Lentorama 2019: Resurrect My Globe!

Day 39: France

Eggs are central to Easter, whether they're boiled and dyed, plastic and filled with jelly beans, or chocolate wrapped in foil.  It's likely that you'll buy more eggs around Easter than you would normally, which could lead you to have some left over. What to do with them?

If you live in Bessières, a town in southwest France, you make a giant omelette on Easter Monday. 

The story goes that Napoleon was passing through, and after enjoying a local omelette he asked for one to be made for his troops. And as you don't say no to the emperor, a giant omelette was made using all the eggs the locals could find.

Jump forward a couple hundred years, and the town brought the giant omelette back as part of a larger festival (though the official history suggests that the omelette tradition was kept alive by local kids, who would ask for eggs and then distribute the omelettes to the poor). The brotherhood that oversees the event does see it as a kind of charitable and cultural thing, and not only continue the practice of giving diners their eggs for free, but have established links with similar festivals around the world (if you're in the States like me you can stop by Abbeville, Louisiana, though theirs appears to be held in November).