The Many Colours of Easter Eggs.

The Easter food theme would hardly be complete without some instructions in the art of making and decorating your own Easter Eggs, now would it?

In the days before little bottles of violently intense artificial food colouring, there were other artificial food colourings (some quite alarming-sounding) and even a few very natural ones.

From Jenny June’s American Cookery Book (1866), two recipes containing multiple ideas for colouring eggs.

Easter Eggs 1.
Immerse eggs in hot water a few minutes, inscribe names or dates etc., on the shell with the end of a tallow candle or with grease, then place them in a pan of hot water saturated with cochineal or other dye-woods; the parts over which the tallow has passed being impervious to the dye, the eggs come out presenting white inscriptions on colored grounds. Or boil the eggs hard and paint subjects on them with a camel’s hair brush, or etch them with a steel pen in India ink. Or dye the shells first, then scrape off the dye in any design desired.

Easter Eggs 2.
An egg boiled in the coat of an onion will turn to a beautiful brown color. To give a blue color, boil the eggs in powdered indigo with the addition of a tea-spoonful of dilute sulphuric acid. To give an egg a mottled appearance, with bright colors blended, and contrasted, obtain pieces of silk of the brightest colors, cut them into bits an inch long, half an inch wide, add a few chips of logwood and a little tumeric; let the egg be well inbedded in this so that the silk may form a thick layer round it, sew it up in very coarse brown paper and boil it half an hour or more.

And from Cookery for Working Men’s Wives (1890)

Colored eggs for Easter.
Eggs can be dyed a pretty colour with the juice of a beet root, or the peel of onions boiled in the water; or, if you have a patch of fancy print, bind it round the egg and boil it, and it will leave the impression. Wash the eggs clean before boiling. Easter eggs should be boiled for ten minutes.

If you want to make your own ‘eggs’ from blanc mange as in the recipe given yesterday for the nest of eggs, but found the instructions intimidating, here is another version with rather clearer instructions.

Easter Eggs.
Make a quart of blanc-mange in the usual way. Empty 12 egg shells through a small hole in one end and rinse well with cold water. Divide the blanc-mange into four parts. Leave one white; stir into another 2 beaten yolks; into a third chocolate; into the fourth cochineal coloring. Heat the yellow over the fire long enough to cook the egg. Fill the shells with
the various mixtures, three of each. Set upright in a pan of meal or flour to keep them steady, and leave until next day. Then fill a glass bowl more than three-fourths full with nice lemon jelly, broken into sparkling fragments. Break away the egg shells, bit by bit, from the blanc-mange. If the insides of the shells have been properly rinsed and left wet, there will be
no trouble about this. Pile the vari-colored "eggs" upon the bed of jelly, lay shred preserved orange peel, or very finely shred candied citron about them, and surprise the children with
them as an Easter day dessert.
Cookery Craft: As Practiced in 1894 by the Women of the South Church, St Johnsbury, Vt. (1894)

Quotation for the Day.

Good Idea: Finding Easter eggs on Easter Sunday.
Bad Idea: Finding Easter eggs at Thanksgiving.
(by Anon.)

And Now for Easter Pudding.

The Easter food theme continues today with three very different versions of Easter Pudding.
Firstly, from The Original Buckeye Cookbook (1905)

Easter Pudding.
One pint sweet milk, yolks of three eggs, two tablespoons corn-starch, three of sugar, and a little salt. Put milk in custard kettle, and when boiling add sugar, then starch dissolved in
a little cold milk, and lastly yolks ; beat, and let cook a few minutes, and turn out in broad dish to cool. When it stiffens around the edges, transfer it, a few spoonfuls at a time, to a bowl, and whip vigorously with an egg beater. Flavor with rose-water. It should be like a yellow sponge; when put into a crown mold.
Make day before wanted. When ready to serve turn out upon dish, fill centre with whipped cream, flavored with vanilla and heaped up as high as it will stand. Pile more whipped cream about the base.
Or With Fruit, while the corn-starch mixure is still hot put a little in a large mold and turn to let it run and leave a thin coating all over inside. Ornament by sticking candied cherries to this in any regular forms liked, fill loosely with fresh or preserved fruits, macaroons and crumbed sponge cake, soaked in orange juice, and a little citron cut very thin; then pour in slowly until full remainder of corn-starch, which must have been kept warm by standing in hot water so that it would not stiffen.
Let stand in cold place all night to become very firm and serve with Marigold Sauce.
Marigold Sauce.
Four tablespoons butter seven of best powered sugar, half cup fruit juice, cup cream, half a nutmeg, yolk of six eggs ; scald cream in custard kettle, beat butter, sugar and eggs together; add nutmeg, pour hot cream over all, add juice and serve.

