You're running out of time to enjoy possibly the only Mardi Gras tradition to survive this season's COVID-19 pandemic. Parades and other crowd-spawning events have been largely canceled across Louisiana.
King cake is the sweet bakery delicacy originally associated with the Jan. 6 Epiphany when the magi (kings) from the east delivered gifts to the baby Jesus.
In Catholic south Louisiana, king cakes somehow became hooked up with the Mardi Gras season, which ends Tuesday night, the last chance to enjoy any conviviality before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.
Lent was long chiefly a religious tradition, with practicing Roman Catholics observing church-ordered fasting, and often giving up something special, until Good Friday and Easter.
The revelry of Mardi Gras has escaped into society generally, with little regard to any religion. Communities across Louisiana and neighboring states host elaborately decorated parades of Mardi Gras pseudo-royalty on Mardi Gras Day and often the weekends just preceding, until COVID.
But the king cake, originally a baked ring of twisted sweet dough enclosing a "baby," has become a sumptuously iced, filled, decorated treat. The "baby" is no longer baked inside - for fear of someone swallowing it and choking - but is sold with the cake.
The host can hide it in the dough before serving, and thereby continue another ancient tradition. At a king cake party, the one whose serving contains the baby, traditionally, must buy the cake for the next party.
And king cakes have become an important Mardi Gras business, with bakeries selling the treats for $20 and more, shipping them across the country.
The "babies" have evolved into realistic-looking plastic dolls about the size of a grape. In times past, tiny porcelain babies were used, or pecans, large beans, or even coins.
Variety! These days, in addition to the generic cinnamon, filled cakes can be found at every grocery and bakery. Specialty versions come in endless variety, liquor-soaked, muffuletta-flavored, berry-filled, humongous, mini, even plain. A thorough search of area bakeries would likely turn up many more.
But makers are not likely to continue production into Lent. Therefore, reminds reader Edna Marie Sevin, sample a king cake right away.
Care-giver update: Patient is home and impatient to get out and about again. Home health care sends out a nurse and a physical therapist every week. An occupational therapist also comes and re-teaches her how to put on socks. I want her to learn how to cook, wash, clean and mow the lawn, but those don't seem to count as occupations.
Real winter? My north Louisiana kinfolk were scurrying Thursday and Friday, making sure their residential water pipes were buried or insulated enough to survive temperatures as cold as 10 degrees this week. A local friend left work early to visit his coastal Terrebonne camp on a similar drain-the-pipes mission. We, too, have pipes, plants and pets to protect. And there is little prospect of preserving our Japan plums or early blooming pink magnolias. Good luck.
That deadly 100-vehicle Texas wreck reminds me just how untutored and inexperienced southern drivers are. Should we get snow or freezing rain, I fear damage, injury, or worse. Stay home, dress warmly, be safe.
Black history: Among that WWII squad of black pilots, the Tuskegee Airmen, was a Houma man. Some information about Gus Brown is displayed at the Regional Military Museum on Barrow Street, and I am working on a story about the modest hero.
Column-fodder: (Nonsense posted on the Internet during pandemic isolation and swiped to fill space here).
- "Since we’re all in quarantine I guess we’ll be making only inside jokes from now on."
- "Ran out of toilet paper and started using lettuce leaves. Today was just the tip of the iceberg, tomorrow romaines to be seen."
- "If 2020 were a math word-problem: 'If you're going down a river at 2 mph and your canoe loses a wheel, how much pancake mix would you need to re-shingle your roof?' "
- "I see people about my age mountain climbing; I feel good getting my leg through my underwear without losing my balance."
- At what point can we just start using 2020 as profanity? As in: "That's a load of 2020" or "What in the 2020" or "abso-2020-lutely."
Responding? Contact Bill Ellzey at 381-6256, at ellzey@viscom.net, billellzey312@gmail.com, or c/o The Courier, P.O. Box 2717, Houma, LA 70361.
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