Bread
Like the buns, bread baked on Good Friday imbues homes with happiness and health.

If stored and allowed to dry out, it can be used throughout the coming year as a cure-all tonic, grated into cider or milk. It is an antidote to all manner of digestive disorders, and if marked with a cross it never goes mouldy The bread -can be hung in the kitchen, to offset evil, fire and disaster.

Ideally it should be made from the same dough as the day's Sacramental Bread.

To give a slice to ailing cows is said to be effective and another traditional bovine pick-me-up involved mixing psalms or books of the Bible in with their hay.

This was said to be a sure-fire cure for any disease.

Cakes
Easter cakes, come in all manner of guises, usually along plum-bread or fruit-cake lines burt, almostr all year round nowadays, the most poplar and well known Eater treat, sorry that should be Easter treat, are the ever popular HOT CROSS BUNS

Good Friday is the first day after Lent, and hot cross buns have long been a favourite way to break the fast today. The buns are older than Christianity - pagan celebrants ate wheat cakes at their spring festivals, and the Greeks, Ro mans and Ancient Egyptians all had buns with a cross etched on the top. The round bun represented the full moon, and the cross divides the bun into the four lunar quarters. Traditional buns have the cross cut into the dough or pricked out with a pin: pastry bands are a more recent thing.

Not all Good Friday buns featured a cross, and in some areas they were triangular, like a samosa.

The well-known jingle 'Hot cross buns, one a penny, two a penny' is a street-seller's cry. The buns were traditionally eaten at breakfast, and the town vendors had to be on the streets before dawn to make the most of their once-a-year wares.

The buns have been popular in England on Good Friday for hundreds of years, but it was only in the last couple of centuries that the tradition caught on across the rest of Britain.

Hot cross buns bring prosperity to the household, and are especially lucky for sailors. This fact was not unknown to a London pub landlady. In 1788 her son wrote to say that he was due home for Easter after a long voyage so and she put a bun aside for him. Tragically he failed to put in his promised appearance, either that year or any other. Each year his mourning mother added another bun to the pile, hoping that her son would one day walk through the door.

After her death the custom continued, and the Widow's Son pub in Devon's Road of now has a collection of well over 200 buns. The buns hang in a net suspended from the pub ceiling, though the oldest of the fossil food has crumbled to dust. Each Good Friday a sailor adds a specially baked bun to the centuries of leftovers. Hot cross buns are then handed out to everyone in attendance.

Dock Pudding
was a delicacy in the north, made from Passion dock – the nettle cure, with onions, oatmeal, and nettles.

Easter Eggs
Easter Day’s traditional breakfast dish. Before the chocolate versions, Easter eggs - often called PACE eggs, after the 'PASCHAL' or PASSION LAMB of the season - were simply eggs with decorated shells.
Pace Eggs
John Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, Vol. 1, ed.

In Scotland Easter eggs are often called Peace or Paiss eggs. 'Pace', 'Peace' and Paiss are all corruptions of Pasch, or Paschal, of which the original root is the Hebrew word ‘Pesach’ meaning Passover.

In Scotland Easter eggs are often called Peace or Paiss eggs. 'Pace', 'Peace' and Paiss are all corruptions of Pasch, or Paschal, of which the original root is the Hebrew word ‘Pesach’ meaning Passover.

Wherever Easier is celebrated, Easter eggs are usually to be found.

In their modern form, they are frequently artificial, mere imitations of the real thing, made of chocolate or marzipan or sugar, or of two pieces of coloured and decorated cardboard fitted together to make an egg-shaped case containing some small gift.

These are the Easter eggs of commerce, which now appear in shop-windows early in the year, often before, Ash Wednesday is past, and by so doing lose much of their original festival significance.

They are, however, comparative newcomers, hardly more than a hundred years old. Artificial eggs do not seem to have been used before the middle of last century, and popular as they are today, they have not yet entirely displaced the true Easter egg of tradition.

This is a real egg, hard-boiled, dyed in bright colours, and sometimes elaborately decorated. It still appears upon countless breakfast-tables on Easter Day, or is hidden about the house and garden for the children to find.

In countries, including England, the Easter Hare (or Bunny more recently) is said to bring the to conceal them in odd corners of the gardens, stables, or outbuildings, but there are other beliefs

Bells bring the eggs
In France, and often in Roman Catholic households elsewhere, it is the bells that bring the eggs. During the 'Still Days', that is, between Maundy Thursday and the celebration of the Easter Vigil Mass, there is no bell-ringing in the churches and the children are told that the bells have gone to Rome to fetch the eggs.

In Scotland as Lent drew to a close, children used to steal eggs, and would then meet on Easter day for an orgy of omelette and pancakes. Only stolen eggs were considered kosher ingredients.

Welsh youths sought their food and other alms in a more open manner, singing short carols outside houses accompanied by noisy rattles and demands for Easter treats.

The hard-boiled egg is used in games like egg-rolling and egg-shackling and in places where the old customs of pace-egging or egg-clapping are kept up, it is begged from householders by visiting youngsters. Like its artificial counterpart, it is one of the most widespread of Easter gifts, and it is also the oldest, with an ancestry running far back into pre- Christian times.

Because eggs are obvious symbols of continuing life and resurrection. the pagan peoples of ancient China, Egypt, Greece, and Persia used them centuries before the first Easter Day, at the great Spring Festivals, when the revival of all things in Nature was celebrated.

