`In my fiftieth year I find myself reflecting on my relationship with food and eroticism . . . thence the idea for this book, which is a mapless journey through the regions of sensual memory, in which the boundaries between love and appetite are so diffuse that at times they evaporate completely."
Isabel Allende is the enchantress cum author of such magic realist novels as The House Of The Spirits. With her new book Aphrodite: The Love Of Food And The Food Of Love, (quoted above) she has concocted something equally surreal. Loosely defined as a cookbook, Aphrodite is a magical cauldron of recipes and stories, written to make readers lick lips and each other in the languid, dizzying process of devouring it.
This is a book you read as much for the pleasure of Allende's language as the recipes, many of which sound like they were created in Scheherazade's kitchen in A Thousand And One Nights. Salivate as you learn how to make: Artichoke Whisper, Rise and Walk Soup, Widower's Figs, Adam's Nuts, Salome Sauce, Erotic Dressing, Novices' Nipples, Venus Mousse, Eggplant to a Sheik's Taste, Harem Turkey, Sybarite, Madame Bovary and Spellbinding Apples, among many other gloriously fictional-sounding recipes.
Allende writes with tongue in cheek, often with the intention of making the reader place his own tongue anywhere but in his cheek. Her Subjective Lists of Aphrodisiac Fruit and Vegetables includes the following. Artichokes are compared with "a person who goes from love affair to love affair" because "it is said that he (or she) has a `heart like an artichoke', scattering leaves right and left".
Truffles are "testicles of the earth" and peppers and chillis are "a fiery component of all those exotic dishes that leave your mouth aflame and your imagination and appetite for love roundly stimulated". As for strawberries and raspberries, they are "delicate fruit nipples". Dates "provide energy and increases erotic potency in men and coquetry in women". There is much more of this, but you won't be able to read for long before desiring food and desire itself.
Allende is tapping in to the ancient fertile theme of equating food with eroticism. Painters and film makers have been down this fig-strewn path many times before. Manet's Le Dejeuner Sur L'herbe, with the milk-white naked woman sprawled on the grassy forest floor between two fully-dressed men, all of whom are contemplating the ruins of a Bachannalian picnic, is the lustiest classic of the genre.
There is a dinner service available with this line from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night painted in gold around the rim: "If music be the food of love, play on". I was given one of these plates as a gift some Christmases ago: having read Aphrodite, I now long for an entire set on which to serve up some of Isabel Allende's recipes.
The week that the pages of Aphrodite were being turned in my house, I raided the local video shop, Reel World, for mouthwatering movies. The first night, arrived home with Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci's The Big Night.
Set in New Jersey in the 1950s, this is the story of two Italian brothers, Primo and Secondo Pilaggi, whose restaurant, The Paradise, is failing to make a profit. The chef, a purist of Italian cooking, will not sacrifice his recipes for the purpose of economising. "Bite your teeth into the arse of life," one of them says - or rather, shouts - early on.
Balancing a plate of pasta and parmesan on my knee, I watched, transfixed. The Paradise Restaurant is the kind you wish you had around the corner: a simple period interior with a duet of cooking and waitering by the Latin brothers to kill for.
I bit into the pasta: I wanted to climb into the television screen and sit down in the Pilaggi brothers' restaurant, where seafood risotta was being served up to an Philistine customer. "Where are the meatballs?" she cries, "I want a sidedish of meatballs!" Primo's answering roar from the kitchen is "She is a criminal who does not know how to treat her food!"
The brothers, in an attempt to attract more customers to their restaurant and hence keep it from closure, invite a Sinatra-like crooner to perform after dinner one evening. Invitations are issued. There is a young woman, a florist, whom Primo loves from a distance. She is invited. So too is Secondo's girlfriend - and, unknown to her, his other lover is also invited. If too many cooks spoil the broth, what are the consequences of too many lovers?
The phone rang. Like the old childhood game of statues, all the people froze on screen when I pressed the pause button. It was my own beloved, calling from Scotland, to tell me what time he would be arriving the next day. Back in the living room, I waved the magic wand of the remote control and released the characters from their Sleeping Beauty existence.
"Good food is the bread of angels," Primo was saying, as he set about preparing the banquet they hoped would save their restaurant. The kitchen of The Paradise began to take on the aura of an alchemist's secret experiment room. Base metal of vegetables, meat, and pasta were slowly transformed into magical-looking dishes, and carried out in triumph to disappear down a dozen willing throats. From another dimension, I watched this banquet of desires, and salivated.
It was a few days before I went back to the video shop.
The night before my love flew away again, we got out Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman. Stir-fried rice and vegetables was on our own menu. In the kitchen, the wok steamed, and the wine flowed. The video whirred.
