La Cuisine des Fees

 

There are several books treating the issue of eating in fairy tales. There`s always food going around in a story and when the children are not eating it means that they are being eaten. I recently found a cookbook based on this subject. La Cuisine des Fées first published in 2005 at Editions Le Chêne in France.

The authors, Philippe Model et Christine Ferber put together an entire feast based on fairytales – mostly sweets but if you look you can easily come up with a 5 course menu. The idea for the book, all under the sign of romanticism and happily ever after, came to Gilles and Laurence while reading stories to their children and eventually also cooked versions of dishes from the stories.  Besides them an entire team of specialists excited by the project of making a cookbook based on fairytales: Cristine Ferber a patissier who can creatively interpret all of the themes in the book and more and a very talented Philipe Model  created of tens of draqings and photographs contributing to a fuller understanding or evocation of a particular story.

An avant-propos, six chapters and an index make up the basic structure of the book. The chapters investigate in grouped themes referring to one or more stories and recipes based on different situations or characters of the book: the magic house, the enchanted garden, the mysterious forest, the ogre`s and whitche`s  castle, from one castle to another and finally Wonderland.

Each recipe follows the same pattern: first a story extract, short, most often a dialogue from the story and the second part consisting of a recipe. Some of the recipes are ``direct`` translations from the story like the sugar matches from The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen while others are interpretations or atmospheric reminders of a character, situation or just evocative of the whole story like the cake of the Marquis de Carabas a nobleman from the Puss in Boots fairy tale. There are numerous stories from the northern hemisphere: The Gingerbread Man by Jim Aylesworth, Cinderella by Charles Perrault, The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi etc.

The recipe index is close to impossible to use. Not unless you are deliberately looking for ``allumette au sucre``.

So far I tried one of the recipes and even dough I found it a bit too approximate for a baking recipe, the results were spot on. Tried it two times and I can say that the second time a big group of 30 years old were happy like little kinds with a cake of the Marquis de Carabas during a late night B-day party in a club. 

Merci beaucoup!