A Slice of the French Tradition: Galette de Roi
Traditions — if not shoved down your throat — are often designed to bring you joy.
Are good friends not the essence of life? In my ideal world, I have a next-door neighbour who I can mindlessly call on for my morning chai, I have a gang that gets together on weekends sipping cocktails, with occasional movie plans and family gatherings in tow; I’m not a fan of the solitary life.
One needs to lose out on things taken for granted to realise their value; such a buzzkill rule, but all so true. Life in a foreign land often brings extended periods of solitude that make me miss my former, younger life. If I’d be able to uphold a hectic social calendar is debatable and is a story for another time, I tend to hold my present-day soirées very close to my heart as and when they happen. While I regularly succumb to the human contemplation of “what ifs”, my heart is so much more in gratitude for the people who make Paris worth it.
Two people have played a prominent role in making Paris what it is. Let us call them S and M. How S and I became friends is one of the craziest stories ever, but the fact that I hang with her in a city VERY far away from home many years later is even crazier. She’s married to this David Guetta-looking French man, M. And he has been a beacon of light to us — lost in the big city sheep — since we came to Paris. He’s our go-to person for knowing all things France. And as rich this country is with all its traditions and quirks, he’s always got interesting stories to tell.
In their latest visit to our place, he entered with a bakery brown bag with a whole pie!
“Wow! A pie,” I exclaimed.
“Nope. It’s a Galette de Roi,” he clarified.
A thin cardboard golden crown sat atop the paper bag.
Galette de Roi translates to ‘a King Pancake’. M explained that this is a traditional bakery product especially popular with kids in France. It’s a thin pie with a dense, creamy almond paste between sheets of crispy puff pastry. The tradition is to cut this cake into as many slices as the number of kids. Then, one of the kids is blindfolded (or sent to sit under the table) and has to allot one piece per kid at random. Once every child has a slice, they dig in.
“So, what’s the crown for?” I asked.
“There is one tiny toy in one of these slices. Whoever gets it will be le roi, ‘the king’, and will get to tell us what to do and not do for the evening,” he explained.
On this eve, there were no kids to take the slice. Only adults who were trying hard to keep the kid in them alive.
We nibbled through our aromatic slices, albeit with caution. The slices were cut slim, not because we were too many of us, but because adults are party-poopers perpetually hiding behind adulthood veils of: “I don’t have a sweet tooth,” or “I’m watching my sugar intake these days.” Tiring.
We were close to finishing our slices when I asked if there really was a toy. And as I voiced my concern, we all looked toward the last big piece lying on the table. A peal of collective laughter broke out, and we realised what had happened. M reached for the slice and cut it further into tiny pieces till the neatly decorated porcelain easter egg emerged. We were being punished for our reluctance and our excuses; the universe is always watching. What luck!
Traditions — if not shoved down your throat — are often designed to bring you joy, ensuring you’ll relish a slice of it irrespective of where you come from. Like we did.
