Page 97 - Designing Ways 276

TAIL OF
THE DOG

Swiss Easter Egg Traditions

witzerland has an enchanting is strained and the skins removed, ones. Once all are found, they are
Easter egg tradition. Normal and the eggs are then boiled in the put on the table for the main meal.
Seggs, preferably white, hard dye. This produces a pale brown Everyone chooses an egg, and there
to find here, are soaked in water, colour, but other vegetables can give is a competition called eiertutsche,
then wrapped with leaves or flowers different dye colours – red cabbage or egg tapping, where you hold
pressed against them, in old pieces for blue, spinach for green, turmeric your egg firmly bottom side up, and
of pantyhose tied really tight. root for yellow. Commercial dyes or your neighbour taps his egg against
This is a Good Friday event in its colourings are available, but these yours. The one whose egg lasts
own right, with the mothers and are not the real deal. Once hard the longest without breaking wins.
children spending ages firstly looking boiled, the eggs are removed and Apparently one of the reasons for
for suitable leaves with good outlines cooled. The covering and leaves having hard boiled eggs on Easter
(herbs are good), then carefully or petals are carefully removed, Sunday is that during Lent, the forty-
wrapping them and hopefully not and beautiful results emerge, with day period before Easter, people did
breaking them. the plant outlines showing up white not eat eggs, so there was a stock
against the rest of the dyed egg. The build-up.
At the same time the dyes are eggs are then polished with bacon fat
prepared. The best known is made to give them a good shine. And who brings the eggs to Swiss
with onion skins, which are collected children at Easter? Not the Easter
(from the big baskets at supermarkets, On Easter Sunday the eggs are bunny, but the cuckoo!
where they are surreptitiously hidden in the garden, and these
removed from the loose onions on natural dyed eggs are far harder
sale) and then boiled. The liquid to find than the shiny chocolate Gill Butler