Secondly, a very elegant dish for gentlefolk, from The Country Gentleman’s Magazine (London, 1868) – a recipe which appears, of course in the section for Country Gentlewomen.


An Easter Pudding.
To 4 oz of fresh rice flour. add by slow degrees half a pint of cold new milk. being careful to keep the mixture free from lumps. Pour it into a pint of boiling milk. and stir it without intermission over a very clear and gentle fire for three or four minutes; then throw in 2 oz. of fresh butter and 2 of pounded sugar, and continue the boiling for eight or ten minutes longer. Let the rice cool down, and give it an occasional stir to prevent the surface from hardening. When it has stood for fifteen or twenty minutes, pour to it a quarter of a pint of cold mil,k and stir well into it a few grains of salt, the grated rind of a large sound lemon, five full sized or six small eggs properly cleared and well whisked, first by themselves and then with two additional ounces of pounded sugar. Beat up these ingredients thoroughly together, pour them into a deep dish which has been rubbed with butter, and in which about a tablespoonful should be left liquefied, that it may rise to the surface of the pudding; strew lightly upon it 4 oz. of clean dry currants, and bake it gently from three quarters of an hour to a full hour. Some nutmeg, a spoonful or two of brandy, and an ounce or two of citron sliced thin can be added if thought desirable. The pudding will be excellent if the baking be well conducted. A border of ratafias laid on the edge of the dish and fastened to it with a little beaten white of egg mingled with a dust of flour, after it is drawn from the oven, will give a nice finish to its appearance; or cakes of pale puff crust not so large as a shilling, may be used for the purpose when preferred. Should a richer pudding be liked, use for it the yolks of seven or of eight eggs and the whites of four, and if it be baked in an American oven, let it be placed sufficiently high in front of the fire for the heat to be well reflected to the under part; for when this is not attended to, recipes will often fail from want of more uniform baking - the surface of a dish being even overdone, while the inside has been but slightly acted on by the fire. When time will permit it, is better to allow the rice for this pudding to become nearly or quite cold before the eggs are stirred to it.

And last, but by no means least, a dish guaranteed to delight the little ones. From the San Rafael Cook Book (1906), I give you the recipe for a nest of Easter eggs:

Easter Pudding.
Make 1 quart of wine, orange or lemon jelly; mold in a round basin in the center of which you have three saucers turned upside down. Save 1 dozen egg shells opened at the small end, and put them in cold water. Make 1 quart of corn starch blanc mange; fill three of the shells, and stand them in a pan of bran or meal. Bruise a few spinach leaves, squeeze out a few drops of the color, add to a little of the mixture, and fill three more shells. Color some with chocolate, some with the yolks of eggs, and some pink from a little of Knox’s pink gelatine. While you are preparing the eggs, have the skin from 2 oranges or 2 lemons boiling; when tender, remove all of the white inside [and discard], and cut [the colored peel] in little strips with scissors; then boil in syrup until clear, and spread out to dry. The next day, turn out the jelly; around the edge of the nest put the peel for straw. Remove the shells from the eggs and pile in the nest; put whipped cream all around the jelly. This is a very pretty dish and delights the children.

Quotation for the Day.

The best part of Easter is eating your children’s candy while they are sleeping, and then trying to convince them in the morning that the Easter rabbit came with one ear.
Anna Quindlen.

Easter Eating.

Easter approaches, and for me and mine that means several days at the beach – with frequent meal breaks of course, so food is very much on my mind (what else is new, you ask?)

There have been many previous Easter food stories in this blog, so before I start today, let me re-cap what we have considered over the last few years.

