Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Easter Eggs
Easter Eggs
To color Easter eggs red, wash them thoroughly and place in a saucepan of water with a little cochineal, carmine or logwood, and boil for ten minutes. When done leave them in the colored fluid for about five minutes; then take them out, wipe dry and rub over with an oiled cloth. Use spinach for green, saffron for yellow. By tying the eggs up in the outside skins of onions, a pretty maize is obtained.
A pretty dish of Easter eggs may be prepared as follows: Pour one pint of cold water over one ounce of gelatine, and let it steep for four hours; add one pound of sugar and three pints of boiling milk, and stir over the fire until the sugar and the gelatine are quite dissolved; then strain and divide into four parts. Stir into one part two tablespoonfuls of sweet vanilla-flavored chocolate; into another the beaten yolks of two eggs; a little prepared cochineal or very red fruit syrup into the third, and leave the fourth white. Flavor the white with rose-water, the red with essence of almonds, the brown with vanilla, and the yellow with essence of lemon. Put the yellow portion over the fire and let it heat long enough to cook the eggs, stirring continually. Have a dozen egg-shells ready, emptied through a very small hole made at one end of the shell, and rinse well in cold water, changing it several times. Do not drain or dry them, as the insides must be quite wet when the shells are filled. Fill three shells with each of the mixtures, standing them upright in a pan of flour or finely-powdered salt, and let them remain all night. On the following day fill a glass dish three parts full with white wine jelly cut in pieces, and on this arrange the eggs, having first peeled off the shells. Scatter among them candied orange and citron peel cut into thin shreds.
Two things are going on here: a set of natural dye baths for hard-boiled shells, and an elaborate moulded cream set inside emptied eggshells. The second half is where the recipe fails by current standards, and the failure is not fixable by adjusting a time or a temperature.
- Raw shells, sweet milk, and a night at room temperatureEmptied shells are deliberately left wet and unsterilised, filled with a sugared milk-and-gelatine mixture, and stood out all night. Eggshell exteriors and the membrane inside are the classic carrier for Salmonella, and a sugared dairy mixture held overnight at room temperature is close to an ideal growth medium. The base is made with boiling milk, but of the four finished mixtures only the one containing beaten yolks goes back over the fire, and that only long enough to cook the eggs.
- LogwoodCochineal and carmine are insect-derived colourings still used in food, and saffron, spinach and onion skins are all edible. Logwood (Haematoxylum campechianum) is a textile and histology dye, not a food colour, and has no modern food approval. It does not belong in a pan with anything that will be eaten.
- Essence of almondsThe almond flavouring of this period was frequently true bitter-almond oil, which carries hydrocyanic acid unless it has been specifically rectified. Modern almond extract is benzaldehyde-based and harmless, but the original instruction cannot be read as calling for that.
- The gelatine is not what you haveAn ounce of nineteenth-century sheet or shred gelatine varied considerably in strength and is not reliably equivalent to modern powdered gelatine, so the quantity here is not transferable even setting the other problems aside. Any comparable dessert should be built from a current recipe with its own ratios.
- ScaleOne pint of water, three pints of milk and a pound of sugar make a great deal more cream than a dozen eggshells will take; the printed recipe simply does not account for the surplus.
- If you want coloured Easter eggsHard-boiling in water with onion skins, saffron, spinach or cochineal is sound and still worth doing, provided the eggs go into the refrigerator afterwards and the dye pan holds nothing but food ingredients. The oiled cloth at the end is only for shine.
Oscar Tschirky's book gathers the working repertoire of the Waldorf's kitchens around the turn of the twentieth century, and this entry is really two traditions stacked together. Colouring eggs with onion skins, saffron and cochineal is old European household practice, recorded long before commercial dye tablets appeared; the onion-skin maize colour in particular is still widely used across much of Central and Eastern Europe. The second half belongs to the Victorian confectioner's love of trompe-l'oeil: blancmanges and Bavarian creams set inside blown eggshells, then peeled and heaped on chopped wine jelly, appear in English and American cookery books through the second half of the nineteenth century as a spring showpiece. The four-colour division — chocolate, yolk-yellow, cochineal-pink and plain white, each with its own flavouring — is characteristic of a hotel pastry department that could afford the labour, and the candied orange and citron shreds scattered over the top are the same garnish that finished other Waldorf desserts.