We ended the last Feast with the story of Scheherazade, the Lover. She became a Persian queen and told 1,001 nights of tales—each to save her life and the lives of all the women in the realm.

Our storyteller at the Feast gave us a recipe for something of a remix of these Persian Love Cakes. The recipe starts with key instructions, drawn from a poem by Hilary Fogarty:

Begin by falling in love.
Begin with desire
To put sweetness upon
Your beloved's tongue.

Then accept the world
As delicate, frail, easily torn
Big and old and wide.

And yourself as clumsy and distracted
Unskilled and prone to hurrying.
Because you are in love,
You can accept these truths.
You can forgive them in the world,
You can forgive them in yourself.

Begin together ingredients.

You must first learn the secrets of trees,
The flowering place of orchids,
The birthplace of spices,
The locations of nurturing soils,
The ways of bees and cows and men.

Because you are in love,
The distance will not seem far.
Because you are in love,
The wait will not seem long.

You must begin to travel the world.

For the sold-out Feast of Fables, scheduled 7 days from now, we will pick up the thread from there, and we will meet beautiful Aphrodite, golden apples, glass slippers, gingerbread houses, and more!

Begin by Falling in Love