January 6th is Epiphany, the day when the Three Kings came to visit the baby Jesus. In France, because in France everything ends up being about food, it's the occasion for galette des rois, which of course is delicious and a kind of game to boot. In each galette is a feve, a little ceramic figure, and if you get the slice with the feve, you wear a golden crown for the rest of the day. (Feve means bean, which used to be baked in the galettes before the days of cheap ceramics.)
Even better, there are multiple kinds of galettes des rois so there's no danger of getting tired of it. Our favorite is the puff pastry with frangipane, but the other one, a kind of circular brioche with chunky bits of sugar on top, is good too, especially with a coffee in the afternoon. Maybe after a nap. If you're that kind of person. Julian came back from the boulangerie this morning with tales of a chocolate galette des rois, and since this is the very last day to have them, we may have to send him back to get one.
Since we are obsessed with all things Astèrix, we got a couple of galettes des rois from the supermarket Intermarché, which not surprisingly cannot begin to compete with the galettes from real bakeries -- but the feves were Astèrix characters. Impossible to miss out on that. We considered eating our way through enough galettes to get the whole set until we saw that there were a dozen. I don't think the baby Jesus would have approved.
The ritual for eating a galette des rois is to put the youngest person under the table to act as the main des innocents (hand of the innocents). The oldest person is the distributeur, who cuts the slices. Then the main des innocents calls out a name, and a slice is handed over. This is to prevent any funny business on the part of the distributeur, who can sometimes feel the feve as he's cutting. We didn't discover this procedure until after we'd made our way through several galettes by simply hacking off a piece when we walked by, heathens that we are.
Am I making it sound as though we have eaten an ungodly number of galettes des rois? Perhaps we are celebrating Epiphany with all the monarchical and religious fervor it deserves. No? Well, somebody has to get out there and do the cultural research. Am I right? You should thank me.