We have learned that at different times and in different places such things as Primrose Pottage, Sedgemoor Easter Cakes, and Oatmeal Pudding have been enjoyed at this season. Another post in another year left us awestruck by the scale of the Lord Mayor of London’s Easter dinner in 1848. One year we found out that in 1879 the United States’ President Rutherford Hayes, and First Lady Lucy Hayes, hosted the very first Easter Egg Roll on the lawn of the White House.

As for recipes, there have been many with an Easter theme. One post in the past gave three different Easter Cake recipes, and in case that was not enough we have also had a White Easter Cake from an Australian wartime cookery book (1943), and a British wartime Chocolate Cake for Easter made with the dreaded and dreadful dried egg. Yet another post had Easter Biscuits and Bunny Rolls. In the posts of Easter 2007, we celebrated the egg in a whole week of posts containing five centuries of recipes (here, here, here, here, and here.)

It might be thought that we have exhausted the topic of Easter food, but I assure you we have not. We have not yet had Easter Soup. Sadly for those of us in the Southern hemisphere who are wending our way through autumn, this recipe is for spring greens, especially those of the wild variety – which should inspire the urban foragers amongst you.


Easter Soup.
Gather the young sprouts and leaves of wild herbs when their first shoots appear, such as dandelion, sheep-sorrel, yarrow, nettle, lady’s mantle (Alchemilla vulgaris), strawberry leaves, etc. Take a handful of each; rinse repeatedly in cold water and drain in a colander. Do not squeeze them, lest you lose some of their juices. Chop fine; put into some good broth, and boil gently for about half an hour. Mix butter the size of a walnut with a teaspoonful of flour and drop it into half a cup of boiling cream or milk. When cooking has dissolved it, add it to the soup. Serve with poached eggs on top, or the custard the recipe of which I give you in my last.
Letters to a Young Housekeeper (New York, 1892) by Marie Hansen Taylor

Quotation for the Day.
Large, naked, raw carrots are acceptable as food only to those who live in hutches eagerly awaiting Easter.
Fran Lebowitz

Easter Cakes.

It is holiday time for me for the next nine days, and very glad I am of it too. Stories will still magically pop up at the appointed time however, thanks to a mad rush of writing before departure and especially to modern technology, which allows them to be pre-posted.

Many things go by the name of ‘Easter Cake’, and today I give you a small sample and wish you bon choix!

Easter Cake.
Take 1 lb butter to 2 lbs of fine flour, and mix thoroughly well together. Add 1 lb of sifted sugar, 1 lb of currants, and beat in a separate basic eight eggs to a froth. Strain some saffron (about four pennyworth) – two or three times into the basin, and add one shilling’s worth of brandy. Beat all well together, and pour into the other basin containing the flour. If it is too moist, add a little more flour; if the effect is contrary, put either another egg or a little more brandy. The dough is then set out in any sized cakes required on a baking sheet, but they should be about a couple of inches thick, and when baked present a light brown appearance. The quantity of saffron can be varied according to taste, some people liking the cakes more highly flavoured than others.
[The Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle (Portsmouth, England), March 7, 1891]

Easter Cakes.
Scotch shortbread is frequently substituted for Easter cake. I give a recipe for one kind of Easter Cake.
1 ½ lb flour, ½ lb sugar, ⅓ lb butter, ½ lb currants, 1 ½ oz candied peel sliced, powdered cinnamon to taste, the yolks of four and whites of three eggs, a glass of brandy, and half a teaspoon of sal volatile. Mix the dry ingredients first, well beat the eggs, add them, and thoroughly mix. Roll out to any thickness, make into round cakes, and bake in a quick oven.
[Western Mail (Cardiff, Wales), Saturday, April 17, 1897]

Child’s Easter Cake.
2 cups sugar.
1 cup butter.
3 cups flour.
2 teaspoons baking powder.
Whites of seven eggs beaten to a stiff froth with a pinch of salt.
Cream butter and sugar. Add flour and baking powder, then milk. Flavor with extract of almond. Fold in eggs last. Slow oven for one hour. When cool, cover with white icing. Ornament center with candy rabbit and row of pink, blue, and brown sugar eggs around edge.
[Washington Post, Jan. 13, 1929]

Quotation for the Day.

