"This Easter," he said, "I didn't hear of any children colouring eggs and rolling them down hills. Come to think of it, I haven't heard of the practice for a long time. As children, we didn't question it, we just did it and the colouring was an important part. The deep yellow you got from boiling them in a pot with handfuls of whim flowers. The source of the blue I don't remember, but it came from something in the kitchen. Hens were big in our lives then, even in towns. At our first house in the suburbs my mother got into business (as she hoped) with about 150 hens and cocks. Or was there just one cock? Anyway, after a few years, she gave it up. So many friends who came visiting just had to have a dozen eggs and perhaps a newly killed bird to go away with. It was a chore for the children to feed, and often to find the damned things, for they at times `layed out' i.e. in shrubby corners or nettle beds rather than in the henhouse proper. They had, after all, an acre to roam over. That enterprise of my mother's soon collapsed. But on holiday in Co Antrim we stayed with a former sea captain who added to his pension by keeping hens in some number, and in a little market gardening. There, children sometimes being perverse, it was not a chore to go searching for hens laying out, but fun. There were four fields running down to Larne Lough - the shore field, the middle field, the fetchfer and the upper field. Every one of them had, at times, to be scoured for errant fowl. (Fetchfer is a word that no Scots-Irish dictionary has yet interpreted. It was the steepest.)
"But all that is a world away. A recent article in an English magazine shows that even the breeds of fowl are different now. When we were familiar with Black Minorcas, Rhode Island Reds, White Wyandottes, this article in Country Life on a man who shows eggs in exhibitions and is apparently the number one, gives the names of the breeds as Marams (grey-barred) which give deep-brown eggs; Araucanas which produces blue eggs, Welsummers which again lay brown eggs and Leghorns whose eggs are described as being as snow-white as their feathers. The article concentrates on a Cumbrian farmer George Taylor whose passion seems to be not eating the eggs but admiring them on plates of sawdust for showing. His exhibits are perfectly formed and elegantly coloured, brown, green and white in the examples photographed. All are free range i.e. they do range freely in the open. But this is perfectionism. He says it may take two weeks' laying from a good hen to product three matching eggs for exhibition. There could be 30 dozen eggs on the table when he begins sorting for his show entries."
Mrs Beeton says that eggs are better when new-laid than a day or two afterwards. Don't you wish you had room in the garden for a few hens? Our friend, by the way, when married and living in the suburbs kept hens for years, so all his children grew up with eggs as Mrs Beeton recommended them. Y