Eggs for Easter, Dyed Various Ways

History

This recipe belongs to the Orthodox Easter table, the feast that breaks the meat-, dairy-, and egg-free fast of Great Lent. A dyed egg — крашенка, from the verb "to colour" — is a single-hued boiled egg, blessed and eaten at Easter, distinct from the pysanka, a raw egg patterned by the wax-resist batik method. In Orthodox tradition the egg stands for new life and the Resurrection: its red colour is read as the blood Christ shed at the Crucifixion, and its hard shell as the sealed tomb, whose cracking marks his rising. A widespread legend traces the red egg to Mary Magdalene, said to have greeted the risen Christ — or, in another telling, the emperor Tiberius — with an egg that miraculously turned red. The eggs accompany the paschal greeting «Христос воскресе!» / «Воистину воскресе!» ("Christ is Risen!" / "Truly He is Risen!"). Characteristically, Molokhovets records both worlds: natural dyes — red sandalwood with alum, onion skins or birch leaves for yellow — beside the newer chemical-laboratory powders, marbled papers, and factory colours then sold ready-made, standardizing folk and commercial practice alike.

Ingredients

• eggs
• bleeding colored silk scraps
• ink
• funt sandalwood (sandal)
• lot alum (kvastsy)
• onion skins or young birch leaves
• commercial egg dyes

Instructions

1. Natural dyeing: wrap clean eggs in bleeding colored silk (with blue sugar-paper cutouts) or dab with ink, tie in a rag, and boil ~10 minutes.
2. Sandalwood red bath: steep 1/4 funt sandalwood overnight, boil with 1/2 lot alum, dye eggs, polish with olive-oiled cotton; reuse the bath 2-3 times. Yellow from onion skins or birch leaves; overlap red and yellow for variety.
3. Or use commercial products of the period: powder and Marke-factory dyes, marble paper, liquid dyes, 'mosaic shine', gold/silver dyes, marble powder and egg lacquer, all sold with instructions.