed into an association with the Virgin birth and was associated ideas of purity.  Quite how this translates into the Easter egg tradition is probably anyone’s guess, but a plausible theory is recounted by the St Neot’s Museum:  simple nests that hares make on open ground were confused with nests made by ground-nesting birds, leading to the belief that hares laid eggs.  However the story initially emerged, it spread throughout Germany and in the 1700s made the hop to America with German migrants.

White House egg roll race in 1929. Source: Wikipedia

Visually similar in appearance to hares, rabbits are smaller, more prolific and more familiar.  Breeding on a legendary scale, they were an obvious symbol of fertility.  The spring egg and the German Osterhase eventually merged together to become the Easter Bunny, a rabbit whose role is to provide decorative eggs to children as symbols of renewal in spring.

In spite of superfetation an egg-laying Easter bunny did not dovetail particularly neatly into serious-minded Christian doctrine, but some traditions were difficult to ignore and more acceptable alternatives emerged, not least the association of the egg with the resurrection of Jesus. In this Christian legitimization of eggy celebrations, the shell of the egg is the tomb of Jesus and the chick within is Jesus awaiting resurrection.

It might seem a bit of a stretch to see how the religious interpretation could be translated into Easter egg hunts, in which eggs, sometimes painted in bright colours and sometimes wrapped in colourful paper, were hidden on a trail for children to find, but this was all part of a community celebration of Christ’s resurrection.  In some parts of England the “pace egg” (from Paschal, another term for Easter) were hard-boiled eggs that could be given as gifts and used in games, such as Preston’s annual egg-rolling event, which is echoed in Washington DC where an White House annual egg roll is an unexpected side to presidential living.  Closely related is the pace egg play, again still performed annually at some places in England.

Cadbury’s Easter Egg advert in 1925. Source: St Neot’s Museum

I suppose that from egg rolling and pace egg plays it was a relatively small step in the new age of industrial advances and experimentation to replace an actual egg with a sweet pseudo-egg, and in Britain it was the Frys and Cadbury’s brands that led the charge, producing the first moulded chocolate eggs in the mid 1870s.  The tradition of enclosing chocolate eggs in ribbons and decorative wrappings became a sure-fire winner on a national scale.  Decorative and shiny foil was both ornamental and helped to keep the chocolate fresh, whilst glossy cardboard packaging propped up the awkward shape.  Prototypes of the Cadbury’s Creme Egg began to appear in the 1960s, but the branded success story was first launched in 1971, one of those Marmite love-or-hate moments (hate, in my case – far too icky sweet!).

Polish Easter eggs. By Praktyczny Przewodnik. Source: Wikimedia Commons CC BY 2.0

In central and eastern Europe, real hard-boiled eggs continue to be an important part of the celebration, usually painted with traditional decorative themes, like the ones right.  At the outbreak of the Russian war on Ukraine I wrote a short post about a traditional Ukrainian egg recipe (divine – фаршировані яйця). The egg cavity was stuffed with the yolk mashed up with mayonnaise, sour cream, as well as finely chopped chives or spring onions, and the whole lot was topped with a low-cost version of caviar and served on a bed of ramsons (wild garlic leaves), which you can find here.

Not being at all skilled at either confectionery or dessert cookery, and with few artistic skills at my fingertips, my own celebration of Easter below, using Churton honesty eggs, is a rather more mundane and sugar-depleted affair for Good Friday.

Eggs marbled by boiling, then randomly cracking the egg shell and then adding food dye to the water to create the marbled effect.

My egg doodles on hard-boiled hen eggs, below, were modeled not on eastern European examples, to which they bear a surprising if faint resemblance, but on the elaborate doodles that I have been producing since childhood.  It’s so much more difficult to do this sort of thing on the rather slippery surface  of a hen’s egg, and let’s face it, I’m no Grayson Perry.  I assumed that the trick with the hand-painted egg would be to find some way of holding it still whilst I drew on it.  I first tried to use a cocktail stick poked firmly into the end of the hard-boiled egg, and then jammed into a ball of blue-tack (plasticine and variants thereof would work well too). The blue-tack was on a saucer so that I could turn the egg without getting my hands covered in still-wet ink. It was a monumental failure for the sort of detail that I was attempting so I gave up and picked up, the egg holding it in one hand and drawing with the other (and getting covered in indelible ink in the process). Here are my very crudely rendered attempts, but although they are pretty poor it was a lot of fun, even if a rather time-wasting pursuit  🙂

Seriously more successful are the shortbread biscuits that my friend Helen Anderson made with her grandchildren, using bright piped icing to create the decorative features. Love them!  Really pretty, really bright and very celebratory.  And I bet they were delicious too.

Lovely home-made Easter biscuits, courtesy of Helen Anderson who both made them and sent me the photos of the biscuits and the icing. Copyright Helen Anderson

Happy Easter!

Watercolour by Helen Anderson, painted from one she found, and used with permission. Gorgeous. Copyright Helen Anderson.

Beautifully coloured and speckled eggs of common garden birds . By Henrik Grönvold, from ‘British Birds’ by Kirkman & Jourdain, 1966. With thanks to Helen Anderson not only for sending me the image but for tracking down the source.