The early Christians saw them as emblems of Christ's Resurrection, and adopted them as holy and appropriate gifts for Eastertide when, as a symbol of rebirth, they re-appeared after their absence during Lent.

Eggs were brought to church at Easter in Great Britain and Ireland to be blessed at the beginning of the festival by the parish priest using the form of words appointed by Pope Pius V:

'Bless, 0 Lord, we beseech Thee, this Thy creature of eggs, that it may become a wholesome sustenance to Thy faithful servants, eating in thankfulness to Thee, on account of the Resurrection of Our Lord.'

Eggs, one of the forbidden foods of Lent could be eaten in thankfulness thereafter and their reappearance on the table after so long an absence must have been one of the minor joys of the Easter feast.

Colouring and decorating the festival eggs seems to have been customary since time immemorial. An old Polish legend says that Our Lady herself painted eggs red, blue, and green to amuse the Infant Jesus, and that since their all good Polish mothers have done the same at Easter.

A Roumanian tale says that the vivid red shade, which is a -favourite almost everywhere, represents the blood of Christ. On Calvary, Our Lady gave a basket of eggs to the soldiers in the hope that they might treat her Son more kindly, and His Blood, flowing down over the eggs as thev lay in the basket at the foot of the Cross, dyed them scarlet. Roumanian women believe that this is why Easter eggs are so often painted red;

but since the Chinese are known to have exchanged scarlet eggs at their Spring Festival as far back as 900 B.C., it is perhaps more likely that red was originally preferred to other colours because, like the egg itself, it is an emblem of life.

There are many ways of tinting and decorating the eggs, some simple and some requiring a high degree of skill. They can be dipped into a prepared dye or, more usually boiled in it, or they may be boiled inside a covering of onion peel. In the household accounts of Edward I for 1290, there is an entry of eighteenpence spent upon 'four hundred and a half of eggs', which were to be covered with leaf-gold, or else 'stained' by boiling, and then distributed to members of the Royal household.

Ordinary commercial dyes are often used today for colouring, but originally only natural ones, obtained from flowers, leaves, mosses, bark, woodchips, or other sources, were employed In England, gorse-blossom was commonly used for yellow, cochineal for scarlet, and logwood-chips for a rich purple. Spinach leaves gave a fine green, and so did the petal of the purple anenome called the Pasque-flower. The outer skin of an onion, wrapped round an egg and boiled with it, is still very often used to obtain a delicate mottled yellow, or a pleasant brown. Similarly, if strips of coloured rag or ribbon are bound on, a marbled effect is produced. In the northern counties, and also in Switzerland, minute flowers and leaves are sometimes laid on the egg underneath the onion-peel to make a white flower-pattern on the yellow or brown surface. Other designs or mottoes, can be traced on the shell before it is dyed with a white wax pencil, or a piece of candle shaved to a point.

Another method is to colour the eggs first, and then to trace a white design upon them by scraping away the dye with an engraving tool or a stylus.

The decoration of Easter eggs is a traditional peasant art in Eastern and Central Europe.

Favourite designs vary in different regions.

In Hungary, red flower-patterns on a white ground are often seen; sometimes the decorated eggs are fitted with tiny metal shoes, with minute spurs attached, and curious little metal hangers.

In Jugoslavia, the letters XV usually form part of the design. They stand for Christos Vaskrese, meaning 'Christ is risen', which is the traditional Easter greeting of Eastern Europe.

Russian eggs are sometimes elaborately decorated with miniature pictures of the saints, or of Our Lord.

Polish designs are often geometrical, or abstract, or they may include Christian symbols, like the Cross or Fish, mixed with pagan emblems of new life. Painted eggs of this type, known as pisanki, always appear on the Easter Table which, in manv households, is adorned with green leaves and spread with the finest foods that the family can afford.

Until just before the First World War, Polish girls often sent large numbers of decorated eggs - sometimes as many as a hundred to a favoured suitor. These, carefully wrapped in a fine lawn kerchief on which the young man's initials had been embroidered, were carried to his house by an elderly female friend of the girl's family usually with some small gift added, such as a posy of flowers, some nuts, or a packet of tobacco. In return, he was expected to send her a piece of dress-material, or a kerchief, or a bunch of many-coloured ribbons. It was customary for the girl to decorate the eggs herself, but if she lacked the requisite skill, she went to some local woman who specialised in the art.

Such specialists were to be found in most Polish villages, and also in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Some were renowned over a wide area for the variety and beauty of their designs. They were paid for their services in money or in kind, or some- times, if a girl was very poor, by help given in the house or garden.

In some East European countries, scarlet eggs, as symbols of resurrection, are placed on, or buried in, the graves of the family dead.

In the Balkans they are sometimes buried in the fields or the vineyards to protect the crops from thunder and hailstorms in the coming year.

A few are also kept in the house to bring good luck. The latter custom was known in Northern England until about the middle of last century. One or two of the most beautifully ornamented Pace-eggs - the name by which Easter eggs are still most commonly called in the northern counties, would be saved and kept in tall ale-glasses in a corner cupboard, or some place where they could be easily seen.

Long lasting
An egg that is boiled really will last for years; some very fine specimens, originally decorated by the poet's children, are still preserved in the Wordsworth Museum at Grasmere. Here and there also, in cottages or farmhouses, others have relics of Easters long gone by. But naturally, they are scarce, only a very few eggs, cherished for superstitious or sentimental ever survived the first year. The majority were either eaten during the festival, or broken to pieces in the vigorous egg-games that were played at this season.

© Roy & Ursula Radford 2007