If you’ve been to (or live in) the midwestern section of the US, you’ve probably seen or even visited a Bob Evans restaurant. As you might expect, the restaurants are named after the founder, Bob Evans, who was born May 30, 1918.
Evans didn’t originally set out to be a restauranteur; he was a farmer. He raised pigs, and at some point decided to make his own sausage — it may have had to do with a small 12-seat diner he owned near his farm. He built a building on his farm where he made the sausage, but he really wasn’t sure whether there was any future in sausage, so he built the building so that it could be repurposed as a machinery shed if the sausage business didn’t work out.
He ended up with more sausage than the diner could use, so he opened The Sausage Shop right there on his farm. The sausage business started to thrive after all, and he needed more customers — so he decided to become his own customer and started opening his own restaurants beyond his farm. There are now over 500 Bob Evans restaurants where you can order Bob Evans sausage. They serve other dishes as well, of course, including eggs.
The connection between eggs and May 30 is more than just what you can get in a Bob Evans restaurant, and it all started in 1846 when Karl Fabergé was born in St. Petersburg, Russia to a family that had fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which outlawed the religious group called the Huguenauts. His father was a jeweler, and Karl entered the jewelry business when he was about 20. But while he joined his father’s firm, he didn’t join his father — his father had retired when Karl was a teenager.
The Fabergé jewelry company was not originally a luxury or high-end brand; they made and sold pretty ordinary things. That all changed in 1882 when Karl won the gold medal at the Pan-Russian Exhibition of Industry and Arts in Moscow. The royal family of Russia bought a pair of his cufflinks, which was quite a coup. However, his was only one (and the smallest) of at least five jewelers whose work was purchased by the royals that year.
Still, he gained access to the royal family, and in 1885 he created the first Fabergé Egg for the Emperor to give to his wife as an Easter gift. Everybody was delighted with the egg, and Fabergé was named Supplier to the Royal Court. This came with a side benefit that Fabergé made the most of: he got access to the vast collection of art and sculpture at the Hermitage, the royal family’s residence. He studied the collection, revived the art of enameling, and as of 1887 created an egg for the Empress every year. The eggs got more and more elaborate. When the next emperor, Nicholas II, took over, he doubled the order to two eggs per year — one for his mother (who eventually had a collection of 30) and one for his wife (who received 20).
The House of Fabergé became the largest and most prestigious jeweler in Russia. It was dissolved in 1918 after the October Revolution. You are, I’m afraid, unlikely to ever acquire a Fabergé Egg, but any Bob Evans restaurant would be happy to serve you an egg dish when you visit.
