George and I got married in September 1990, and a month later, we moved to Geneva for a year. By December, the we were settled in the Plainpalais neighborhood (which is actually depicted on the map above), and the novelty was starting to wear off a bit. The Fête de l’Escalade came as a welcome distraction, and everyone made sure we knew about it, although we didn’t go to the celebration. We just got a chocolate marmite.
The story begins in 1603, when the Duke of Savoy decided he wanted to capture the city of Geneva and make it his capital. On the night of December 11-12, his troops tried to scale the walls of the city. Legend has it that a woman was up late tending to her vegetable soup when she heard a noise, saw the soldiers climbing up the wall, and dumped her pot of soup over them, scalding them and raising the alarm. She is remembered to this day as Mère Royaume.
(The Savoyard version of this story is that the soup was so terrible that the soldiers fled in disgust.)
Today, Genevans celebrate the Fête de l’Escalade with a costumed road race and other festivities. The official food of the Fête de l’Escalade (there’s a special food for every holiday in Geneva, even the fast days) is a chocolate marmite (soup pot) filled with marzipan vegetables. Typically, the youngest child in the family is allowed to break the marmite, which functions as a sort of chocolate pinata except that the marzipan vegetables usually aren’t very good.
Of course the stores were full of chocolate marmites the week beforehand—it’s like the chocolate bunnies at Easter, all different sizes and degrees of elaborateness. We got a fairly modest one but there were some that were huge. Anyway, there isn’t really a story attached to this post, just a happy memory of eating the chocolate marmite, and a reminder that some people never forget a fight.
