Diary: Patricia Storace, A Lilliputian Christmas Feast
Seeing the miraculous in the small
Details from the eighteenth-century Neopolitan Baroque Crèche at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musée des Santons, Village Provençal Miniature, Grignan, France
The celebration of Christmas is a meditation on the presence of the miracle in reality—a transformation of the world seen through marvels of changing scale and of paradox. Miraculously, the darkest days of the year become its most radiant, the time of acute hunger yields a paradisal plenitude. The abundance of the Christmas table is an occasion to feast as if we were immortal. As Robert Farrar Capon, the author of The Supper of the Lamb, wrote, the meal celebrates not only the “Word, but the Flesh He came to save.’’ It also celebrates the miraculous survival of a homeless child stalked by a murderous king, the triumph of good over evil, love over cruelty. The rituals of Christmas are theater in which seemingly implacable despair changes into joy.
At its heart is the miraculous birth of a human baby—who is also God incarnate for Christians, a divine witness in other traditions. In the Islamic Nativity, the child Jesus speaks from the cradle, articulating his love of God.
The newborn child changes the nature of the world, making the impossible possible. The bare stable that is his birthplace is a revelation of paradise. The unseen becomes visible, what is tiny is recognized as cosmic, and great kings no longer live for money and power, but deliver both up to the tender infant, kneeling in reverence instead to infinite goodness.
The baby in the manger is the smallest figure at the center of the traditional Christmas crèche, but the infant draws toward the stable an entire miniature world in pilgrimage. The ubiquitous crèches you see in neighborhood streets and shop façades in Spain, Italy, France, and elsewhere are peopled with a whole social milieu, the secular world contributing its particular gifts to the sacred world, including gifts of food they grow or cook. In the famous Provençal terra cotta santon “little saint” scenes (a craft in which women like Thérèse Neveu, honored by the great Provençal poet, Frédéric Mistral, have excelled), the community bears an anthology of its characteristic regional food to the Holy Family. There can be fish sellers, winemakers, farmers’ wives with baskets of eggs on their heads, bakers, chestnut sellers with portable stoves, olive sellers, a man carrying a Christmas goose in a basket, and prosperous couples carrying bottles of wine and fougasse, an orange-water-flavored bread that is one of the traditional thirteen Provençal Christmas table desserts. The endearing figure of the innkeeper Bartoumieu (Bartholomew) is disheveled, wearing a wrinkled, badly buttoned shirt, as he hastens to offer his dried cod and baskets of vegetables to the new parents. In a way, the santons are like figural votive candles. These gifts of food are not only symbols of their givers’ livelihoods, but of their sustenance; the gift is not only of their talents, but of their lives.
I myself have dabbled in Lilliputian cuisine. It is, as you would guess, a small repertoire: Mastering the Art of Lilliputian Cooking would not need two volumes. I was inspired by a copy of Agnes Jekyll’s 1922 Kitchen Essays that I found at a second-hand book market I haunted as a student . Jekyll was the first cookery columnist for The Times of London. Her witty and generous narrative recipes for different occasions and states of mind were conceived as social and psychological portraits, a little as if Montaigne had written a cookbook. She was a pioneer of a genre that is still very much alive, but what led me to Lilliput through her was learning that Agnes had been godmother to Mary Lutyens, the daughter of the architect Edwin Lutyens, designer of the British Embassy in Washington, of much the British government structures of New Delhi, and of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House. Agnes had designed the Dolls’ House’s kitchen and stocked its pantry. Her more famous sister-in-law, the landscape gardener Gertrude Jekyll, designed the Dolls’ House garden. And in the library, alongside books by Kipling, Thomas Hardy, and Vita Sackville-West, is Agnes’s miniature volume, A Doll’s-House Cookery Book. (Incidentally, the library, thanks to Queen Camilla’s project celebrating the centenary of the Dolls’ House in 2024, is still a living microcosm of British literature, with new books by Alan Bennett, Elif Shafak, Tom Stoppard, and Bernardine Evaristo, among others, along with a new cookbook, by Tom Parker Bowles, Queen Camilla’s son, a cookbook author and historian of British food.) Agnes Jekyll’s microscopic cookery book helped support me in a substantial way through my university years, when I became a popular-by-word-of-mouth weekend child minder, through giving lessons in Lilliputian cuisine. I taught my charges to bake bread; we made tiny baguettes, braided loaves, and the world’s smallest marmite or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which according to the Lilliputian etiquette practiced by Gulliver himself, were not to be devoured all at once, but eaten in three bites. We made pain au chocolat, rolling the dough around a dusting of grated chocolate, baked about as long as it takes to recite the Lilliputian love poem as faithfully recorded in T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose: “Mo Rog / Glonog / Quinba / Hlin varr.” (Translation: “Give me a kiss, please Miss. I like your nose.”)
