OTHER BIRDS

BENEDICT’S CALLING CARD

A Mallow Island Origin Story

Once upon a time, long ago, there lived a quiet and dreamy child named Benedict who grew up not knowing love. He was rarely lonely, however, because ghosts gravitated to him.

But this was not love. He understood that.

One day a struggling baker took pity on the orphan boy he saw on the street, and he gave Benedict the stale treats he’d been unable to sell that day. He was astounded when Benedict, eating slowly despite his hunger, was able to tell him exactly what ingredients were in each sweet. Benedict, it turns out, was born with a very rare ability to decipher even the most complex ingredients in anything he ate. It was a trait that had gone unnoticed, for he rarely ate food with any complexity, subsiding mostly on porridge and limp vegetables.

The baker decided to take Benedict on as an apprentice and he gave him a warm place to sleep at night on bags on flour. This was generous of him, yes. But the baker had an ulterior motive. He went around to the most popular bakeries in London and brought back sweets and confections for Benedict to taste and replicate.

While this still wasn’t love, Benedict thought it was close.

Soon, Benedict filled his days, and most of his nights, with making sweets. He was a notoriously bad sleeper because of the ghosts who waited impatiently for his dreams. Every morning the baker would walk into the bakery to find that Benedict had made tantalizing petit fours, choux filled with delicious creams, candied chestnuts and astounding mille-feuille.

Benedict enjoyed making people happy for those few moments between seeing something delightful he created, and having it pass between their lips. Baking for others, he discovered, was an ancestor to love. It was something from which love might one day become. The baker handed the reins over to Benedict, while he himself greeted and chatted with customers. He became quite rich.

One fateful night, a bored and wandering Egyptian ghost, whose tomb had been raided and his treasures now in a nearby grand home, came to Benedict. Ancient Egyptians were the first to use the mallow plant medicinally, and this ghost was feeling particularly wistful. He told Benedict to consider using mallow in his confections. The next morning, the baker discovered Benedict had made something wholly original, something no one had ever heard of. It would become his specialty: a spongy, soft confection made by whipping dried roots of the mallow plant with sugar, water, and egg whites.

The baker became the toast of London!

Benedict still slept on those bags of flour.

Lest you’re worried about poor Benedict, keep reading.

For this is where our story of Benedict intersects with that of a wealthy old Englishman named Edward Pelletier and his wife, Eloise.

Edward and his wife had ducked out of the rain into the bakery, and they were tempted to taste this most heavenly creation. Edward had recently married the much younger Eloise, considered to be the most beautiful woman in France. Eloise, like many uncommonly beautiful women of the time, was fashionably bored and quite stubbornly resistant to happiness of any kind. Her husband was undaunted. Being cheerful by nature, he sought every remedy to cure his lovely wife of her low moods—clothing, furs, jewelry, several homes all over Europe with elaborate rooms and gardens. Nothing made Eloise happy. But the moment she tasted Benedict’s mallow creation, she smiled for the first time in their entire marriage.

Edward asked to meet the creator, and the baker reluctantly pulled shy Benedict out of the kitchen. Edward offered him a place on his kitchen staff on the spot. Staring at the profile of the lovely Eloise as she looked out the rainy bakery window, Benedict finally knew what love was.

Much to the baker’s horror, Benedict said yes.

But Eloise had no such feelings for Benedict. Demanding as she was, she loftily directed him to bring her afternoon tray of sweets to her every day and wait while she ate. Then she would instruct him to change something. Arrange the sweets differently. More of one flavor one day. Less of it the next.

Benedict would always bow and say, “Your dream is mine.”

It was this simple phrase, said to Eloise every day for months, that began to alter her feelings. She was used to men adoring her, to their grand gestures and expensive gifts. But they never listened to anyone’s heart but their own. Certainly not hers. Soon, it was not the tray of sweets every day that lifted her spirits, it was the tall, pale young man who carried it to her.

Eloise began to gain weight, which made her even more beautiful. She seemed for the first time, if not happy, at least content. Her husband, Edward, as oblivious as he was cheerful, took complete credit for this. It was he, after all, who had hired Benedict. Like most men, he believed the solution was always the end of the problem.

During the time Eloise was slowly falling in love with Benedict, Edward was expanding his holdings to the United States. He bought an island off the coast of South Carolina and when his house there was completed, he took his wife to see it. She wasn’t able to say goodbye to Benedict, or to at last reveal her feelings. 

As you may expect, Eloise was miserable on the island. Nothing was to her liking. Not the large home, not the grounds, not the staff—including no less than three American pastry chefs and four chocolatiers who were there to cater to her every whim. It was not the same, she would say to Edward. No one could create her favorite treats like Benedict. She most desperately wanted to leave.

But unfortunately for Eloise, Edward immediately felt at home on the island. His joints hurt less in the thick Atlantic humidity, and he no longer needed to wear fur-lined trousers to stay warm. His old body had found a place to thrive. Nothing in years had made him feel this youthful, not even, as he had hoped, his young wife. But he wanted Eloise to be happy, so he sent for Benedict. He did not tell Eloise this. He saw no need. It was not the man, after all, but his sweets she loved.

By fate or serendipity, depending on how romantic your nature is, the mallow plant was found growing in abundance all over the island. When Benedict arrived, he set to work. He made so much of his mallow confection, more than even Eloise could eat, that Edward decided to sell it. Soon, word of this new marshmallow confection traveled up and down the eastern seaboard. Edward built homes for the army of sweet-makers he brought in, and pastel-colored shops to offer the treats. He even named the island Mallow Island. His island would now make everyone who came to it as happy as he! He was delighted. 

While certainly more comfortable than sleeping on bags of flour, Benedict rarely stayed in the home provided for him, a particularly grand house with porches and turrets and pecan tree saplings planted in front. He took up residence in the kitchens of the main house, occasionally falling asleep by the fire and waking with a gasp, having been visited by spirits of the island’s past, speaking a Gullah language he didn’t understand. Like Eloise, he did not like the island. His dream was to run away with her. But he believed her dream was to be here, so here he would stay. It was enough to cook for her, to know he was giving her that pleasure. He did not know she was unaware of his presence for nearly a year as her husband rode the boon of Southern reconstruction by creating an improbably sweet destination for travelers.

For Eloise, this person who baked like Benedict was both a blessing and a curse. He made her think of her beloved, and for that she was grateful, but he also made her profoundly sad with longing. She surely would have died without her daily tray of memories. Eloise finally asked her maid to take her to this man. She wanted to meet this American twin to her Benedict. She was taken to the kitchens, where there was a cloud of flour and sugar so thick it made the air as white as fog. Through it, she saw Benedict.

At that moment, his dream became hers.

Eloise and Benedict ran away together that night, never to be seen again.

I told you not to worry.

And don’t fret about Edward, either. He took this with remarkable goodwill. Of all the things that pleased him, Eloise ranked astonishingly low. When you have a full cup, you don’t mind when a drop escapes. Edward stayed on Mallow Island, dying a rich old man at the turn of the century. He left no heirs, and without his cheerful persistence, no one was willing to stay on to work, especially when there was a steep decline in demand for small-batch, labor-intensive marshmallow. American manufacturers were now mass-producing mallow sweets with gelatin instead of the mallow root because it was so much faster.

Today, Edward’s home is the Mallow Island Resort Hotel. If you happen to stay there, know that guests have reported heart-shaped pieces of chocolate mysteriously appearing in their pockets or on beside tables. Memorably, one guest even found one in her shoe.

The hotel staff call it Benedict’s Calling Card. And most who know Benedict’s story believe it is a ghostly reminder of how precious love is.

So don’t waste a single moment.

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