LETTERS FROM HOME: THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FOODS OF LOVE AND FOODS WE LOVE

May 6, 1998

Dear Julie,

DC and I were at our favorite bookstore spilling cappuccinos on the magazines when I brought her a copy of Isabel Allende's new book, "Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses."

I read her this 12th-century poetry that begins the book:

Her breath is like honey spiced with cloves,

Her mouth delicious as a ripened mango.

To press kisses on her skin is to taste the lotus,

The deep cave of her navel hides a store of spices

What pleasure lies beyond, the tongue knows,

But cannot speak of it.

DC gasped. Sold.

I must confess to an ultra-ulterior motive for wanting this book filled with gustatory adventures and lascivious recipes: We're on a diet.

Allende writes of the relationship between food and sensuous love but I think the connection exists between food and all kinds of love.

There is the love for a place: dissolve-in-your-mouth gnocchi with zesty pesto at a small Italian restaurant I could never remember the name of but could always find by setting out on foot in North Beach.

Or an experience: the salmon and fry bread cooked on hot stones the morning after watching the breathtaking white deerskin dance many years ago near Happy Camp.

The Karok Indians hold the ceremony every two years to put the world back in balance. That perfection was in every bit of the sweet salmon caught that morning from the Klamath River. It was in the stout fry bread kneaded by the hands of women descended from the ancients who tasted this same wholeness -- and I would say holiness -- thousands of years ago.

Food is mixed up with the love of certain people. My granny no doubt had been making chicken and dumplings since she was a farm girl and she cooked them until she died in her 90s. The dumplings were fat, rolled and cut with a knife on a bread board, and the whole chickens were stewed until the bones nearly crumbled.

Chicken and dumplings were impossible to divine one from the other. They still seem a gift from God to me.

My other grandma makes plain old Maxwell House coffee that seems to evolve into a gourmet roast when it comes from her pot. My mother made wonderful wilted lettuce but has decided that she has cooked enough in this life. My father is a master of grilling steaks, probably because he so loves to eat them.

These are sentimental associations. I love these people so a delicious food linked to them increases its pleasure in the mind.

But they also are sensory memories. Somewhere deep in my brain lives the smell of the cook fire that unleashed the flavor of that salmon. Good food excites the senses, makes life instantly lovable.

It awakens us to the invitations of cilantro and basil to taste, to feel with tongue and teeth the exquisite texture of risotto or a creme brule. To listen. Good food says, Look at me with appreciation for my beauty, my nurturing soul

Food can be much like a lover after all.

DC went to Chicago last weekend. When I got home from work, I opened the refrigerator to find two dessert glasses filled with parfaits made with fat-free raspberry yogurt, fat-free Jello and fat-free whipped topping.

It's not the food. It's the love.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.