Let Them Eat Galette!
The French holiday L'Épiphanie reminds us that there's never a bad time to eat pastry.
Two Saturdays ago, France celebrated La fete des Rois, or L'Épiphanie, a holiday so important that they named it twice.
L'Épiphanie is technically a Christian holiday celebrating the arrival of the three kings in Bethlehem to present the baby Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. If you’ve ever wondered, frankincense and myrrh are tree resins, the extracts of which you can pick up at a high-end grocery store for under ten bucks.
Christmas is December 25th but L'Épiphanie is January 6th, indicating that the kings showed up twelve days late—thus the twelve days of Christmas. Before judging the kings for their tardiness and weird taste in gifts, keep in mind that they had to travel about 900 miles from Babylon, by camel, guided only by a bright star that they weren’t completely certain led to anything. It’s reasonable that they made life easier by stopping at Whole Foods on the way to pick up a little something.
The French have turned this religious feat of stellar navigation into an excuse to eat yet more cake, having barely digested their bûche de Noël—a chocolate log served at Christmas that resembles a giant Hostess Ho Ho. It surprises me that Americans don’t widely celebrate Épiphanie, given their shared love of sugar.
The focus of Épiphanie is a family-sized almond pastry called a galette des rois—a distant cousin of the New Orleans “king cake.” There’s a lot of ceremony involved with eating it. Inside the galette is a small ceramic trinket called a fève. Whoever gets the fève in their slice is given a paper crown and coronated king (or queen) for the rest of the day. To avoid favoritism should the server know where the fève is, in some families the youngest person crawls under the table during the serving and decides who gets which slice.
Because my dad is French, my family celebrated Épiphanie when I was growing up in South Dakota. It was hard to track down a galette des rois in the 1970s Midwest (probably still is, frankly), so my mom and dad would make it from scratch.
My dad is an avid reader with a vast respect for the history of his homeland. One year, he learned that a fava bean was traditionally used for the fève—like, 200 years ago—so he substituted a bean for our usual ceramic doodad.
Fava beans worked as fèves because they have a hard, chewy shell that doesn’t soften much after baking, so whoever got one in their slice knew it. My dad used a random bean from our cupboard—like a broad bean, maybe. I don’t know which kind of bean he used, because my family are extremely fast eaters, so whoever got the fève consumed it unawares. The bean was long gone and there was no king that year.
Marilyne and I spent a few weeks last winter here at La Villatte. Although January 6th had passed, Épiphanie is now a monthlong event in France, so we picked up a galette on the way to the farm—specifically, a Star Wars-themed galette, because Disney’s system of market-oriented capitalism has found its way to Europe. Also, Star Wars is cool. To my complete rapture, the fève turned out to be a little ceramic R2D2.
This year, I looked forward to another franchise-based galette, so I was disappointed when Marilyne ordered our cake from her sister, whose grade school was selling galettes as a fundraiser. One of the parents is a pastry chef or whatever and volunteered to make them by hand or whatever. There would be no galactic fève.
A silver lining came when the chef encountered a personal issue that delayed delivery of the galettes until the Wednesday after Épiphanie. I used this as an excuse to rush to the local Casino market in Crocq and pick up a proper, franchise-themed cake to tide us over. All they had in stock were Asterix galettes. Asterix is a French comic book based on the adventures of a small village of ancient Gauls who held out against the Roman Empire in 50 BC. Despite being made into a series of movies starring Gérard Depardieu, the franchise never took off in the States.
The Asterisk galette was delicious, but the fève was mediocre—just a little white medallion with a drawing of Asterisk’s beloved terrier Idéfix printed on it
When the school’s galette arrived four days later, it was even more delicious.
I doubt it contained much more than sugar, flour, butter, eggs, salt, and almonds. What it did contain was—not one—but two fèves!
Marilyne’s sister reported that one of the other school galettes featured a fève of the famous red Laughing Cow cheese mascot holding up a sign reading, “Pourquoi la vache qui rit, rit?” Why does the laughing cow laugh? I had high hopes.
Sadly, the first fève was an ugly little brown block purporting to be a pétran, a wooden table specifically designed for kneading dough. We might have mistaken it for an errant, stale block of fudge if it didn’t have the words “Le Pétrin” printed on it.
On the other hand, the second fève was a woman coyly bending over to lift her dress and present her rear-end, clad in a pair of olde-timey bloomers. At the base it read, “Fanny.”
In case you wonder how the parents of a French third-grader might react to such a risqué fève, they probably wouldn’t react at all. Or maybe they might smile approvingly and say, “Let them eat cake.”