Sometimes, great ideas arise while sitting at a table or rubbing shoulders at a bar counter. With glass in hand and mouth full. That's right, with a happy stomach, we allow ourselves to wish. We eat and talk about food. Or something related to the act of eating. How many times do we attribute our mood to food? How many others, the act of cooking is the perfect excuse to fuel our thinking? In what infinite situations do we make the table a celebration? And flirting… let's not even talk about it. We met for dinner because in that meeting one is able to bare one's soul just by opening one's mouth and ordering the desired dish.
We love gastronomy, even if we don't like to eat. Because socialization and encounter inhabit it. And from that passion for food, recipe books are born. Some simply pursue the perpetuity of a tradition: not to forget where we come from and how we have grown. Others are clinging to trends: this 2024, for example, is the year of Chinese cookbooks, recipe books for the Airflryer continue to be popular, and veganism is taking up more and more space on the shelves.
However, there are books that are born without intention, without thinking that a simple compilation of recipes could lead to a successful book. The latter is what happened with Venus in the Kitchen. Recipe book for love by Noman Douglas, edited by Siruela.
“The following recipes,” writes the author, “have not been compiled in a hurry, nor with the intention of publishing them. They were slowly collected, one by one, for the benefit and private use of a small group of friends, most of whom, I am sorry to say, are now older than they would like and are anxious—and who isn't?— to preserve the vitality of their Youth and maturity for as long as possible.”
What a great excuse and what a demonstration of love! Compile recipes that can make our friends happy and fuel their libido. What more could you want? This is what the writer Norman Douglas thought back in the 1930s when the author and a group of friends were enjoying “a succulent dinner and several bottles of old wine” then, in that effluvium caused by wine and food, someone commented that “ has read, heard or whispered” that the doctor Ambroise-Auguste Liébault (who dedicated his life to hypnotic suggestion and its use in health care) “had written about the rejuvenating effects of certain dishes and condiments” In that thread of The conversation begins with the enthusiasm of those sitting at the table who encourage Douglas to begin research on “recipes that will restore their appetite” and with them “their youth.”
The premise, without a doubt, was tempting, and this is how this compilation began to take shape, the first edition of which was published in 1952 under the title Venus in the kitchen either Loves's Cookery Bookand fifty years later, the Siruela publishing house puts it on the shelves of bookstores in a delicious small format, with salmon-colored hardcovers, a short prologue by Isabel Coixet and beautiful illustrations by Bruce Roberts.
“He kept the recipes at the bottom of a trunk,” the author writes in the book's prologue, “adding a new one from time to time and, occasionally, also that of some bizarre dish of an aphrodisiac nature. There, they would continue if it were not for one of the friends of the aforementioned group (…) he had tried one or two of them and had been pleasantly impressed by their subsequent effects “
It works! the friend shouted. Thus, he begged the writer to publish them, but not without warning him that whoever cooks them “must be rich, otherwise it would be better to abandon all hope of finding Venus and continue with that frigidity of temperament for which the always economical recipe book of current cookbooks” And so he did. Twelve years later, he presented to his friends the compilation: Cooked celery, Rice toast with shrimp, Aphrodisiac hippogras, Oyster olives, stewed crabs, quail with truffle, Stuffed pig's head…
This is a recipe book without a recipe, where you will find precise quantities or a list of ingredients, it is rather a reading book for the curious, a surprising compilation of short texts and clear purposes: that tempts you, that encourages you to cook and try. And then… Whatever comes up!
There is something binding between this little book and Intimate succulents. Philosophical treatise on cooking, by Laura Esquivel. The author has already revived not only our youth, but also our desire for everything in her book. Like water for Chocolate. lhe characters in this beautiful love story show their passions between stoves, tables with succulent banquets, cooked over low heat and served to provoke the desire to love without measure. In Intimate Succulences, the author invites the reader to a dialogue about gastronomic culture, a you to you that reminds us that without this search for desire, no one will be able to live fully. A delight of an essential essay book on our shelves. Almost as much as the already classic and beautiful Aphrodite, by Isabel Allende. Its first hardcover edition was extremely beautiful, then the paperback version came out which, even today, can be found in some specialized bookstores. The book, again an essay that at times is a novel and at others a story, is, like Venus in the Kitchen, an antidote to all pain. At least, for those who come from the heart.
#Readings #cooking #seek #true #love