Aphrodite, page 18
Cheese
Cheese is milk teeming with bacteria, and everything else is wishful thinking. The first time I saw cheese being made was at a dairy in the interior of Venezuela, hot as the Sahara, in a germ-filled shed where six cows were distractedly waiting their turn to be milked, chewing their cud and flicking away flies with their tails. Part of the milk, destined for the well-named “hand cheese,” was mixed with curds; the heat multiplied the bacteria, and as soon as the liquid curdled it was strained through a large sieve. The whey went straight to the hogs, who were right beside the milking shed, which explained the smell, a bouquet more far-reaching than cow dung. The rest of the milk went into the round tubs where Don Maurizio, a gigantic half-Indian, half-African, naked from the waist up, sweating and singing, plunged his arm in up to his armpit and conscientiously stirred. Don Maurizio, a great cheesemaker, had a battery-operated radio tuned to a station where joropos, salsas, and country songs gauged the time needed to turn the curds into cheese, and his timing was so exact that the result was always identical.
Since then, I have had the opportunity to visit industrial computerized cheese-processing plants where hygiene is as strict as that of the operating room and the barns smell of pine forests. The cows have been fed so many hormones that they moo in soprano and any one of them could produce enough milk to fill the celebrated bath of Cleopatra; the cheeses, nevertheless, do not seem as perfect, or nearly as tasty, as those made by Don Maurizio. He molded them into round loaf shapes, left them to set in the shade, and after a few hours they were ready to be sold and eaten. After picking out the flies, which tended to get stuck in the surface, we ate the cheese with cachapas, warm corn tortillas right off the coals. It is one of my most pleasant memories of that difficult period as an immigrant in a foreign land. And that hand cheese must have been aphrodisiac, because all I have to do is recall its delicate flavor and the sweat slipping down the brawny arms of that king of cheese, Don Maurizio, to feel adulterous impulses.
There are cheeses for all tastes; it would be impossible to list all the flavors and consistencies, as they are nearly infinite. Each region has its favorites. In Switzerland you eat the best Gruyère and Emmenthal, in Italy Parmesan and Gorgonzola, and in Holland Gouda. In a premeditated act of gluttony during his childhood, my brother Pancho peeled a good-size Gouda cheese as if it were an apple and patiently devoured it down to the last crumb; we were sure he would die of incurable indigestion, but he has lived in good health for fifty years. I have few more colorful and sensual memories than those of the cheese and flower markets in tulip season in Amsterdam. In England, Cheddar is very popular, as is Stilton with its gray and green veins, served by the spoonful, beginning in the center of the cheese and accompanied by a glass of sherry.
In France, where every province produces an important variety of delicious cheese, no meal worthy of the name can end without a tray of several kinds, served before dessert along with the best robust and aromatic red house wine. Some, like Gruyère, take three or four months to ripen, and its quality depends on the regular distribution of its holes. The gourmet will choose the Brie of the day, testing it as if it were a fruit, and Camembert by the smell, which indicates its maturity. This latter cheese was invented by a French peasant woman of the eighteenth century, whose statue rules over the small village of Camembert. My grandfather, who adored that cheese, although his doctor had forbidden him to eat it, bought it on the sly and hid it in his clothes press. Sometimes the odor was so nauseating you couldn’t walk into the room.
