5 cracking Easter egg facts
Chocolate, cardboard, painted or Fabergé – we take a look at the fascinating facts behind Easter eggs
It’s all about fresh starts
For centuries, eggs have been associated with rebirth and new beginnings, making them a fitting symbol for spring when new life replaces the harshness of winter. The Christian church adopted this idea – and eggs became a symbol for the Resurrection and later a key part of Easter, traditionally eaten at the end of the Lent fast. Amid concerns that this Christian Easter message has become lost over the years, the Real Easter Egg company (www. realeasteregg.co.uk) has launched Fair Trade eggs with a booklet in the box telling the Easter story.
It didn’t all start with chocolate…
The earliest Easter eggs were hens’ or ducks’ eggs painted in bright colours with vegetable dye and charcoal and presented to children on Easter Sunday. The household accounts of Edward I, for the year 1290, recorded an expense of 18 pennies for 450 eggs to be gold-leafed and coloured as Easter gifts. In Victorian times, cardboard and satin Easter eggs filled with gifts and chocolate were in vogue.
Chocolate eggs were a real challenge
JS Fry of Bristol made the first chocolate Easter egg in 1873. Initially it was a slow-going process, and many were solid not hollow, until a new method was found to make liquid chocolate flow into moulds. Early ones were made of bitter dark chocolate and filled with sugar-coated drops or decorated with chocolate piping and marzipan flowers.
Don’t get egg on your face!
There are plenty of unusual traditions associated with Easter eggs, one of the oldest being the medieval festival of egg throwing. Always held in church, the priest would throw a hard-boiled egg around the choirboys! Whoever was holding the egg when the clock struck 12 got to keep it. Egg rolling (‘til it breaks) is still a popular Easter Sunday tradition.
The tallest and the most expensive
There have been plenty of attempts to create the biggest Easter egg. The tallest, made in Italy in 2011, stood 34ft 1.5 in tall. The most expensive – a jewelled egg featuring a diamond-set cockerel (pictured below) made under the supervision of the famous Peter Carl Fabergé – sold for nearly £9 million in 2007.
If you laid all the Cadbury Creme Eggs made in a year from end to end, they would stretch from their home in Bournville, Birmingham to Sydney, Australia