Memory, Marzipan, and "The Stolen Prince"

I love marzipan – let’s just come out with that straight away.

I also work with it often when I bake. My family loves marzipan too (though, and this is true, those of us born in England—or its possessions—love it a little bit more…it’s like the Marmite thing but not as extreme) and until recently, I thought it was one of those items with universal appeal. Apparently it isn’t.  When I started posting photos on Facebook of marzipan figures I’d made, I got a surprising amount of flak from marzipan haters. I don’t understand how you can hate marzipan. What is to hate? Seriously?

It’s essentially a paste made of ground almonds and sugar.  That’s it. Some recipes call for small amounts of other ingredients (corn syrup, almond essence, rum, etc.), but the basic recipe has stayed the same for millennia. Naturally, there is a dispute over who “invented” marzipan (Persia or early Europeans), but there is no question that it is a point of confectionary pride in Germany, Italy, and England. The word “marzipan,” in fact is the German variant of the English “marchpane,” which is no longer used. But soft, check out this reference from Romeo and Juliet,

Act I, Scene V:

A hall in Capulet's house.

Musicians waiting. Enter Servingmen with napkins
First Servant

    Where's Potpan, that he helps not to take away? He
    shift a trencher? he scrape a trencher!
Second Servant
    When good manners shall lie all in one or two men's
    hands and they unwashed too, 'tis a foul thing.
First Servant
    Away with the joint-stools, remove the
    court-cupboard, look to the plate. Good thou, save
    me a piece of marchpane; and, as thou lovest me, let
    the porter let in Susan Grindstone and Nell.
    Antony, and Potpan!
Second Servant
    Ay, boy, ready.

Yes. Save me a piece.

Marzipan is extremely versatile. It can be molded into exquisite figures of fruits and vegetables and whatever else you can imagine and rolled out to cover cakes (which the English still do) instead of thick, barely edible fondant. When I finally figured out how to make my own marzipan it was as if a whole new world had opened up for me.

My mom’s memories and love of marzipan have their origins in the thin slices of Battenburg cake she would eat when her father took her to the “bioscope” at the Seapoint promenade in Cape Town. Mine involve the little marzipan treats we’d have when we got fancy enough to buy the little pigs or fruits that came in plain white bags—stiff with sugar on the outside and soft, fresh and almondy on the inside. I’d nibble at them slowly, always very sad when they were gone.

But unlike most writers who write about food, my most powerful memories and connections with food are not related to the eating of it (no sensory memories of oysters sliding down my gullet or madeleine crumbs in my tea) but to the reading about it in books. There were the cakes and tea in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for example, and the huge, poisoned, and delicious almond cake in Asterix and Cleopatra. The Turkish Delight in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe captured my imagination too—creating a flavor in my mind that had very little to do with actual Turkish Delight. But one of the strongest memories I have—and one that lingers still—is of the marzipan in a story titled, “The Stolen Prince” from the collection,  The Lotus and the Grail: Legends from East to West by Rosemary Harris. It was published in England by Faber & Faber in 1974 and I still have my original copy which I have dragged—literally—around the world with me. I haven’t seen another copy since, nor have I been able to find “The Stolen Prince” anywhere else in any form.

The story (which the author credits as having a Greek origin) goes like this:

A Greek king of modest means (already a wonderful description) has a beautiful daughter whom he is trying to marry off. The princess has other ideas because, generally speaking, the suitors are meh and bearded and don’t meet her standards (she’s a single-minded princess who knows what she wants—another reason to love the story). The princess is also a talented baker (another very un-princess-like quality) with a sharp eye for beauty. She wants to do right by her dad but wants to live her life the way she wants to live it. So she goes down to the royal kitchens and mixes up a huge batch of marzipan—in the story, because of the British spin, it’s referred to as marchpane. Working in a frenzy, the princess stays up all night sculpting a perfect prince out of marchpane. (The story points out that since the princess is such a skilled sculptress, the prince is both gorgeous and anatomically correct—go ahead and draw your own conclusions; I certainly did.) Once she sees what she’s done, the princess is bereft because while he is beautiful, Prince Marchpane is also completely inanimate (go ahead and draw your own conclusions about that too). So what does she do? She carries her sweet prince and lays him at the altar of St. Cecilia (there is a braiding of paganism and Christianity throughout the story) and, prostrate, prays for the breath of life. This goes on for weeks. The king and the servants have to step over her in the hall while she gets thinner and thinner. The king is a bit alarmed by all this but lets her be. After—yes, you guessed it—forty days and nights, her prayers are answered and Prince Marchpane comes to life, lifts up his worn-out princess, and carries her off to bed. The story points out that in addition to being gorgeous, the prince smells really, really good. Obviously, they marry and are happy happy until…

The thing is, Prince Marchpane is made out of sugar and almonds so he’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. So when an Evil Queen from a neighboring land sails by and hears tell of his beauty and deliciousness, it doesn’t take much for Prince Mushbrain to be lured onto the boat and spirited off to the Evil Queen’s boudoir where she holds him hostage (and presumably tastes him frequently).

Well. Obviously, the princess is a wreck. But not one to wallow and weep (remember the whole forty days and nights thing), she has three pairs of iron shoes made and resolves to tramp across the globe and heavens in them until she wears them  all out searching for her Prince Marchpane. She’s on the last pair when she finally discovers where he’s being kept. Of course, it’s never that simple. You can’t just storm the Evil Queen’s castle and take away Prince Marchpane when you’re all worn out and small. Long story short: she figures out a plan but the Evil Queen proves to be a tough cookie and Prince Marchpane, again, not quite quick enough on the uptake. There are so many fabulous details in this last part of the story—the glorious items that spring from magical nuts that the princess has been given, drugged wine, and the insatiable greed of the Evil Queen. The princess’s constancy and strength prevails in the end and she gets Prince Marchpane home where “they made love in the lemon groves, and listened to the nightingales.”  And as if all that weren’t enough, he reads Homer, keeps bees, and makes wine, “but there’s a rumour that he never, never let her make a marchpane man again.”

Not that stupid, apparently.

I don’t want to get all postmodern psychoanalytic feminist (or whatever) in my interpretation of why this was such a powerful story for me as a girl not quite out of childhood but seeing it in the rearview mirror but it had a lot to do with being able to choose and create one’s own destiny. As a woman. I loved all my princess stories—the Grimms, along with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were my first and deepest loves—but it was rare to find one that didn’t have men determining their fates in some way, however canny they were about twisting things to their advantage. They were almost always under a man’s thumb and only through trickery or guile were they able to get what they wanted. And when they didn’t get what they wanted, they pretended that what they’d gotten was what they’d wanted all along. The princess in this story bakes and cooks because she wants to. She makes her own prince because she doesn’t like the other offerings. When he comes to life he spirits her away to the bedroom before they get married. She’s bound and determined and she gets it done. But she is the genuine article; kind, generous, and funny. When the Evil Queen tries to make her own Prince Marchpane it goes horribly, hilariously wrong (not to give too much away, but things start to rot in the heat…). The message was also about patience, about really knowing what you want, and about being true to yourself.

But I won’t lie to you and tell you that I didn’t want (very, very badly) to make my own marchpane prince. If I had been just a little younger when I’d first read this story, I might have actually tried. Just a little older and I would have scoffed. But I discovered “The Stolen Prince” at exactly the right moment for all the messages of empowerment, creativity, and the sweetness of heart’s desire to hit me dead on. I think about the story every single time I roll out a piece of marzipan and take in the scent of almonds and sugar.

I’m getting better at my little sculptures too.

Perhaps there’s still time to make that prince. 

Marzipan Paintbrush and Fruits