Dry, strong-flavored cheeses like Parmesan are thought to be the most stimulating, but some of the softer ones, like goat cheese and mozzarella, have an equal reputation in that regard. As for Parmesan and mozzarella, the essential ingredients of a good pizza, this is the moment to recommend them to those of you who long to flaunt posteriors as sensual as those of the damsels painted by Rubens and Botero. At the beginning of the seventies in Chile, I made a brief incursion into the theater world with a pair of musical comedies. One of them, Los Siete Espejos, or The Seven Mirrors, incorporated a ballet corps of several beautiful fat young women who acted as a Greek chorus, telling the story as they danced and giggled and jiggled. It was the era of Twiggy, that English model who looked like a survivor of a concentration camp and whose picture was splashed across the covers of all the fashion magazines, she of the toothpick legs and orthopedic shoes and starving expression. By one of those aberrations of history, this twiglet became the decade’s feminine ideal; there was no woman alive who didn’t aspire to the androgynous wormdom of the famous Twiggy. The fat women in The Seven Mirrors were a direct challenge to that aesthetic, a hymn to abundance. I learned from any number of theatergoers that they came to the performance more than once just to applaud the obese chorus girls. These women, who had attained their voluminous proportions thanks to good teeth and a sedentary life, were now skipping dinner and for two hours flitting like dragonflies across the stage. As a result, they began dropping pounds at an alarming rate. The director of the company saved the play from disaster by putting up a sign in the foyer saying: PLEASE DON’T SEND FLOWERS TO OUR CHUBBY CHORINES. ORDER PIZZA.
When you consider that the sole ingredient of cheese is milk, then there can be nothing aphrodisiac about it, but when accompanied by bread, wine, and pleasant conversation, the effect is the same as if there were.
Si Non è Vero . . .
Truffles, a rare delicacy, are actually insignificant mushrooms that pigs and dogs are trained to sniff out and dig up. According to ancient wisdom, abusing them foments melancholy, but they are so rare and so prized, and therefore served in such miserly quantities, that no one is in danger of being poisoned by them; on the other hand, a mere breath of their intense perfume is enough to overcome a surfeit of love and to uplift an appendage that may simply have fainted. Truffles cannot be cultivated; they grow in accord with the mysterious vegetal laws that determine size, color, and fragrance. Every day there are fewer woodland terrains sympathetic to the existence of truffles, so the price has risen to the levels of that for caviar and gold. (And speaking of gold, did you know that in cities like Hong Kong you can drink a small espresso coffee containing gold dust? In the Piazza San Marco in Venice, you can pay just as much for an espresso without the gold.) Madame du Barry, the Marquis de Sade, and Louis XIV consumed truffles with incontrovertible faith in the effect they wrought in moments of intimacy, and Rasputin prescribed them to the tsar to thicken his blood and strengthen the royal bloodline. A recipe from the time of the Borgias reads: “Take a truffle cleaned of dirt and excrement, soften it by brushing it with fragrant oil, wrap it in a fine ribbon of pig fat, and place it over the fire until, the fat melted away, the truffle exudes its essence.”
Napoleon ate truffles before meeting Josephine in their amorous battles in the imperial bedchamber, in which, it is no exaggeration to say, he always wound up defeated. Scientists—however do they come up with these experiments, I wonder?—have discovered that the scent of the truffle activates a gland in the pig that produces the same pheromones present in humans when they are smitten by love. It is a sweaty, garlic-tinged odor that reminds me of the New York subway.
Some years ago, I invited to dinner—with intentions of seduction, naturally—an evasive beau whose reputation as a good cook forced me to outdo myself with the menu. I decided that a truffle omelet sprinkled with a dusting of red caviar at serving time (the gray was beyond my possibilities) constituted an obvious erotic overture, something akin to giving him red roses and the Kama-sutra. I searched high and low for truffles, and when finally I located some, my modest salary in a land not my own would not stretch far enough to buy them. The clerk in the delicatessen, an Italian as much an immigrant as I, counseled me to forget the truffles.
“Why don’t you use mushrooms instead?” he asked as I disconsolately gazed at those little bits black as rabbit droppings, which to my eyes shone like diamonds.
“It isn’t the same. Truffles are aphrodisiacs.”
“They’re what?”
“Sensual,” I said, to avoid going into detail.
I must have blushed, because the man came out from behind the showcase and approached me with a strange smile. He imagined, I suppose, that I was a nymphomaniac hoping to rub my erogenous zones with his truffles.
“Romantic,” I murmured, blushing redder and redder.
“Ah! For a man? Your sweetheart? Your husband?”
“Well, yes . . .”
Charm, mixed media by Lilly Cannon, collection of Owens Chapman.
At that instant his smile lost its sarcastic twist and turned complicitous: he stepped behind the counter and produced a small bottle, like a perfume vial.
