Now that I’m living close to my mom, who is in her eighties, we have a lot of interesting discussions about the “good old days.” For instance, her grandfather, a Finnish immigrant, never farmed with a tractor. He used mules until he died in the 1940s. I’ve learned about pitching hay into the hay wagon while kids stamped it down, and tying the milk cow to the car bumper and pulling her to the neighbor’s field to put her in with the bull.
I’ve learned about her friends who had no running water and who bathed in the slough, my uncle tipping outhouses at Halloween, my grandmother putting water in the car radiator in the winter (no antifreeze) and then driving across the long lake bridge to go to a Roy Rogers movie, making certain to put a blanket over the hood of the car, to keep the radiator water from freezing. And of course when she got home, she had to empty the radiator. Good times.
My mother was fortunate enough to have a refrigerator while she was growing up, but her cousins had a
hole dug in the back yard, covered with boards, where milk was kept. Talk of food preservation led to stories of preserving eggs in water glass. This fascinated me, so I looked into it.
Water glass is a mixture of water and pickling lime. Pickling lime is a mixture of bones, oyster shells and limestone that has been heated in a kiln, then hydrated with water. There are different kinds of lime, and a person making water glass will want hydrated lime.
The first rule to preserving eggs in water glass is to use fresh farm eggs that have NOT been washed. when a hen lays an egg, she creates a product with a protective coating that seals the pores and keep bacteria out. This is called the bloom. Only eggs that have a bloom, which store eggs do not, can be preserved in water glass. If an egg is dirty, it can’t be wiped clean, because this affects the bloom. Only the cleanest eggs can be used.
Mix the lime with a ratio of one ounce of lime to one quart of water. You’ll need to mix enough to completely cover the eggs in your food storage grade container. A three-gallon pail with a lid works well. Submerge the eggs in the solution, pointy side down. After the eggs are submerged, cover the pail to decrease evaporation and store the water-glassed eggs in a cool dark place.
Before using the eggs, wash thoroughly, because pickling lime isn’t good for the digestive system.
How long can eggs be kept this way? From 18 months to 2 years. You can keep adding eggs to the preserving pail daily, but the bottom eggs should be used first.
These eggs are not pickled. They are used just like fresh eggs. The only caveat is to watch for cracks and never use a cracked egg.
Are you familiar with water glassed eggs? Did your family use any old-timey food storage methods? Looking forward to hearing!