The story behind the tradition of eating chocolate eggs at Easter – 08/04/2023 – Food

Many Easter traditions — such as sweetbreads and Sunday lunch — come from medieval-era Christianity or even older pagan beliefs. But the chocolate egg is a more recent twist.

Chicken eggs have been eaten at Easter for centuries. Eggs have long symbolized rebirth and renewal, which makes them perfect for commemorating the story of Jesus’ resurrection, which coincides with the arrival of spring in the northern hemisphere.

Currently, the Catholic Church allows the consumption of eggs during the fasting period of Lent, but in the Middle Ages, they were prohibited, along with meat and dairy products. Medieval chefs often found surprising ways around the ban — and even made fake eggs to replace the real ones.

At Passover—a time of celebration—eggs and meat such as lamb (another symbol of renewal) returned to the table.

Even after eggs were permitted in fasting meals, they continued to feature prominently in the Passover feast. The 17th-century cookbook writer John Murrell recommended “eggs with green sauce”, a kind of pesto made with sorrel leaves.

Across Europe, eggs were also offered as tithes to local churches on Good Friday.

That may have been where the idea of ​​giving eggs as a gift came from.

The practice was abandoned in many Protestant areas after the Reformation, but some English villages maintained the tradition well into the 19th century.

It’s not known exactly when people started decorating eggs, but research points to the 13th century, when English King Edward 1st (1239-1307) gave eggs wrapped in gold leaf as a gift to his courtiers.

We also know that, a few centuries later, people all over Europe colored their eggs. Usually, they chose yellow, using onion skins, or red, with roots from rubiaceae or beetroot plants.

It is believed that the red eggs symbolized the blood of Christ. A 17th-century author indicated that this practice came from the early Christians of Mesopotamia, but it’s hard to know for sure.

In England, the most popular way of decorating eggs used flower petals, which generated colorful impressions. The Wordsworth Museum in the Lake District still houses a collection of eggs made for the children of the poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) in the 1870s.

From dry eggs to chocolate eggs

Painting eggs with colorful patterns is still a common Easter activity, but these days these eggs are increasingly associated with chocolate. When did this change take place?

When chocolate first arrived in Britain in the 17th century, it was a fascinating and very expensive novelty.

In 1669, the Earl of Sandwich paid £227 for a chocolate recipe by King Charles II (1630-1685). The value is equivalent to 32 thousand pounds (about R$ 204 thousand), in current values.

Nowadays, chocolate is considered a solid food, but at the time, it was a drink usually spiced with pepper, following Mayan and Aztec traditions.

And for the British, this new and exotic drink was unlike anything they had ever tasted. One author called it “American nectar”: a drink for the gods.

Chocolate soon became a fashionable drink among aristocrats, often given as a gift as a status symbol. And that tradition remains to this day.

The drink was also popular in London’s newly opened coffee shops. Coffee and tea had also just been introduced to England, and the three drinks quickly changed the way Britons interacted with each other socially.

It was at that time that theologians of Catholicism did indeed link chocolate to Easter, but out of concern that eating chocolate would contravene fasting practices during Lent.

After intense debates, it was decided that chocolate prepared with water could be acceptable during fasting. At least at Easter—a time of feasting and celebration—chocolate was accepted.

Chocolate remained expensive until the 19th century. In 1847, the company Fry’s (which today belongs to the English chocolate factory Cadbury) produced the first solid chocolate bars, which revolutionized the product trade.

This made chocolate much more accessible in the Victorian era, but it was still viewed with a certain complacency. And, thirty years later, in 1873, Fry’s developed the first chocolate Easter egg as a luxury delicacy, merging two traditions related to the exchange of gifts.

Even in the early 20th century, these chocolate eggs were still seen as a special gift and many people never ate the ones they got. A woman in Wales has kept an egg from 1951 for 70 years and a museum in Torquay, in southern England, recently bought an egg that had been in storage since 1924.

It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that supermarkets began offering chocolate eggs at lower prices, hoping to cash in on the Easter tradition.

With growing concerns about continued chocolate production and avian flu reducing egg production, Easter could look a little different in the future. But if there’s one thing Easter eggs can show us, it’s the adaptability of traditions.

*Serin Quinn is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Warwick, UK.

This text was published here.