Eat Drink Man Woman opens with a preparation of food so violent that you could think for a minute you were watching the opening sequence of a thriller instead of a dark comedy. Knives glitter and flash in the sun, wielded with unerring dexterity. Prey is hunted down in the chef's garden, birds are hacked apart, frogs are thrust into oil, crabs are smashed open.
Eat Drink Man Woman is a Taiwanese movie that centres on the ritual preparation each Sunday of an elaborate meal by widower Mr Chu for his three daughters. It is his wordless way of expressing his love for them; this is truly a man who hopes that the way to the heart is through the stomach. A famous chef, yet, he himself has longsince lost his sense of taste.
Food equals the desire for love in this movie: unable to articulate his love, Mr Chu cooks far too much of it instead, hoping the dishes of crabmeat and noodle, of savory soup and baked chicken will suffice instead. Whenever his cooking is criticised, he takes it as a personal rejection. None of his daughters can ever finish Sunday lunch, over which each of the women eventually comes out with bombshells.
"My memory is in my nose," Jia-Chien, his middle daughter, tells one of her lovers. Wistful, she remembers her father baking her "bracelets of dough, and rings of dough, into which he put bits of sparkle for me to wear on my fingers" when she was a child and they had an ease of language together.
Patriarch, Mr Chu will not allow anyone except himself to cook in his kitchen. Longing to cook, Jia-Chien buys far too much food at market and cooks a surfeit at her lover's place. She is unable to express her feelings for him, so she cooks enough for 10 instead. There's so much food on the table that the meal becomes something literally distasteful. "I'm stuffed," groans her lover, pushing his plate away. It's too much for him in every way. They break up soon after.
Our empty plates lay between us on the living room floor. "That was just right," we say reassuringly to each other.
In time, Mr Chu mellows out with the love of a woman. "Life isn't like cooking after all," he proclaims, as he announces his intention to marry again. "I can't wait until all the ingredients are properly prepared and laid out before starting to cook."
The film closes with Jia-Chien cooking for her father. They sit together at the table and taste her soup. "Too salty," he says, and then realises what he has said. Mr Chu has regained both his sense of taste and his ability to love.
The next morning, my love flew away. I did not feel like eating all day, although I briefly considered making Isabel Allende's Spiritual Solace.
In the evening, I brought home Alfonso Arau's Like Water For Chocolate. I did not feel like cooking, so my sad attempt at some sort of South American cuisine to go with the movie came out of the freezer: Mexican Style Chicken. With a bottle of Spanish beer, it made for a pathethic - and lonely - supper.
"When Tita felt Pedro's gaze on her bare shoulders, she understood exactly how raw dough must feel when it comes in contact with boiling oil." Poor Tita. As the youngest of three daughters, family tradition demands that she remain at home to look after her ghastly mother until she dies. Pedro, in a move that apparently makes perfect sense to him, marries Tita's sister Rosaura instead and moves into the house, so he can be close by.
While Tita, as family chef, cooked up quails in rose-petal sauce, I munched on tasteless spiced chicken which left a horrible burning aftertaste in my mouth. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Tita's quails was having the most extraordinarily erotic effect on everyone at the table.
Her other sister, Gertrudis, is compelled to leave the table and shower naked in the outside bath-house. The bath-house is hit with flaming arrows: Gertrudis runs out naked and is abducted on horseback by a Mexican Revolutionary, soon to be her husband . . . It deserved more than processed chicken, that scene.
Pedro looks at Tita in a way people usually only ever do when they are alone. The narrator's words dripped like honey into my ears. "Tita's whole being had dissolved into the rose-petal sauce. That's how she invaded Pedro's body. They had discovered a new way of communication. . ."
Like Water For Chocolate spans generations, wars, and weddings. Like the dark and secret centre of a rich truffle, Tita and Pedro's unfulfilled love is the core of this surreally beautiful movie. The ending - oh, the ending is allconsuming.
The movie finished at midnight, the house was silent. Rewinding the video in the empty stillness, and watching the title flash up again, Like Water For Chocolate, suddenly, I felt that unmistakable and overwhelming desire for chocolate. It was too late for the shop down the road, and there was not a scrap in the house.
Then I remembered the white chocolate eclairs we had bought to have after dinner the evening before: several lifetimes ago. I had not had mine. In the kitchen, I took the box out of the fridge, the delicious melancholy of the film still unreeling in my head.
There was a piece of folded paper in the box where the other eclair had been: a love letter secreted within the box, waiting to be discovered. Magically, in an instant, the house no longer seemed empty. I took the remaining eclair and letter up to bed and devoured them both by candlelight.
Aphrodite: The Love Of Food And The Food Of Love, by Isabel Allende, is published by Flamingo at £16.99 in UK