My Lilliputian Christmas feasts were sought after. We had to approximate the Lilliputian banquet for Gulliver and the great culminating Christmas dinner co-hosted by Lilliputians and humans in White’s novel, as hogsheads of AOC Lilliputian red wine (about the size of a tumbler, [?] with a flavor like Burgundy, per Gulliver), whole roasted bullocks the size of young partridges, and geese and turkeys the size of potato chips were unavailable. But despite the importance of Lilliputian terroir, climate, and agricultural practices for the full farm to table experience, we did very well with varied menus of mushrooms stuffed with cheese, quail eggs, deep fried green olives stuffed with sausage meat, and roast chestnuts, followed by miniscule Deglet Nour dates stuffed with particles of candied orange peel for plum pudding, tiny piped chocolate meringues, and chocolate truffles standing in for the Christmas Bûche. And most importantly, the after-dinner toasts, prepared by each of us, in praise of the miniature, the belittled, or underrated, to practice the great art of expressing wishes for a good to be shared in common by great and small. Mine was always, and still is, to mustard seeds: “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”
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Lilliputian Quail Eggs
These elegant morsels are even more nutritious than chicken eggs, dense with protein and vitamins, due to their greater proportion of yolk to white. The only challenge in dealing with them is peeling their delicate shells after cooking while keeping their perfect oval shape.
Fill a bowl with ice cubes and water to have ready for the cooked eggs.
Place a dozen quail eggs in a saucepan and cover them with cold water, adding a splash of white vinegar, to streamline the peeling process. Cook uncovered on low heat until the water boils. Boil for four minutes, then turn off heat, and let the eggs rest in the hot water for another two minutes. Remove the eggs with a strainer or slotted spoon, then place them immediately in the ice bath. When the eggs reach room temperature, place them on your work surface and roll them gently to crack the shells. Peel them under cold running water so that the thin membrane beneath the shell comes off cleanly. You can prepare them in advance, storing them in a covered container for five days.
There are countless ways, simple or complex, to savor these jewels. Four or five stirred into a creamy tomato soup, with a handful of shredded herbs are luxurious. I love them gently reheated with cream and tarragon, served over rice. Scotch quail eggs wrapped in sausage meat, then dredged with flour, egg, and bread crumbs and deep fried in a couple of inches of hot oil are superb, and will make any picnic unforgettable.
But my favorite way is the simplest, taught me by Janet Mendel, whose books on Spanish food are invaluable archives of Spanish cooking—living and timeless. Put the cooked eggs, speared with toothpicks, in the center of your favorite platter, make a well on either side of coarse salt crystals and of ground cumin. Dip first into the salt, then roll in the cumin. Serve with champagne or sherry for the perfect appetizer. (Quail eggs are staples, too, of Latin American children’s birthday and quinceañera parties.)
Patricia Storace’s most recent book is the novel The Book of Heaven, in which the intimate histories of eating and storytelling are deeply entwined. She is also the author of Dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece and a book of poems, Heredity. This is the latest in her series of diaries on cooking and reading for Book Post. Her previous recipes for the holidays included chestnut and chocolate pavé, with a consideration of Christmas ghosts; the famous turkey dressing of Civil Rights activist and author Lilian Smith; a late-night journey and potato paté from Jeanne Moreau with Ismail Merchant; and a poetic couple’s love story in food.
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