Your news, sports and entertainment leader for Evangeline Parish, La.

Article Image Alt Text

Four-year-olds Molly Vidrine and Audrey Vidrine react after taking part in the Cajun and Catholic Easter tradition of egg paquing at Danyelle’s Early Development Center in Ville Platte on Wednesday. (Gazette photo by Raymond Partsch III)

Joyeuses Pâques

Evangeline Parish steeped in Cajun tradition of knocking eggs on Easter

By: RAYMOND PARTSCH III
Managing Editor

Phil Lemoine and his family always had an ace up their sleeves when it came to paqueing eggs.
The former Ville Platte mayor fondly remembers taking part in the traditional Cajun and Catholic game as a child on Easter Sunday. The ritual pits two people hitting or knocking hard-boiled eggs together, and whoever holds the egg that cracks first is the “loser.”
Lemoine, his siblings and cousins got the upper hand by swapping out chicken eggs for Guinea eggs, known for having much harder shells.
“The Guinea eggs were one of our secrets,” laughed Lemoine. “That’s because they were the toughest egg. We felt that it was cheating and that stopped us sometimes from using them… only sometimes.”
Egg paqueing has been around for centuries and dates back to Europe. The tradition was brought to Louisiana by the earliest Catholic settlers and has been passed down for generations. There is a debate on the origin of the game’s name. It is either inspired by the pock-pock-pock sound an egg makes when hitting another or from the word Paques, which is French for Easter.
Regardless of where origin of the name of the game stems from, its popularity in Evangeline Parish grew amongst the Veillons, Aucoins, LaFleurs, Lemoines and dozens of other families.
The Ortegos were one of those families and Ville Platte Gazette Publisher David Ortego remembers just how important the tradition was in his household.
“My grandfather took a lot pride in egg paqueing,” Ortego said. “He had his own chickens and a good three weeks before Easter, he would sit down in his chair, his spot, and he had a bowl of eggs. He would take the eggs and hit them on his front teeth and he could tell by the sound of the egg if they were hard or not.”
Ortego added, “If he felt they were hard enough he would put it aside in a bowl. If it didn’t make that sound he would place it in another bowl. At the end he would have the two best dozen eggs and those are the ones that would be dyed.”
Former Evangeline Parish District Attorney Brent Coreil remembers his grandparents using their teeth as well to determine the hardness of the shells. Coreil also recalls a very popular method used by many families to help harden the shells of their eggs.
“I grew up with parents that had a feed store,” Coreil said. “Prior to Easter we would start selling crushed oyster shells to go with the chicken feed. The oyster shells helped make the chickens lay an egg with a harder shell.”
Corel’s family would also make sure to put aside plenty of those hardened eggs for themselves come Easter Sunday.
“We dyed and kept the stronger ones to visit the other families to paque,” Coreil said. “You would have to make your rounds and paque your eggs with everybody.”
Ebby Perrodin recalls just how precious having that elusive hard-shell egg was during Easter weekend.
“You would hold on to those eggs like they were jewels,” Perrodin said. “If you had a good egg people would come into the house and start yelling for you to come down and paque.”
The immensely popular pastime wasn’t regulated to just knocking eggs, as part of the fun for many children was the dying of the eggs. Dying the egg was traditionally done on Good Friday and the dying process would either be done by the store-bought dyes or home-made methods.
“Mom and dad showed us how to dye eggs in a coffee cup,” Perrodin said. “You would buy a pack of dye and use a teaspoon of vinegar and some warm water. The boiling time would break a few and of course we dropped a few.”
If you couldn’t afford the store-bought dye, it was not all that hard to find what you needed in the backyard garden or leftover ingredients from dinner.
“Sometimes we would get coffee grains or leaves from the tree or onion peels and use that to dye the eggs,” Perrodin remembered. “Those red onion peels would make your egg come out in a beautiful shade of red.”
Like Perrodin, Lemoine reflects back on how the entire holiday weekend was an event. It started with dying the eggs on Friday and then attending mass, having an egg hunt and paqueing eggs on Sunday, and sometimes an added bonus. And that bonus doesn’t include having the broken eggs turned into potato salad or deviled eggs.
“We would have an Easter egg hunt and there would be golden eggs,” Lemoine said. “If you found the golden egg it was a special prize. That special prize inside was a letter to a scavenger hunt to look for other things. Our Easter egg hunts turned into scavenger hunts.”
Egg paqueing is still common in Evangeline Parish, Avoyelles Parish (Marksville hosts an event at the parish courthouse) and in some parts of others, like St. Landry but that is all. The tradition simply died out.
Paqueing eggs was far more popular fifty years ago, when entire families would compete with other families in town, than it is today.
“People are just not interested anymore,” Perrodin said. “There are too many things to do now. Nobody in town even dyes eggs anymore.”
“It’s not as formalized as it used to be,” Coreil said. “People would wear their Easter best. Little girls wore beautiful dresses, young men wore slacks and dress shirts and everyone went to church. It is unfortunate that we don’t do it like we used too.”
That is why, for some people, passing down the region’s distinctive tradition takes on even more importance.
“It was extremely important,” Lemoine said. “It was our family’s tradition. It made us feel part of the community. It was just Easter tradition for everyone here in the community. That’s why it was so important.”

Our website requires visitors to log in to view the best local news from Evangeline Parish. Not yet a subscriber? Subscribe today!

Follow Us

Subscriber Links