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Vintage Wire Egg Baskets

• by Nancy, March 02, 2010

I use a vintage wire egg basket for a centerpiece on my dining room table.

Egg baskets were invented to carry warm, freshly laid eggs safely from hen house to table. The open wire basket allows air to circulate so the eggs cool quickly, keeps them from rolling into each other and prevents cracking. I love the fanciful ones shaped like animals. They make great gifts, especially lined with

waxed paper and filled with cookies.

I don’t have hens, so I don’t need my basket to collect eggs. As an artist, I love the shadows it throws when the sunlight hits it, and I love the contrast between the thin lines of the wire and the broad expanse of my table. I also appreciate, as I do with all vintage things, the passage of time inherent in its aged surface, its connection to other lives I can only imagine.

Here’s an old recipe I found for stuffed eggs. Farce is an old cooking term for the word, stuff.

To Farce Eggs
Take eight or ten eggs and boil them hard. Peel off the shells and cut every egg in the middle; then out the yolks. Make your farcing stuff as you do for flesh, saving only you must put butter into it instead of suet, and that a little. So done, fill your eggs where the yolks were, and then bring them and seethe them a little. And so serve them to the table.”
---The Good Housewife’s Jewel, Thomas Dawson, with an introduction by Maggie Black, London, 1596 (p. 86)

Shared interests create community; I was delighted when a fellow blogger spied my basket in the photographs from my last post, and wrote to me that she has the same one. You can find them online on sites like ebay. Here’s a link to a page with lots of different ones if you’d like one too.

see also: Vintage Canisters in the Modern Kitchen

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