From Christmas in Connecticut (dir. Peter Godfrey, 1945). Uncle Felix (S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall), who’s a chef, not an uncle, at least not to Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck), at whose pretend farmhouse he’s now cooking, tells the publisher Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet) what’s on the menu:
“And for dinner, Mr. Yardley, we will have potage Mongole with roast goose bernozz with walnut stuffing.”
“Oh, Uncle Felix, stop, please. You make my mouth water.”
Bernozz is my approximation of Felix’s pronunciation of Béarnaise. Potage Mongole is of course purée Mongole, a once-fashionable soup, and an apocryphal inspiration for the name of the Eberhard Faber Mongol pencil.
The advertisement accompanying this exploration of soup and pencils is from the October 15, 1937 issue of Life. You can click for a larger view.
Related reading
All OCA Mongol pencil posts (Pinboard)
Friday, January 2, 2026
Uncle Felix’s potage Mongole
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https://books.google.com/books/publisher/content?id=GyEuDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA80&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&bul=1&sig=ACfU3U2i7hZCrzSxY6sUWvl3TK2mViErvg&w=1280
Thanks, Anon. I have, somewhere on my Mac, the article in which Eberhard Faber IV says that the story is apocryphal.
From Fortune (December 1971): “My great-uncle, John Eberhard Faber, is supposed to have named the well-known MONGOL pencil after his favorite soup, Purée Mongole; the story happens to be apocryphal, but it is revealing that the family always liked it.” As EF IV says, the family tended toward “fun and games and high living.”
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