The Christmas Kalends of Provence | Page 9

the principal dish shall be a roast
turkey, and that nougat and poumpo shall figure at the dessert. Why
poumpo is held in high esteem by the Provençaux I am not prepared to
say. It seemed to me a cake of only a humdrum quality; but even Misè
Fougueiroun--to whom I am indebted for the appended
recipe[1]--spoke of it in a sincerely admiring and chop-smacking way.
Anciently the Christmas bird was a goose--who was roasted and eaten
('twas a backhanded compliment!) in honour of her ancestral good
deeds. For legend tells that when the Kings, led by the star, arrived at
the inn-stable in Bethlehem it was the goose, alone of all the animals
assembled there, who came forward politely to make them her
compliments; yet failed to express clearly her good intentions because
she had caught a cold, in the chill and windy weather, and her voice
was unintelligibly creaky and harsh. The same voice ever since has
remained to her, and as a farther commemoration of her hospitable and
courteous conduct it became the custom to spit her piously on
Christmas Day.
I have come across the record of another Christmas roast that now and
then was served at the tables of the rich in Provence in mediæval times.
This was a huge cock, stuffed with chicken-livers and sausage-meat
and garnished with twelve roasted partridges, thirty eggs, and thirty
truffles: the whole making an alimentary allegory in which the cock
represented the year, the partridges the months, the eggs the days, and
the truffles the nights. But this never was a common dish, and not until
the turkey appeared was the goose rescued from her annual martyrdom.
The date of the coming of the turkey to Provence is uncertain. Popular
tradition declares that the crusaders brought him home with them from
the Indies! Certainly, he came a long while ago; probably very soon
after Europe received him from America as a noble and perpetual

Christmas present--and that occurred, I think, about thirty years after
Columbus, with an admirable gastronomic perception, discovered his
primitive home.
Ordinarily the Provençal Christmas turkey is roasted with a stuffing of
chestnuts, or of sausage-meat and black olives: but the high cooks of
Provence also roast him stuffed with truffles--making so superb a dish
that Brillat-Savarin has singled it out for praise. Misè Fougueiroun's
method, still more exquisite, was to make a stuffing of veal and fillet of
pork (one-third of the former and two-thirds of the latter) minced and
brayed in a mortar with a seasoning of salt and pepper and herbs, to
which truffles cut in quarters were added with a lavish hand. For the
basting she used a piece of salt-pork fat stuck on a long fork and set on
fire. From this the flaming juice was dripped judiciously over the roast,
with resulting little puffings of brown skin which permitted the savour
of the salt to penetrate the flesh and so gave to it a delicious crispness
and succulence. As to the flavour of a turkey thus cooked, no tongue
can tell what any tongue blessed to taste of it may know! Of the minor
dishes served at the Christmas dinner it is needless to speak. There is
nothing ceremonial about them; nothing remarkable except their
excellence and their profusion. Save that they are daintier, they are
much the same as Christmas dishes in other lands.
While the preparation of all these things was forward, a veritable
culinary tornado raged in the lower regions of the Château. Both
Magali and the buxom Nanoun were summoned to serve under the
housekeeper's banners, and I was told that they esteemed as a high
privilege their opportunity thus to penetrate into the very arcana of high
culinary art. The Vidame even said that Nanoun's matrimonial
chances--already good, for the baggage had set half the lads of the
country-side at loggerheads about her--would be decidedly bettered by
this discipline under Misè Fougueiroun: whose name long has been one
to conjure with in all the kitchens between Saint-Remy and the Rhône.
For the Provençaux are famous trencher-men, and the way that leads
through their gullets is not the longest way to their hearts.
VI

But in spite of their eager natural love for all good things eatable, the
Provençaux also are poets; and, along with the cooking, another matter
was in train that was wholly of a poetic cast. This was the making of
the crèche: a representation with odd little figures and accessories of
the personages and scene of the Nativity--the whole at once so naïve
and so tender as to be possible only among a people blessed with rare
sweetness and rare simplicity of soul.
The making of the crèche is especially the children's part of the
festival--though the elders always take a most lively