Latvian Easter eggs

The Latvian Easter egg coloring tradition uses onion skins to get a rich, earthy brown, with little flowers and leaves leaving their prints behind in white. I described the method in more detail last year, although the eggs weren’t finished in time for Easter due to issues finding white eggs.

Rice, parsley, rose leaves, clover and dandelion skins

After that debacle I decided to try hosting an Easter egg coloring afternoon again this year. Roberts made the special trip out to the one store that carries œufs blancs, and I stepped up my onion skin collecting. I had been saving them for at least four months, but now I made several trips to the local Carrefour to buy an onion or two and fill the rest of the bag with loose skins from the bin. In the United States I had to explain to the cashier once or twice what they were for (more often I just said “art project”), but here in Clermont with my limited French language proficiency, more often than not I combined a little head shake with a vacant “what are you talking about” look.

The kids hard at work

Friday morning Lauris’s friends (and their moms) started arriving, bags of onion skins, old nylons, grasses and flowers in hand. Some of the prep work was already done the previous night; I had boiled the water and half of the onion skins so the giant pot would have a chance to cool before we put all of our eggs (literally) in one basket. And all that was left to do was decorate and tie our egg bundles, boil them and then let cool for about 20 minutes. And of course drink beaucoup de café, watch the kids practice their social skills in the living room and catch up on the local going-ons.

Photo credit: Evdoxia Ghika

The mothers left for home with their eggs still wrapped so that they would have extra time to cool, and that the kids may have a nice surprise opening the little “presents”. I was too impatient to let the water cool completely before repeating the process with the eggs I had wrapped and so a few cracked from the sudden temperature change, but we’ve more than enough to have our olu sišanās, or “egg-hitting” on Easter morning.

I wish all my readers a wonderful time coloring their eggs and hope you will share the methods you use with me!