The Christmas Kalends of Provence | Page 9

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 medi?val 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 Proven?al 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. Mis�� 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 Chateau. 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 Mis�� Fougueiroun: whose name long has been one to conjure with in all the kitchens between Saint-Remy and the Rh?ne. For the Proven?aux 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 Proven?aux 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 cr��che: a representation with odd little figures and accessories of the personages and scene of the Nativity--the whole at once so na?ve and so tender as to be possible only among a people blessed with rare sweetness and rare simplicity of soul.
The making of the cr��che is especially the children's part of the festival--though the elders always take a most lively interest in it--and a couple of days before Christmas, as we were returning from one of our walks, we fell in with all the farm children coming homeward from the mountains laden with cr��che-making material: mosses, lichens, laurel, and holly; this last of smaller growth than our holly, but bearing fine red berries, which in Proven?al are called li poumeto de Sant-Jan--"the little apples of Saint John."
Our expedition had been one of the many that the Vidame took me upon in order that he might expound his geographical reasons for believing in his beloved Roman Camp; and this diversion enabled me to escape from Marius--I