If you are ever at a loss to support a flagging conversation, introduce the subject of eating.
Leigh Hunt

Street Boys Fare.

I am too intrigued by the street vendors of Victorian London to cast them aside just yet, so I hope you are not bored by another post on the topic.

As we discovered, the street food was not for the hoi-polloi, but for the folk lower down the social scale, many (perhaps most) of whom had limited or no cooking facilities in their homes. As always, the well-to-do can rationalize the situation of the poor, and I give you a fine Victorian London example today, from a gentleman who almost convinces that the street boys eat as well as the gentlemen in their clubs – Nay! Better, because cheaper, and more fun!

From yesterday’s source (Mayhew’s London Poor), we have:

Mr. Albert Smith, who is an acute observer in all such matters, says, in a lively article on the Street Boys of London:

"The kerb is his club, offering all the advances of one of those institutions without any subscription or ballot. Had he a few pence, he might dine equally well as at Blackwall, and with the same variety of delicacies without going twenty yards from the pillars of St. Clement's churchyard. He might begin with a water souchée of eels, varying his first course with pickled whelks, cold fried flounders, or periwinkles. Whitebait, to be sure, he would find a difficulty in procuring, but as the more cunning gourmands do not believe these delicacies to be fish at all, but merely little bits of light pie-crust fried in grease; - and as moreover, the brown bread and butter is after all the grand attraction, - the boy might soon find a substitute. Then would come the potatoes, apparently giving out so much steam that the can which contains them seems in momentary danger of blowing up; large, hot, mealy fellows, that prove how unfounded were the alarms of the bad-crop-ites; and he might next have a course of boiled feet of some animal or other, which he would be certain to find in front of the gin-shop. Cyder-cups perhaps he would not get; but there would be gingerbeer from the fountain, at 1d. per glass; and instead of mulled claret, he could indulge in hot elder cordial; whilst for dessert he could calculate upon all the delicacies of the season, from the salads at the corner of Wych-street to the baked apples at Temple Bar. None of these things would cost more than a penny a piece; some of them would be under that sum; and since as at Verey's, and some other foreign restaurateurs, there is no objection to your dividing the "portions," the boy might, if he felt inclined to give a dinner to a friend, get off under 6d. There would be the digestive advantage too of moving leisurely about from one course to another; and, above all, there would be no fee to waiters." After alluding to the former glories of some of the streetstands, more especially of the kidney pudding establishments which displayed rude transparencies, one representing the courier of St. Petersburg riding six horses at once for a kidney pudding, Mr. Smith continues - "But of all these eating-stands the chief favourite with the boy is the potato-can. They collect around it as they would do on 'Change, and there talk over local matters, or discuss the affairs of the adjacent cab-stand, in which they are at times joined by the waterman whom they respect, more so perhaps than the policeman; certainly more than they do the street-keeper, for him they especially delight to annoy, and they watch any of their fellows eating a potato, with a curiosity and an attention most remarkable, as if no two persons fed in the same manner, and they expected something strange or diverting to happen at every mouthful."

Kidney pudding
Procure one ox or eight mutton kidneys, which cut into slices the thickness of half-a-crown piece; lay them upon a dish, seasoning well with black pepper and salt, and shaking one ounce of flour over; mix all well together to absorb the flour and seasoning, then have a pudding basin lined as directed for beefsteak pudding, finish, boil, and serve as there directed. A pudding made with one pound of steak and a beef kidney is also very excellent.
The Modern Housewife, Alexis Soyer, 1851

Quotation for the Day.

The weather here is gorgeous. It's mild and feels like it's in the eighties. The hot dog vendors got confused because of the weather and thought it was spring, so they accidentally changed the hot dog water in their carts.
David Letterman.

Good Friday Buns.

March 21 ...

It is Good Friday today according to the Christian calendar, and the day when it is traditional to eat hot cross buns. Although the phrase ‘cross buns’ was first recorded in 1733, the tradition appears to have very ancient roots. ‘Bread’ in one form or another has played an important symbolic role in all cultures in which grain is a staple (as does rice in Eastern cultures), and it seems that bread marked with a cross-like symbol may go back a very long way indeed – perhaps to Ancient Greece or Ancient Egypt. The original ‘cross’ may in fact have represented the crossed horns of an ox – a traditional sacrifice in many times and places.

