The Church Lady Secret Egg Dye Recipe

For me, Easter comes in sensory bursts, a film-reel of color and sound, flashes of scents, tastes, and textures . . . a compilation of memories that I pull out each year.

Easter is a little girl with frilly dress and patent leather shoes

Easter is daffodils blooming in the wild and out-of-the-way spots.

Easter is dye-stained fingers.

Easter is Grandma Pauline’s pickled beets.

Easter is the loudest hymn singing of the year, in four-part harmony, in a tiny country church. It sounds just like this.

Easter is vibrant colored eggs hiding in the damp morning grass around that same tiny church. 

Every Easter the Sunday School quarterlies and flannelgraph boards were put aside. The night before, church ladies prepared the colored eggs. That morning the orneriest men and older boys hid the eggs. We children hunted for them. It was the most delightful Sunday morning of the calendar year.

The first place to look was around the logs that held up our church-yard benches. Then we would rush to the creepy stairwell to the basement or the scratchy bushes around the stoop. The path to the outhouses usually had a few eggs tucked away in the borders. There were some under the big pines in back and even a few over the steep hillside.

Adults would encircle the churchyard as a protective boundary and to join in on the fun. They would throw out hints and shout “hot!” or “cold!”. We children had the run of the place and no one shouted “Stop running!” It was glorious.

I was particularly mesmerized by my church eggs because they were so vibrantly colored. My eggs at home didn’t look nearly as nice. Why were these so much brighter…and therefore better?

Each year I’d beg my mom to buy the dye that church-ladies used. Sensible as always, my mother would buy the simple Paas kit. “Beth Ann this IS what everyone uses.” 

As I got older I started compiling clues. The church-lady eggs had a stronger vinegar smell than mine. Sometimes the color from theirs came off on my fingers. I noticed that the blues and purples differed most from my ho-hum Paas eggs at home. At any egg hunt I could immediately pick out the eggs which were dipped in the secret-church-lady-recipe.

The church-lady-secret-egg-dye-recipe remained a mystery to me until I was a mother myself. One Easter I’d forgotten the Paas dye kit. I wondered if I could squeak by with food coloring. What a relief (tinged with Paas guilt) when I found directions right on the McCormick box.

I prepared the eggs, covered the table, laid out every mug and big spoon I could find. Each mug got a dose of vinegar, carefully counted drops of food coloring, and boiling water. Then I called the kids in, hoping the results wouldn’t be too disappointed.

An hour later, I looked at our cartons of dyed eggs with wide eyes. My five-year-old heart filled with glee. The secret to vibrantly colored church-lady Easter eggs? 

Plain-ole food coloring. McCormick recipe here.

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