Seduction, Feasts, and Recipes: Aphrodite by Isabel Allende

«I dedicate these erotic meanderings to playful lovers and, why not? also to frightened men and melancholy women.»

Food is desire, language, and remembrance. In her book Aphrodite, Isabel Allende weaves flavours into storytelling to explore the profound connection between nourishment and pleasure.

Published in 1997, Aphrodite presents as an unconventional cookbook. A compendium of food and the senses, where each dish becomes part of a wider reflection on love, sensuality, and the art of authentic living.

«The most intense carnal pleasure, enjoyed at leisure in a clandestine, rumpled bed, a perfect combination of caresses, laughter, and intellectual games, has the taste of a baguette, prosciutto, French cheese, and Rhine wine.» From the very first pages, Allende declares how the food is the beating heart of this book, a conduit for evoking memories, scents, and flavours, as well as encounters and passions. In the book, each recipe, infused with personal stories and anecdotes, becomes an invitation to explore life’s most intimate and vibrant side. «With any of these treasures of cuisine, a particular man materializes before me, a long-ago lover who returns, persistent as a beloved ghost, to ignite a certain roguish fire in my mature years. That bread with ham and cheese brings back the essence of our embraces, and that German wine, the taste of his lips.»

Aphrodite is the crystalline mirror of a quick, winding prose, layered with memories and details that spiral in a subtly ironic, at times self-indulgent, stream of consciousness. It overflows with images that stir the senses, so vividly it feels like a picture book, even without a single image. And it needs none. From the sticky sweetness of honey, languid and lingering like a passionate love, to the pungent spiciness of ginger, a metaphor for sudden  intense passion, every dish and ingredient is more than a combination of flavours. It is a ritual of seduction that celebrates body and soul, a vivid image of sensuality that is vibrant, exuberant, alive, and surprisingly universal.

Perhaps even more so when we consider that Allende herself admits she did not come from an opulent culinary tradition, dismantling the myth that writing about food requires vast ingrained knowledge or formal expertise such as cordon bleu training. «People who write about cuisine come naturally from a long tradition of culinary refinement; they have been born and have grown up in evocative locations such as the French provinces or an Italian villa, where their mothers and grandmothers cultivated an art as delicate as it is succulent. […] It is such an ambiance, surely, that produces celebrated cooks and gourmets, expert wine tasters, authors of cookbooks, and, finally, the aristocrats of food who set the standards for the palates of that tiny percentile of humanity who can eat every day. I fear I possess no such credentials.»

With candour and wit, she tells how her relationship with food began much later, when she understood the intimate bond between food and sensuality: «I come from a family in which disdain for earthly pleasures was a virtue and asceticism in habits considered a boon to good health. […] many years would pass before the kitchen ceased to be a spectacle coordinated by my mother and came to interest me personally. That happened when I realized that among the few things that men and women have in common is sex and food. Then I undertook the adventure of exploring both. It was a long journey through the senses that eventually led to the genesis of these pages.» 

The chapter on bread is particularly unforgettable. Set in the kitchen of a Brussels convent, it emerges from one of Allende’s sudden memories: «A nun, not wearing her habit, with the shoulders of a stevedore and delicate hands of a ballerina, arranged the dough in round and rectangular loaf pans, covered them with white cloths washed a thousand times and then washed again, and left them to rise beside a window, on a large medieval wood table.» The dough takes on the shape of mysterious naked bodies, the result of «comingling of yeast, flour, and water.» Before her eyes, and ours, «the content of the pans took on life, and a slow and sensual process evolved beneath those white napkins that were discreet sheets covering the nakedness of the unbaked bread.»

Even the simplest dishes are painted in bold, warm, dense strokes, like the recipe for the Empress’s Omelette, freely adapted here:

Ingredients for two people in love:

• Five eggs, fresh from the nest of a virgin hen

• Half a cup of beluga caviar, preferably from the Baltic Sea — preferably

• Four fine but succulent slices of Norwegian smoked salmon

• Fresh country butter

• Chopped chives

• Salt & pepper

• Two teaspoons of sour cream

• Of course (sic), toasted bread

Ever so delicately, break the eggs into a fine porcelain bowl — porcelain for reasons of elegance, nothing more (sic) — and beat lightly, adding salt and pepper. 

Warm the butter in the omelet pan sacred to every good cook, and as soon as the butter begins to turn the tint of warm Caribbean skin, pour in the eggs. 

When the omelet is half cooked on the bottom, loosen it with infinite gentleness, whispering encouragingly, because if you are rough, it will lose its enchanting disposition; add the chives and salmon and fold it over, exactly as you would close a book. 

To free it entirely, experts move the skillet back and forth with the pulsing syncopation of a good dancer and then, with a sudden flip of the wrist, toss it up in the air and catch it, now reversed, so it

will cook to a golden brown on both sides — although I admit that every time I’ve tried that move, the omelet has landed on my head. These gyrations are pure exhibitionism, because when you make an omelet, as when you make love, affection counts for more than technique. 

Serve your omelet on your most beautiful plates, already warmed in the oven. Spoon on the caviar, and beside this triumph place the sour cream and warm toast. 

After a night of passion, this is the breakfast indicated for making love, no holds barred, the rest of the day.

Food prepared and shared with care becomes, in Aphrodite, an act of love and connection, a universal language.

It is the thread that weaves through cultures. A celebration of life that Isabel Allende offers us with a style that is both raw and tender, capable of making us savour every word as if it were a feast, biting into life, tasting every moment.