Cooking with Madame d’Aulnoy

The fairy tales of Mary-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Baronesse d’Aulnoy—first published in French in the 1690s—are full of jewel-like foods, poisoned drinks, and violent feats of baking. The cooking is extreme. In one story, “Finette-Cendron,” a Cinderella figure, pleases her fairy godmother by baking her a cake with “two pounds of butter”; later, she serves her a feast made from two chickens, a cock, and “two little rabbits that were being fed up with cabbage.” In another story, “Belle-Belle,” a cross-dressing girl kills a dragon after getting him drunk on a lake-sized wine cocktail spiced with “raisins, pepper, and other things that cause thirst.” In a third, “The Bee and the Orange Tree,” a princess brings her shipwrecked sweetheart “four parrots and six squirrels cooked in the sun,” along with “strawberries, cherries, raspberries, and other fruit,” served on plates of stone, and using large, “very soft and pliable” leaves as napkins. Lest anyone find d’Aulnoy’s repasts and their power unrealistic, the opposite is true, as I discovered while attempting to re-create the food with my friend Celia Bell, whose novel, The Disenchantment, published this May, was inspired by d’Aulnoy’s life and work.