EGGS-ACTLY WHAT TO BELIEVE - SO THE YOLK'S NOT ON YOU.

Byline: Donna Lee Providence Journal

Eggs may take their knocks the rest of the year, but at Easter and Passover time, they're a symbol of the season for Seder plates and Easter baskets.

They're also woven into our meals, our superstitions, even our old-fashioned slang.

You can be a good egg or a rotten egg. You can have egg on your face because you did something embarrassing, like leaving a yellow driblet of egg on your chin. If you're an egghead - an intellectual - you're probably sharp enough not to put all your eggs in one basket.

Since it's the season for eggs, here's a lot of egg lore:

Humpty Dumpty has taken a fall in recent years because of cholesterol worries. But now health professionals say that saturated fat is a greater cause of elevated blood cholesterol than the cholesterol you eat, so eggs are looking better.

The average egg contains 213 to 220 milligrams of cholesterol. The cholesterol is in the yolk. The white is cholesterol-free.

Fresh eggs sink in water, stale eggs float.

The heaviest chicken egg on record weighed 1 pound, eight times more than the average large egg. Picture an egg the size of a pound of butter, and pity the poor hen.

An impossible feat: try to roll a hard-cooked egg in a straight line. It tends to roll in a circle.

To find out whether an egg is cooked, spin it on its side. If the egg wobbles, it is raw. If it spins smoothly, it is cooked.

Swiss children receive eggs from the Easter cuckoo (a bird) but most others credit the Easter bunny.

Chinese 1,000-year-old eggs aren't ancient, they just look that way. The white is black and the yolk is bright green and blue. The egg tastes fishy or like creamy, smelly cheese. They aren't cooked. Goose eggs are covered with clay and left for six to eight weeks. Chemicals in the clay soak through the shell, preserving and firming the egg.

Hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk? Egg whites begin to cook at 145 degrees F, yolks at 144 degrees F.

If they are reasonably fresh when you buy them, eggs will last 30 to 40 days in the refrigerator. Eggs one to two weeks old peel more smoothly when boiled than do very fresh eggs.

Refrigerate Easter eggs as soon as you've colored them and again after the egg hunt. Discard any left at room temperature for more than 2 hours. Use the rest within one week.

The green tinged yolk in a boiled egg is ferrous sulfide, which develops more readily in older eggs. To avoid, use fresh eggs, don't boil eggs longer than 15 minutes and after cooking, cool them quickly in cold water. (The green is harmless.)

To keep eggs from cracking during boiling, pierce one end carefully with a standard pushpin and ease the eggs into simmering water.

French chefs often beat egg whites in copper bowls because the copper reacts with the egg to stabilize the foam and produce more volume. In a steel or glass bowl, a pinch of cream of tartar, which is acidic, accomplishes the same thing.

Room temperature egg whites beat up more quickly than cold ones, but eggs are easiest to separate when they're still cold.

Don't beat egg whites in a plastic bowl. Plastic absorbs fat; even after washing, a film lingers. Egg whites won't beat well if there's a trace of fat or egg yolk.

Egg protein is of such high quality that it is used as the standard by which other protein is measured.

To preserve freshness, store eggs in the refrigerator in their carton just as they are packed, blunt end up. Don't store them on the door, which jostles them. Use within 10 to 14 days for best flavor.

Egg shells are porous. If stored near onions, eggs absorb the odor.

When a very fresh egg is broken, the yolk stands high and the area covered by the white is small. Older eggs spread more.

An extra-large egg has 90 calories; large and medium eggs have 80 calories each.

Large eggs are the standard in recipes. Unless it specifies a size, a recipe means large eggs.

The rubber egg: Put an egg into a glass and put a spoon on it to weigh it down. Fill the glass with vinegar. By the next day the egg shell will be soft and rubbery, because the acid (vinegar) dissolves the calcium of the shell.

An egg with a blood spot is safe to eat. It doesn't mean that the egg has been fertilized. It is caused by a rupture on the yolk surface during the formation of the egg.

Fertile eggs are no more nutritious than nonfertile ones.

Eggs lose more quality in one day at room temperature than in one week in a refrigerator.

The only difference between brown and white eggs is the shell color.

Brown is preferred in New England, white elsewhere. The breed of hens that lay brown eggs is bigger and eats more food than those that lay white eggs. That's why brown eggs cost slightly more, says the American Egg Board. They add that hens with brown ear lobes lay brown eggs, those with white lobes lay white.

For centuries, eggs were forbidden during Lent, so it was a treat to have them again at Easter.

Eggs are used lavishly in Easter cooking: in Italian frittatas (omelettes), rice or grain pies, the Russian bread called kulich, and Portuguese, Greek and Italian breads cradling whole eggs in the shell.

At Easter, Greeks tap bright scarlet eggs end-to-end, to see whose cracks first. The person left with an uncracked egg is blessed with good luck.

Long ago, when plowing fields in springtime, European farmers carried eggs into the fields, believing eggs would make crops more bountiful.

If you were a bride in France 400 years ago, you would break an egg on the floor when you entered your new home, to ensure that you would have children.

In the last century in England, a newborn baby would receive an egg, some bread and a sixpence - charms to ensure that the baby would never go hungry or be poor.

Salmonella food poisoning has been linked with raw or undercooked eggs. Cook eggs well to destroy salmonella; don't eat raw eggs. That means no Caesar salad or eggnog unless they're made with pasteurized products such as Egg Beaters.

To cook eggs, gently ease them into boiling water. Adjust heat and simmer eggs 5 to 7 minutes for soft or 12 to 15 minutes for hard.

To peel eggs, begin when they are hot. Start at the larger end. If shell is still hard to remove, peel under tap water.

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Chart: What's America's favorite Easter egg color?

Source:Heinz Vinegar Easter Eggs- am