There were two high points to my Easter Sundays when I was a child. First, waking up to find that the Easter Bunny had indeed come a-hopping and left me a chocolate egg at the bottom of my bed. The second was the trip to Butser Hill to roll painted eggs down its grassy slopes.
Egg rolling – aka pace egging – is one of those traditions that retains its tenacious grip on our leisure time long after its significance has passed. Few people will have given up eggs as part of their Lenten fast this year, so their reappearance at the breakfast, lunch and dinner table is not a time for national rejoicing. Nevertheless, pans of food dye will simmer away on Sunday and Monday, staining eggs red, blue and green, and the proud owners will cheer their egg on as it wobbles and tilts its way to the finish line.
For some reason food dyes never give eggs the rich colour I’d expect. Onion skins, on the other hand, can turn eggs a rich brick red, while a spoonful of turmeric makes for a vivid yellow and chopped beetroot a bluish red.
Nostalgically, I remember the eggs tasting particularly, heroically eggy after their roll down the hill. I suspect it was more that I was hungry after running up and down the hillside and anything would’ve tasted good.
A slightly more elegant way to eat your eggs, whether they’ve been rolled or not, is shells, halved and spread with mayonnaise. The recipe below will make a lot of mayo and it will keep for a couple of days in the fridge. Make it with the freshest eggs you can get.
Easter eggs and mayonnaise
For the Easter eggs:
Skins of 3 medium onions
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
12 medium eggs
1. Bring a medium pan of water to the boil, add the onion skins and white wine vinegar and simmer, covered, for 30 minutes.
2. Strain the dye into a heatproof jug and discard the onion skins.
3. Return the water to the saucepan and bring back to a simmer. Add the eggs and simmer for 15 minutes.
4. Remove the eggs from the pan with a slotted spoon and cool on a wire rack (with kitchen towel underneath it).
For the mayonnaise:
2 medium egg yolks
A pinch of English mustard powder
2 tsp white wine vinegar
175ml sunflower oil
50ml extra virgin olive oil
1. Place the egg yolks, mustard powder and vinegar in a bowl with a small pinch of salt and whisk together.
2. Slowly whisk in the sunflower oil, a little dribble at a time, until it has all been used.
3. Slowly whisk in the olive oil – you should have a very thick, creamy mayonnaise. Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary.
Spoon the mayonnaise into the bowl and serve with the Easter eggs.
Thanks for the colouring tip, Jassy – may give this a go.
My mother used to wrap the eggs in onion skins before putting them into a saucepan of boiling water. The result was a mottled patterning on the shells. Not the lovely even dye that you have produced but we could pick out our eggs quite easily as they rolled down the hill.
If I’d had elastic bands, I’d have wrapped the eggs up in the onions skins to get that mottled look – so pretty. But the postman seems to have stopped discarding rubber bands in our doorway, so I’m running dangerously low.
There’s a Chinese receipe for Tea Eggs which involves hard-boiling eggs, cracking them all over – but leaving the shells on – then simmering them for an hour or so in water to which have been added tea leaves (Chinese), soy sauce and star anise. When peeled they too have a mottled surface, and have been lightly flavoured by the tea, the soy and the spice.