Marmite de l’Escalade
Fly to Geneva
A chocolate cauldron filled with marzipan vegetables; it is smashed as the ritual words are recited.
Every December, Geneva smashes cauldrons. They are made of chocolate, round like a pot, with two handles and the city’s coat of arms; inside lie leeks, cabbages, turnips and carrots made of marzipan, and sweets wrapped in red and yellow, the Genevan colours.
They recall a night in 1602. On 12 December, shortly after midnight, the Duke of Savoy’s troops tried to take the city by climbing its ramparts with ladders that could be taken apart for carrying. Geneva held firm, and the festival that keeps the memory alive is named after that climb, the Escalade. According to legend, a woman from Lyon of over sixty, the mother of a large family, the Mère Royaume, emptied a cauldron of scalding soup out of her window onto the head of an attacker passing beneath her walls.
The sweet cauldron came much later, in 1881, made first of nougat, then of chocolate. The ritual, though, has not changed: it is smashed in one blow, and the youngest and the oldest at the table strike together, hands joined, speaking the set formula: “Et qu’ainsi périssent les ennemis de la République !” (“And so perish the enemies of the Republic!”). The pieces are then shared around the table.
Real vegetables have their place too: the festival soup, in which leeks, cabbages, turnips, onions and carrots cook together, is eaten in the lanes during the celebrations, with mulled wine. No recipe is the authority; every family has its own.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Escalade (Genève)” (French, German and English).
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