Vegans, avert your eyes while the rest of us consider the egg. We’ve finally reached its season, at least as far as symbolism goes: spring, birth, something that the Theosophical Society calls “the origin and secret of being”—and that’s just the beginner-level stuff. What the grain of sand was to William Blake, the egg has been to just about everyone else. Brahma emerged from an egg, and so did the Tahitian god Ta’aroa and Pangu, the Chinese creator. The ancient Greeks practiced oomancy, divination by boiled egg white. Brits, as Julian Rubinstein wrote in the magazine last year, are so crazy about oology—the study of eggs—that they are sometimes driven cross the law in their pursuits, hoping to escape the notice of special oological investigators. While we’re looking at all those “oo”s, we might take a moment to praise the Romans for leaving us a prefix whose form so perfectly matches the thing it describes.
On the day before Easter, a New Yorker whose own experience of the egg as a symbol is limited to the roasted sample on the Seder plate set off on a casual egg hunt through the city. First stop: the Ukrainian Museum, on East Sixth Street, where the sunlight flooding through the windows of a small ground-floor exhibition room illuminated cases filled with jewel-like pysanky, Ukrainian Easter eggs. In the lobby, a video showed a bespectacled woman in an embroidered blouse drawing intricate, angular designs with a wax-tipped stylus over an eggshell. She paused every so often to dip the egg in dye, sealing a new color—yellow, orange, red, black—beneath the next round of wax. (Pysanky comes from the Ukrainian word for “to write.”) Her movements were as quick and sure as a calligrapher’s. When she held the egg up to the candle lighting her worktable, the wax melted away, revealing an exquisitely inscribed shell about as similar to the monotone Paas variety as a tattooed man is to a baby.
“It takes time and practice and dexterity,” Maria Shust, the museum’s director, said. She was dressed in Peeps tones: a light-green cardigan and a yellow silk scarf. Shust explained that the pysanky tradition dates back to pagan times, as do the eggs’ motifs: the sun; triangles that represent air, light, and water or birth, life, and death, from long before the Holy Trinity came along; plants and animals; talismanic lines and spirals indicating eternity, though contemporary _pysanky-_makers are free to choose different imagery. Roz Chast, for instance, covers her pysanky with portraits of the same nebbishy characters who appear in her cartoons, though you could also say that they’re modern incarnations of types that date as far back in time as pysanky themselves.
In Ukraine, egg decorating was traditionally the domain of women. They worked secretly, at night, “when nobody would bother them,” Shust said. The eggs came from chickens that had laid for the first time; pysanky, which had the power to ward off nefarious spirits, had to be protected from the evil eye—and, according to the exhibition text, from any wayward thoughts the women might have, “since these too might offset the magic quality of the egg.”
On the wall behind Shust, regional pysanky variations dangled from pegs stuck into a map of Ukraine. Their elaborate shells cast long shadows over the gray territory below. The egg hanging over Donetsk, in the east, was decorated in blue and red, also the colors of the flag of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the unrecognized pro-Russian state set up in an eleven-story administrative building, in early April. To the south, Crimea was eggless.
To the roving egg-seeker, everything looked like an egg: gum spots on the sidewalk; the faces packed together on an N train rattling uptown; the white oval of the Rockefeller Center ice rink, where skaters who somehow hadn’t had their fill of winter traced figure eights under the clear sky. In the upstairs plaza, camera-wielding visitors milled around a multitude of egg sculptures, nearly three feet tall and lined up on boxy pedestals, like troops from Chicken Little’s imperial army. They were the spoils of Fabergé’s Big Egg Hunt, a fund-raiser for a visual-arts organization that serves public-school students and, more mysteriously, for an Asian-elephant conservation group. The first Fabergé egg was offered as a gift from Tsar Alexander III to his wife, Maria Feodorovna, in 1885. Its enamel shell opened to reveal a golden yolk and a hen, plus a diamond replica of the imperial crown. Times have changed. The Big Hunt eggs, which had been decorated by artists, were scattered around the city earlier in the month, to be “collected” by ordinary citizens who scanned their Q.R. codes with smartphones and could bid on them at auction, though a few had been designated for American royalty like Leonardo DiCaprio or Jay Z to find. Gathered together at Rockefeller Center for their grand finale, they could have been sacred totems of a vanished civilization, artifacts recovered from Easter Egg Island.
“Oh my goodness, how many eggs?” a man dragging a small child along by one hand while pushing a baby in a stroller with the other asked. Two hundred and sixty, it turned out. Some resembled their natural counterparts, speckled like the eggs of the brown noddy or the cream-colored courser. Most, though, bore clear evidence of Homo sapiens’ tampering. Egg 64, by Kevin McHugh, featured an iridescent shark. Tourists posed with Egg 110, which wore a Statue of Liberty crown. Egg 108 was constructed from what looked like overlapping suède fortune cookies. There were eggs made of Legos, mirrors, pushpins, and stacked vinyl disks, and deconstructed eggs that could never have held a yolk, golden or otherwise. Students at Midwood High School had painted their egg with water lilies. William Wegman had printed his with Weimaraners. Tracey Emin had scrawled an insomniac lament on Egg 69: “In a desperate bid to close my eyes—and sleep—to want not to be awake—then all that keeps me awake …”
It wasn’t lost on the egg-seeker that the kids running and jumping and shouting in different languages among the sculptures were themselves eggs of a sort, at least in Shakespearean English, when the word signified unhatched youth. “What, you egg! / Young fry of treachery!” shouts the murderer who stabs Macduff’s son, in “Macbeth,” for one unpleasant example. Some of the dazed guardians following in their wake looked a bit like the bewildered Lear on the heath, whose Fool tells him that he can make him two crowns “after I have cut the egg i’ the middle, and eat / up the meat.” Who can blame them? An extended Saturday in midtown is enough to deflate anybody’s soufflé.
Back at home, it was time for a snack. In his new cookbook, “Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient” (Little, Brown), Michael Ruhlman guides egg cravers through a panoply of recipes, from frittatas and bibimbap (his calls for an “aggressively fried” egg) to coddled eggs with truffle butter and a mango-lime semifreddo. These sounded lovely, but something quick and simple was in order. Scrambled eggs: you take a pan, turn on the heat, swish around a little butter or oil, crack and stir, yes? No, says Ruhlman. Under the heading “How to make perfect scrambled eggs,” Ruhlman instructs cooks to be gentle on the stove top. A double boiler is a good idea, to prevent the eggs from overheating. Rather than furiously scraping, you tenderly stir and fold, keeping the heat low, until the steam starts to rise and “the curds appear to be sauced by the fluid part of the eggs.” Now is the time, Ruhlman advises, to “ask someone to butter the toast and to make sure the coffee is hot and ready or the Champagne is uncorked.” Fortunately for the egg-seeker, a defter someone was on hand to take care of the cooking part, leaving her to set the table while the eggs were eased from the pan and onto the toast.
They were excellent.
Photograph courtesy of the Ukrainian Museum.
