Easter eggs

Why everyone’s talking about...

How come we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection by stuffing our faces with chocolate eggs? Doesn’t seem too logical…

Well, eggs, an emblem of rebirth, were adopted by early Christians as a symbol of the Resurrection. One story is that after the Ascension, a doubting Emperor Tiberius told Mary Magdalene: ‘Christ has no more risen than that egg is red.’ Whereupon the egg he was pointing to turned red. In some religious sects, eggs are still dyed red to represent Jesus’s blood and the cracking of the hollow egg likened to opening his empty tomb. In medieval times, choirboys tossed an egg around and when the clock struck 12, whoever was holding it won. Their prize? The egg.

So how did chocolate eggs come about?

In the 17th and 18th Centuries, eggs made of satin-covered cardboard were given as gifts. Yum! Fry’s of Bristol made the first chocolate one in 1873 – a luxury item made from grainy and bitter dark chocolate. In 1905, Cadbury’s, with its new Dairy Milk variety, put them within everyone’s grasp. Germans created a patterned outside to disguise imperfections – the origin of today’s so-called ‘crocodile finish’ marks.

So it took off…

I’d say. British children now receive an average of 8.8 Easter eggs each year – equal to twice their weekly recommended calorie intake. Creme Eggs are especially popular: Cadbury’s makes 500million a year – Jacob Rees-Mogg MP is a devotee and is reported to keep up to 60 on his desk. An American woman, Miki Sudo, holds the world record for eating 50 Creme Eggs (8,100 calories’ worth) in six minutes 15 seconds.

Any other downsides, apart from all the calories?

Eggs are a bad shape to transport, so there’s lots of wasteful packaging – up to a third of the total weight of an egg.

Can you get other sorts of Easter egg?

There are cheese eggs. And an Indian restaurant in Surrey in 2013 created an Easter egg from chilli peppers that was ten times hotter than a vindaloo. Diners had to sign a disclaimer. Then there are Faberge eggs. In 2007, a diamond-covered example sold for almost £9 million. Every hour, a cockerel made of jewels popped up from the top, flapped its wings four times and crowed. The most expensive non-jewelled chocolate egg went for £7,000 in 2012. Weighing almost eight stone, it featured edible gold leaf and was decorated with 12 smaller eggs.

Thanks for eggs-plaining all that without ‘cracking’ any eggs-cruciating puns.

It’s the l-Easter I could do.