Easter eggs

Ever wondered why we’re so obsessed with eggs at this time of year? It’s a pretty loaded answer...

You could start with the Easter Bunny (who is most likely to be a hare) and how the hare and eggs symbolised fertility and played a part in Pagan spring festivals and offerings to Pagan deities like Oestara (who may, or may not have existed depending on your sources). We can look to the Christians rolling eggs to represent rolling the stone from the entrance to Jesus’ tomb, how an egg in its three parts (shell, yolk and white) can represent the Holy Trinity and how pancake day uses up all the eggs before their prohibition during Lent. We can follow the christians further back to Mesopotamia 2,000 years ago where eggs were stained red to represent life and death and the blood of Christ. If you wanted to go all the way back, then ostrich eggs were being decorated in Africa 60,000 years ago!

So it’s safe to say this fascination around eggs in Spring isn’t new and if you wanted a more practical and secular view on it, then how about the fact that people were damn happy to have eggs back on their plates after going without all winter. I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know that eggs were seasonal. Having been born and raised miles from the countryside, as far as I was concerned eggs came in cardboard boxes from the supermarket and were in the kitchen every week of the year. As a child I knew that eggs came from chickens but it was a rather abstract concept. I’d never seen a chicken lay an egg and the idea of collecting them from a chicken coop was (and still is) just a picture in mind, an illustration from a children’s book. I didn’t know that you couldn’t eat eggs in the winter because hens aren't laying. You could say a hen’s reproductive cycle is solar powered, once the days darken it all shuts down. If you’re wondering why we can buy eggs from the supermarket all year round it's because egg producers now have the modern day wonders of artificial lighting.

We all know that chickens lay eggs to have babies, but being a townie I didn’t know that an egg has to be fertilised to turn into a chick. This makes sense as we know that male and female animals copulate to produce offspring, so no cock no baby (I am of course abbreviating cockerel, you filthy minded fiends!).

I remember nicking an egg out of the fridge and hiding it in my bedroom, wrapped up in a scarf, warm and snug in the hopes it would hatch and I could have a chick. It didn’t of course much to my disappointment, but it seems I wasn’t the only one to give it a go. A quick Google search turned up an article in The Guardian about a 14 year old boy who bought an incubator off Ebay and tried his luck with a box of duck eggs from Waitrose. 28 days later he had a duckling! According to the sources this was not an immaculate conception but a rogue male chick who had dodged a bullet by hiding in with the ladies and got lucky. As egg producers don’t want this sort of trouble, chicken farms are female only. Of course when an egg hatches you don’t know what you’re going to get so obviously there are as many male chicks as females but I will spare you the heartache and omit what happens to the males, my dad told me when I was a teenager and I’ll never forgive him for it.

So on a chirpier note, let’s talk about chicks of the chocolate variety or eggs which are more traditional. Although perhaps not as traditional as you may think. Here’s a historical soundbite to throw at someone as they bite into an easter egg. Chocolate eggs weren’t a thing until the 1700’s and it all began by filling egg shells with melted chocolate (among the upper classes of course). Fry and Sons produced the first chocolate eggs in Britain and then Cadburys jumped on the idea and made a form of chocolate that could be moulded and from then on chocolate eggs were easier to make and available to all that could afford them.