How Did Renaissance People Dye Easter Eggs?

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 2, April 2018.

By Kayleigh Walters

Springtime brings Easter and the joy of dyed eggs. Even though Easter was on April 1 this year, our interest in the botanical history of egg dyeing is still piqued. In an age before packets of color tablets were available from grocery stores, or drops of food dye was mixed with vinegar, people colored Easter eggs with dyes made from plants. While there are a wide variety of historically important dye crops, three plant dyes were likely available from an early date to both rich and poor people: turmeric, purple cabbage, and onion skins.

Painted Easter eggs from the District of Neresnice-on-the Terešva (Slavic and East European Collections, The New York Public Library. 1926. “a-h) Id”. Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-a4d7-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99)

Historic documents from Europe place Easter egg coloring as early as the 13^th century. By the Renaissance period (the 14^th to 17^th centuries), there are records of Polish, English, Russian, and German people dyeing Easter eggs. How did these historic people dye their eggs? Likely, through a combination of three plants which could have formed the basis of a color wheel of dyes:

• Turmeric (Curcuma longa) – Yellow
  Turmeric, which has been used for centuries, is an herb from India and Southeast Asia, which found its way to Europe via the Silk Road. Its ginger-like vividly yellow root can be dried and ground into a powder, which likely stained the hands of many cooks. People of that time may have dyed their eggs yellow by soaking them in a turmeric bath or painting them with turmeric paste.
  
  

  Rhizome cutting of turmeric (Curcuma longa) from the Botany Research Greenhouses.
• Purple Cabbage (Brassica oleracea var. capitata f. rubra) – Blue
  Cabbage, likely domesticated in the pre-history of Europe, would have been plentiful in Renaissance households. In order to dye eggs (counterintuitively) blue, eggs may have been soaked in the water left over from boiling purple cabbage.
  
  

  Red Cabbage (retrieved from Wikimedia Commons)
• Onion Skins (Allium cepa) – Red
  Onions, for being common, are one of the earliest domesticated vegetables. In addition to being a cold hardy abundant crop which would have stored well during the refrigerator-less Renaissance, yellow onion skins were boiled in a pot with eggs to produce varying shades of red.
  
  

  Onion (Allium sp.) (photo by R.A. Howard)

Traditions can have deep roots – even those as whimsical and brightly colored as a basket of Easter eggs. When looking through the ethnobotanical collections of the U.S. National Herbarium, we can see pressed and dried plant specimens collected from the wild alongside cultivated specimens that we adapted for our own use.

Thanks to Jennifer Heise's deep dive into the history of egg dyeing in her article, “Eggs dyed with period dyestuffs” <http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/SCA/eggs/eggdyes.html>.