“Olio d’oliva aromatizato al tartufo bianco,” he announced in the tone of someone pulling an ace out of his sleeve. “Olive oil with the scent of white truffles,” he clarified.
And immediately he slipped a few black olives into a plastic bag, with the direction to wash them carefully to remove the flavor, chop them into small pieces, and marinate them a couple of hours in the truffle-scented oil.
“As romantic as truffles, and much cheaper!” he assured me.
I did as he said. The omelet was perfect, and when my exquisite beau detected the unmistakable fragrance and asked with surprise whether those inky fragments were indeed truffles and, if so, where the hell I’d found them, I made a vague gesture that he interpreted as flirtatious. He devoured the omelet, constantly casting sideways glances dark with perplexity, an expression that at the time I found irresistible but in fact, seen with the detachment of age, was closer to being comic. I’m really glad I gave him olives. His reputation as a beau was as exaggerated as that of truffles.
And since we are talking about “truffled” olive oil, the moment has come for me to share my “emergency recipe.” Since the age of nineteen, I have been married every day of my life except for three months of playing around between a divorce and a second marriage. That means that I have had approximately 16,425 occasions to drive some man mad. The creation of this soup was a matter not of chance, but of necessity. It is a practically infallible aphrodisiac that I always fix after some terrible fight, a flag of truce that allows me to make peace without humiliating myself too greatly. My opponent has only to smell it to understand the message.
Reconciliation Soup
Ingredients
1/2 cup chopped Portobello mushrooms (if dried, 1/4 cup)
1/2 cup chopped porcini mushrooms (if dried, 1/4 cup)
1 cup brown mushrooms
1 clove garlic
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups stock (beef, chicken, or vegetable)
1/4 cup port
1 tablespoon truffled olive oil
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons sour cream
Preparation
If you can’t find fresh mushrooms and must use the dried ones, soak them in 1/2 cup of good red wine until they spring up happily; in the meantime, while they’re soaking, I calmly drink the remainder of the wine. Then I mince the garlic clove for the pure pleasure of smelling my fingers, because I could just as easily use it whole, and then sauté it with all the mushrooms in the olive oil, stirring vigorously for a few minutes—I’ve never counted, but let’s say 5. I add the stock, the port, and the truffled olive oil—not quite all of it, I leave a couple of drops to dab behind my ears; let’s not forget, it’s aphrodisiac. I season with salt and pepper, and cook over low heat with the lid on until the mushrooms are soft and the house smells like Heaven. The last step is to process it in the blender; this is the least poetic part of the preparation but unavoidable. The soup should end up with a slightly thick texture, like mud, and with a perfume that makes you salivate and awakens other secretions of body and soul. I put on my best dress, paint my fingernails red, and serve the soup, in warmed bowls, garnished with a dollop of sour cream.
The Spirit of Wine
Nectar of the gods, consolation of mortals, wine is a marvelous beverage that has the power to drive away worries and to give us, though it be for but an instant, a vision of Paradise. No one can argue the aphrodisiac power of wine: in moderate quantities it dilates the blood vessels, carrying more blood to the genitals and prolonging erection; it lessens inhibitions, relaxes, and fosters joy, three fundamental requirements for good performance, not only in bed but at the piano as well. In my distant youth, I believed that white wines were served during the day and red wines at night. Later someone tried to rescue me from ignorance by offering me his version: white wines are for women and red for men, a heresy capable of felling an oenologist with a fatal stroke. We are talking about an ancient and elaborate art to which countless volumes have been devoted through the centuries; it would be a blasphemy to try to sum them up in a couple of sentences. It has taken me several decades to learn some basic principles; from the beginning, I state my ignorance.
In expensive restaurants, I smell the cork, chew the first sip with an expression of profound concentration, and then return the bottle, complaining of a certain acidity. That always impresses the waiter and earns me a little respect. The truth is that I have a bad head for alcohol and with the second glass I start taking off my clothes and skipping down the street. The theoretical part of this chapter wasn’t at all difficult; I sought the counsel of experts and consulted a half dozen books, but the practical part cost me more than one cold. My neighbors think I belong to a euphoric nudist sect.
