Professor Butter Beard and the Morgan’s “Book of Marvels”
“The world is a circle without a beginning
And nobody knows where it really ends.
Everything depends on where you
Are in the circle that's spinning around.
Half of the time we are upside down.”
- Burt Bacharach, “Lost Horizon,” 1973
Let’s start with facts. Shangri-La is a fictional place in Tibet, described in the 1933 novel “Lost Horizon” by the British author James Hilton. Hilton portrays Shangri-La as a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains. In the novel, the people who live in Shangri-La are almost immortal, living hundreds of years beyond the normal lifespan and only very slowly ageing in appearance. A group of hijacked travelers are mysteriously led into this monastic oasis and must decide whether to remain within this scrumptious utopia or return to the troubled world outside.
But then, let’s hand over this delicious premise to the 1973 piano-skipping hands of Burt Bacharach, and all of a sudden, Peter Finch and Liv Ullman are flirting and frolicking among the tulips, Sally Kellerman and Olivia Hussey are singing enchanting duets, and Bobby Van is soulfully serenading the aged Charles Boyer who is embarrassingly dressed in Dalia Lama drag.
The twelve-year-old me was enchanted and immediately proceeded to astonish and annoy my parents (and most of the neighbors) by prancing through the elementary schoolyard with swirling stolen toilet paper as streamers while singing the entire score from beginning to end (perfectly memorized, I must add). For me, Shangri-La became a personal “marvel” – an unexpected, inexplicable and astounding phenomenon inhabited with delightful hopes and dreams.
According to Colin Bailey, director of the Morgan Museum and Library, “these stories and others like them can be considered the modern counterpoints of medieval marvels. While every age has its own sense of what constitutes a marvel, what remain the same is the powerful sense of wonder and fascination that they evoke in their beholders.”
The Morgan Library and Museum explores this theory in their latest exhibition: “The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World.” Spanning mainly the years between 1200 to 1550, this exhibition brought together about 20 books, manuscripts and maps (and one globe) that echo the visual language and wanderlust of the show’s main attraction: two copies of the “Livre des Merveilles du Monde,” or “Book of Marvels of the World,” a 15th-century illustrated guide to the globe that catalogues the remarkable inhabitants, customs, and natural phenomena of various regions around the world, as it was then known to Europeans.
The illuminated manuscript was written and published in France by an unidentified author, written from the perspective of a medieval armchair traveler. Bailey writes, “Weaving together tales from ancient sources, traditional folklore, and the supposed reports of eyewitnesses, its compelling but mostly fictitious accounts were intended both to educate and titillate its medieval readers.”
The exhibition opens with a map of the Holy Land, created according to pilgrimage accounts. Among the very earliest printed examples of medieval maps to survive from Europe, the “Rüst Map” presents a world with the Garden of Eden at the top and Jerusalem prominently occupying the center. This world is subdivided by wildly contorting rivers and the various regions depicted as individual islands. Personifications of the four winds edge the circular boundary. Labels abound, providing names of various cities, realms, and in some cases, rudimentary descriptions of a particular region’s inhabitants.
Rüst populated his map with a cornucopia of marvelous peoples and wonders, including cannibals, pygmies battling cranes, sun-worshipers, dragons and even dog-headed humans. It immediately brought to mind my favorite of all medieval manuscripts, The Book of Kells, illuminated in much the same fantastical manner centuries earlier in Scotland.
The Morgan curators introduce their shining star of the exhibition, “The Book of Marvels” by opening the manuscript to a page depicting Traponee, or Sri Lanka. Within the illumination exquisitely chapeauxed hunters, armed with intimidatingly sharp spears and their ultra-focused hounds, chase a giant snail up a small hill. While just behind, a man and his wife comfortably lounge in their home constructed from one snail’s hollowed-out shell.
Additional objects in the exhibition demonstrate how foreign cultures were imagined in the Middle Ages, including depictions of famous medieval landmarks and somewhat human “others.” Highlights include extremely rare, illustrated manuscripts of Marco Polo and John Mandeville; a richly ornamented Ottoman “Book of Wonders” made for a sultan’s daughter; and a Bavarian “Book of Nature” encompassing the natural history knowledge of the late 14th century.
My forever childlike mind escapes reality by imagining what Bacharach might have additionally composed if he had been given permission to include within the Shangri-La inhabitants giant snails, two and three-headed naked singing monks, and wickedly tempting forked-tailed she-devils. Marvels indeed!
As I travelled with these thoughts into my daybreak kitchen, I was inspired to create an updated version of my summer-sweet cherry pie imagined as a medieval landscape crowded with hills and mounds of butter and sugar pastry, bubbling pools of sweet garnet juice, and hidden taste treasures of exotic spices and vanilla seeds. The choice of a sumptuous pie is perfect, for in the realm of marvels, “the world is a circle without a beginning, and nobody knows where it really ends.”
Professor Butter Beard’s Sweet Cherry Pie
One Two-Crust Pie
Your favorite two-crust pie dough recipe
5-6 cups pitted and halved fresh sweet cherries (measured after pitting and halving)
6 Tbsp granulated sugar
Zest of two limes (you will use the juice of one)
3 Tbsp all-purpose flour
½ tsp fine sea salt
½ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp ground allspice
1 tsp vanilla paste
3 Tbsp almond flour
Heavy cream and granulated sugar to finish
1) Make your favorite two-crust pie dough. Divide the dough in half and pat each half into a 6” disk. Wrap each in plastic wrap and chill for at least 1 hour – long enough for you to pit and half all your fresh cherries. Set the prepped cherries aside in a large glass bowl.
2) When ready to bake, preheat your oven to 425 degrees.
3) In a medium bowl, whisk together the 6 Tbsp granulated sugar and the zest of two limes until the sugar appears moist and is very fragrant. Add the all-purpose flour, fine sea salt, cinnamon and allspice and whisk to combine.
4) Roll out your first dough disk to fit your chosen pie plate. (I roll mine to roughly 1/8” thickness). Fit the bottom crust into the pan and sprinkle the 3 Tbsp almond flour over the bottom.
5) Squeeze the juice of one of the limes over the prepped cherries, add the vanilla paste, and then fold in your dry mix to evenly combine. Keep at the ready.
6) Roll your second dough disk into a circle large enough to cover your pie. I then use my lattice top roller to create a design in the dough – you could easily cut into large strips to create your own lattice work. Use a spatula to fill the bottom crust with the cherries. Place the top crust over the cherries and trim the edges before folding under the edges to seal. Brush the top crust with heavy cream and sprinkle liberally with granulated sugar.
7) Bake the pie at 425 degrees for 25 minutes, reduce the heat to 374 degrees and bake for another 35-40 until the filling is bubbling and the top crust is deliciously brown.
Note – Don’t you dare toss out any leftover dough. Roll it into cookies, painted with heavy cream and dusted with sugar and cinnamon. Keep them chilled and pop them into the oven for 18-20 minutes after you remove the pie.
