Bay Leaves and a Salted Egg

A girl writing in the Connoisseur in the 1750s describes her Valentine’s Eve. She pinned bay leaves to her pillow so as to dream of her sweetheart, and to make sure of it she ate a hard-boiled egg with the yolk taken out and the hollow filled with salt, shell and all, without speaking or drinking afterwards. She and her friends also wrote their lovers’ names on papers rolled up in clay and dropped them in water, and the first to rise was the valentine. Next morning she lay with her eyes shut until the right man came to the house, because the first single person of the other sex seen on Valentine’s morning was thought to be your destined partner.