Pisanice

The story

Pisanice are the decorated eggs of a Croatian Easter, and the oldest way to color them uses what every kitchen already had. Families boiled eggs with onion skins for a brick-red shell, or with beets and nettles for other shades, and decorated them further with wax, fabric, beads or patterns of flowers and leaves. In the inland villages of northern Dalmatia, the Zadar National Museum notes, eggs were commonly dyed with the root of the madder plant, called broć, which gives a reddish tone, and also with the skins of kapula, the local word for onion; a finished egg was sometimes rubbed with fat. At Easter, which falls on March 28 in 2027, the eggs go into the basket with bread, young onions and in some places cheese or ham, carried to church to be blessed. In some Dalmatian villages leftover blessed food could only be burned, and some families carried an egg out to the vineyard instead. Children then play with the eggs, tapping them against each other, throwing coins at them or hunting for eggs hidden in the house and the grass. Cook a few extra eggs, since any that crack in the pot can go straight to the breakfast table.