All we need are hard-boiled eggs, which actually don’t have to be chicken eggs – although even they are not so “common” these days because they are so varied. It’s enough to visit a random market and familiarize yourself with the wide range on offer: free-range eggs, green legged eggs, leghorn eggs, barn eggs, cage eggs and whatever one can think of. But there can also be eggs from a quail, duck, gooses – including “oat” ones – and God knows what else.

What’s next? What are we going to do with them, having such an offer, in which perhaps only peahen eggs are missing? There are also ostrich ones, but let’s leave for desert – it shall be a surprise.

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE So where have all these eggs with fascinating names gone? – poached eggs, mollet eggs, not to mention eggs au beurre noir, i.e. in black butter, whatever that means. Where can you eat egg Gloria that is to say one James Bond’s favourte eggs (har-boiled, finely chopped, with cream, cheese sauce and English mustard)? Where to search for cuisines, parties, salons, eating places and bars that offer Tyrol-, Italian-, French-, Egyptian-, Turkish- and of course Polish-style eggs? The latter most often means an egg stuffed and slightly fried so an eggshell filled with a pulp made of chopped hard-boiled eggs with chives, sometimes with dill or parsley while the filling is secured with breadcrumbs, thank to which it browns on butter, spreading spring smells. Mouthwatering!

And now, the Turkish egg – as I found out literally at the last moment, it is conquering culinary websites – is fried on yogurt. I will not depreciate this recipe, yoghurt is good food, but ... eh, fried egg in cream, good, thick, slightly sour Polish cream! Heated in a saucepan or a small frying pan (a small frying pan – “patelka” – as one of the pre-war authors of famous cookbooks writes with charm) almost to the boil, it is a tasty, light and expressive base for a colourful egg! I bet that many of the distinguished Readers remember that sometimes their mother or grandmother made such an egg for them – not necessarily in the farmstead during the holidays, in the city, too – and now they will try it themselves, in the face of an Easter excess of eggs in the kitchen.

Salmon-pink, green and brown

Recently, perhaps on the occasion of the upcoming holidays, I looked into my favorite pre-war cookbook “How to cook” by a certain Maria Disslowa, a long-term – as she presents herself – director of the Lviv School of Household, operating at the Queen Jadwiga Municipal Female High School. There are sixty-three recipes for egg dishes - essential dishes, not those for which eggs are a supplement or necessary input, such as mayonnaises, cakes or pasta! Even more, as many as eighty-seven – and only twenty-two for omelettes – are in slightly more exquisite “Universal Cookbook” by Maria Ochorowicz-Monatowa, a famous and earlier book, from 1910.

There are all sorts of things: kale with eggs, spinach with eggs, eggs in sorrel sauce, Tyrolean-, Bavarian-, Breton-style eggs and many others. But here’s the kale that modern vegetarians think they discovered. Ha! The list of “foreign-language eggs” is also impressive, including: à la tripe, à la paysanne, à la princesse, à la Jules Ferry and à la Beijing eggs. Let me just say that the first ones are hard-boiled eggs or œufs pochés, i.e. poached eggs covered with a thick sauce of onion stewed in butter, spread with broth, and mushroom broth during the Lent. Nothing, but something!

Maria Disslowa made fun of foreign names, so her table of contents captures the imagination (and taste buds!) right away: eggs stuffed with veal, chicken, liver, anchovies, cheese, on tartlets and baked, with smoked herring, with caviar, on toast with salmon and on pedestals, in crayfish sauce, in tomato sauce and fried eggs, which I will be happy to present, although I don’t know if I dare to prepare them, because they look very laborious. Well, we take out the poached eggs very gently and put them just as gently to cool down, then sprinkle each one with Parmesan cheese and lightly dust with flour, grease – gently! – with a beaten egg and sprinkle with breadcrumbs. And we fry them in butter!

For the sake of justice, let me point out that the homely Lucyna Ćwierczakiewiczowa in the famous publication “365 dinners” gives only four recipes for egg dishes. On the other hand, the extremely competent “Polish Cuisine” of the rightly past times offers forty (!), including sophisticated ones.

And let me add that Maria Monatowa recommends “lapwing eggs and seagull eggs”, praising their outstanding taste. I wonder if the Bullerbyn children – one of the boys, Bosse of Central Farm, collected birds’ eggs and had a huge collection of them – would eat their contents. In my family, there is a memory of my aunt Maria Mickiewicz, who was sent to Kazakhstan during the Soviet occupation, who told me about the fantastic tasting eggs of wild birds from Lake Balkhash. There, on spring days, the exiles were transported to look for and collect countless eggs, which the authorities used only for their own production. The search was not easy, in the coastal thickets and riparian forests, so each of the hungry seekers could finally eat something more than starvation-level soup.

And one more unknown egg: blue, even turquoise, as if immediately painted for the Easter table. The “Atlas of Culinary Curiosities”, which I wrote about a few months ago, tells about it: domesticated Chilean Araucana hens, whose origin is not fully explored and which “make” one condition – they must live in the open air, otherwise there will be no blue eggs.

Time for “święcone”

Therefore, we have an abundance of eggs of all kinds, which – by the way – is not obvious in different countries of the world, although the whole world actually eats eggs. And it has always been so, as evidenced by ancient Roman sayings – ab ovo, for example, that it begins with an egg, and omne vivum ex ovo that everything that lives comes from an egg – and biblical stories and parables, although Adam and Eve did not eat eggs, or at least the biblical record did not tell us about it. But the egg is also among the obligatory dishes on the Jewish holiday table during the largest Passover holiday in Judaism, which commemorates the Exodus from Egyptian slavery. What we also talk about during our Paschal Triduum services, what we remember and what we read about. During the Last Supper, Jesus probably also ate an egg, although disputes about the presence of an egg in the Christian and Jewish tradition of this holiday can still be found.

We can see a multitude of egg proposals in prepared baskets and baskets with “swięcone” [food blessed at Easter], with which we rush to our churches all over Poland on Holy Saturday. Every year it is a great pleasure for me: this beautiful overview of our cultural wealth, expressed in the set of dishes and raw materials prepared for blessing. Although this article was supposed to be only about eggs, I can’t resist not to mention this specific set, in which eggs definitely lead the way. White and colorful, dyed and written, in traditional and experimental patterns (children!), hard-boiled, but who knows, maybe there are also raw ones, chocolate, plastic, wooden and porcelain. Not to mention the Fabergé Egg, a work of goldsmith art created in tsarist times, which no one will take to be blessed, although they will put it on the table (behind an armored glass so that nothing happens to it).

Let’s move on to the Easter table. When everyone, wishing each other, will share the egg – which also means eating it – they will join the feast. A feast traditionally called “breakfast”, although it smoothly turns into an all-day meeting, interrupted by walks, in search of chocolate eggs – eggs rule after all! – in gardens and parks and tasting homemade liqueurs, including eggnog (eggs!). An Easter feast usually means that at the beginning we get – or serve – a more or less thick sour rye soup, sometimes called white borscht (traditionally, it differs from sour soup by the sourdough used – here it is made of wheat flour, not rye) or krzonówka (without sourdough, but with whey), so-called from the old Polish term for horseradish, which can also be so much in Christmas sour rye soup that it becomes horseradish soup. And in it – in the sour rye soup – of course there must be eggs. Hard-boiled, cut into quarters, halves or even slices, in the children’s favorite egg slicer.