Easter
Eggs
Easter
eggs are specially decorated eggs given out to celebrate
the Easter holiday. The
oldest tradition is to use dyed and painted chickens eggs,
but the general modern custom is to substitute eggs made
from chocolate. Easter eggs can be any form of confectionery
such as hollow chocolate eggs wrapped in brightly-colored
foil. Some are delicately constructed of spun sugar and
pastry decoration techniques. The ubiquitous jelly egg
(or jelly bean) is made from sugar-coated pectin candy.
These are often hidden, supposedly by the Easter Bunny,
for children to find on Easter morning.
Decorated
eggs are much older than Easter, and both eggs and rabbits
are age-old fertility symbols. The Passover Seder service
uses a hard-cooked egg flavored with salt water as a symbol
both of new life and the Temple service in Jerusalem.
The Jewish tradition may have come from earlier Roman
Spring feasts.
Easter
egg origin stories abound -- one has an emperor claiming
that the Resurrection was as likely as eggs turning red;
more prosaically the Easter egg tradition may have celebrated
the end of the privations of Lent. Long ago, some cultures
considered eggs as meat, which would have been forbidden
during Lent. One would have been forced to hard boil the
eggs that the chickens produced so as not to waste food,
and for this reason the Spanish dish hornazo (traditionally
eaten in and around Easter) contains hard-boiled eggs
as a primary ingredient.
Easter
eggs are a widely popular symbol of new life in Poland
and other Slavic countries' folk traditions. A batik-like
decorating process known as Pisanka produces intricate,
brilliantly-colored eggs. The celebrated Fabergé
workshops created exquisite jewelled Easter eggs for the
Russian Imperial Court.
There
are many other decoration techniques and numerous traditions
of giving them as a token of friendship, love or good
wishes. A tradition exists in some parts of Britain of
rolling painted eggs down steep hills on Easter Sunday.
When boiling hard-cooked eggs for easter a nice colour
can be achieved by boiling the eggs with onion skin.
source:
From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Happy
Easter!!!
Back to the Easter
Stories