Today I want to consider when ‘cross buns’ became ‘hot’. I don’t know for sure (another project!), but it was certainly well and truly established by the mid-nineteenth century. Henry Mayhew, in his amazing social study London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those that Will Work Those that Cannot Work, Those that Will Not Work described the street sellers of Hot Cross Buns in 1851.

“The sellers of the Good Friday buns are principally boys, and they are of mixed classes — costers' boys, boys habitually and boys occasionally street-sellers, and boys street-sellers for that occasion only. One great inducement to embark in the trade is the hope of raising a little money for the Greenwich Fair of the following Monday. I am informed that 500 persons are employed on Good Friday in the streets of London in the sale of hot-cross buns, each itinerant selling upon the day's average six dozen halfpenny, and seven dozen penny buns, for which he will take 12s. 6d. (his profits being 3d. in the shilling or 3s. I½ d.). One person informed me that last Good Friday he had sold during the day forty dozen penny buns, for which he received 50s. The bun-selling itinerants derive their supplies principally from the wholesale pastrycooks, and, in a less degree, from the small bakers and pastrycooks, who work more for "the trade" than themselves. … The itinerants carry their baskets slung on their arm, or borne upon the head. A flannel or green baize is placed at the bottom of the basket and brought over the buns, after which a white cloth is spread over the top of the baize, to give it a clean appearance. A vendor of " hof-cross buns " has to provide himself with a basket, a flannel (to keep the buns warm), and a cloth, to give a clean appearance to his commodities.”

Last year on this day I gave you a recipe for Hot Cross Buns from the good old reliable Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery (1870’s). Here is an alternative recipe from the same book.

Good Friday Buns.
(commonly called Hot Cross Buns)
Rub a quarter of a pound of butter into two pounds of flour. Add a pinch of salt; then mix a wine-glassful of fresh, thick yeast with a pint and a half of warmed milk, and stir these into the flour till it forms a light batter. Put the batter in a warm place to rise. When sufficiently risen, work into it half a pound of sugar, half a pound of currants, half a nutmeg, grated, and a quarter of an ounce of powdered mace. Knead these well into the dough, making it up into buns, and place them on buttered baking tins. Make a cross on them with the back of a knife, brush a little clarified butter over the top, and let them stand a quarter of an hour before the fire. Bake in a good oven.

Sufficient for two dozen buns.

Monday’s Story …

What flavour scones?

Quotation for the Day …

The best part of Easter is eating your children’s candy while they are sleeping, and then trying to convince them in the morning that the Easter rabbit came with one ear. Anna Quindlen.

Good Friday Buns

Today, April 6th …

Hot cross buns are traditionally eaten on this day wherever there is a historically Christian culture. The cross is intended to symbolise the crucifixion, and in their purest form the buns have no butter or milk or eggs, as befits the season of Lent.

As with so many traditional foods, a large number of myths abound, and these range from the amusing to the ridiculous. One story insists that the buns date back to pagan rituals, but as the first recorded us of the phrase ‘cross buns’ was in 1733, this seems a tad unlikely.

Some foods never date, and sweet, fruity bread buns are one of them. I give you this recipe from the ever-reliable Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery (circa 1870’s). Vary them at your whim. I believe some people even put choc-chips in them.

Good Friday Buns (commonly called Hot Cross Buns)
Rub a quarter of a pound of butter into two pounds of flour. Add a pinch of salt; then mix a wine-glassful of fresh, thick yeast with a pint and a half of warmed milk, and stir these into the flour till it forms a light batter. Put the batter in a warm place to rise. When sufficiently risen, work into it half a pound of currants, half a nutmeg, grated, and a quarter of an ounce of powdered mace. Knead these well into the dough, make it up into buns, and place them on buttered baking tins. Make a cross on them with the back of a knife, brush a little clarified butter over the top, and let them stand a quarter of an hour before the fire. Bake in a good oven.

Monday’s Story …

Next week as befits the Easter Season, we will have an Egg Theme. We will eat our way through five centuries of Egg Recipes, starting with the 16th C on Monday.