I always wanted to have a wine cellar. I’m not referring to six bottles in the back of a closet—that I have—but to a cold, dark cellar embroidered with spiderwebs and closed off with a wooden, triple-locked door whose keys hang at my waist, a vault in which bottles of exquisite wines have lain for years. I imagine the ceremony of descending into the belly of the earth with a candle to seek the perfect complement to enhance my dinner with my lover . . . all right, it can just as well be with my husband. We had that tradition in my family. I don’t mean the lovers, I mean the cellar. There was one in my grandparents’ home and another in my mother’s. Once a year a special trip was undertaken to the famous vineyards of Macul and Concha y Toro to buy wine in fifteen-liter demijohns that were then divided into bottles my mother sealed with melted candle wax and marked with a mysterious code before laying them down in the cellar. There they rested, in darkness and silence; it was rare that one was opened before it was five years old.
That was the everyday wine of my childhood, but for grand occasions a reserve from one of the best Chilean vineyards was chosen. During one of her husband’s many diplomatic missions, my mother lived in Turkey. In those days Ankara was not the cosmopolitan city it is today, and many products were difficult to obtain, among them quality wines, but my mother has always had mysterious contacts. A French diplomat revealed to her the best-kept secret of his embassy, something that would horrify a sommelier but that got my mother out of a scrape on more than one occasion: you pour out the neck of a bottle of mediocre red wine and replace it with port, turn the wine over a couple of times, let it rest, then serve it in a crystal carafe. For white wine, proceed in the same manner, using the driest sherry. That good friend added that you always serve the good wines first and bad ones later, when no one notices the difference, as indicated in the Gospel according to Saint John. The first miracle Jesus performs takes place in Cana of Galilee during a wedding he attended with his mother and his disciples. Halfway through the feast, Mary comes to him and says that they’ve run out of wine, so Jesus commands that six large stone vessels be filled with water, and when the servants draw out the liquid they contain, they discover it is wine. And to prove it, the master of the feast says: “Every man at the beginning sets out the good wine and when the guests have well drunk, then that which is inferior; but you have kept the good wine until now.”
Exactly what connoisseurs recommend. At any rate, no one’s meaning to set a trap here, only to give some clues with a clear conscience, so let’s get down to the meat of the matter, I mean, down to the grape of things.
Recent research indicates that wine drunk with moderation and regularity reduces wear on the heart, thus allowing us to die of cancer. Folklore has always told us that wine dissolves the fat from a meal and washes out the veins, a truism proved by modern medicine: wine elevates the levels of HDL cholesterol and cleans the arteries. In France, where ten times more wine is drunk than in the United States, and where four times more animal fat and red meat is consumed, blood cholesterol levels are considerably lower than they are here and the incidence of heart attacks one of the lowest in the world after Japan. Besides living better, the French grant themselves the pleasure of living longer. This “discovery”—called the French paradox—has produced a new generation of red-wine drinkers in the United States, but until now the results have not been observable. It may be that it’s not only the wine that prolongs health but the way of drinking it; the French eat sitting down, with calm, enjoying each mouthful. Watching a bourgeois couple in a provincial bistro is a most instructive lesson: they dine ritually, in silence, concentrating on their food and drink, unaware of the rest of the universe. Their menu is varied, the portions small, and they do not eat at all hours of the day and night. One key word defines the French paradox: moderation.
Sleeping Girl, painting by Balthus, Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York, © 1997 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
Whole volumes are dedicated to a single class of wine, in case you wish to delve deeply into this subject, but here we will have room for only a modicum of general information. All wines are sensual, including what in Chile we call litreado, a most humble wine sold in refillable containers and by the cup, and which, being the sole consolation of the poor, has its equivalent in most parts of the world. The varieties of wines are infinite, determined not only by the regions in which they are produced, the types of the grape, and the process of fermentation, but by the year and even the hour of the harvest. The wood used in making the barrel, the temperature, the humor and love of those who make it, the spirits that wander by night through the caves in which the wine sleeps, all affect the final product.
