Food
Food - Michele Roberts says never rush a woman into sex
Published 26 January 2004
Seducing a woman with food is all very well, but it's best not to rush the sex
Keats did not write much about food, which is a pity. "Endymion", one of the worst poems in the English language - hectic, turgid with spurious rapture, written in clomping couplets notable mainly for their awkward and risible rhymes - improves enormously once it pokes its nose into the kitchen garden and imagines Flora and Zephyrus gathering "fennel green, and balm, and golden pines,/Savory, latter-mint, and columbines,/Cool parsley, basil sweet, and sunny thyme". Keats almost got it right, though, in "The Eve of St Agnes". As any fule kno, one way to endear yourself to a woman is to give her delicious food and not require her to clean afterwards. Accordingly, Porphyro, enamoured of the beauteous Madeline, decides to offer her a midnight feast. He hides himself in a closet in Madeline's chamber, whence he watches her undress: "Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;/Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;/Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees/Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees". Madeline falls asleep, and out he pops bearing a tray loaded with "a heap/Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;/With jellies soother than the creamy curd,/And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;/Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd/From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,/From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon". He wakes Madeline, but then blows it. Rather than let her eat, he rushes the sex: "Into her dream he melted, as the rose/Blendeth its odour with the violet, -/Solution sweet". Food remains a linguistic decoration.
For Colette, writing a hundred years later, images of edible treats point to lusty appetite, real pleasure. One of her greatest novels, Break of Day, mixing seeming autobiography with philosophy and prose poetry, plays tantalisingly with food as a substitute for sex. A fiftyish novelist, whom Colette names after herself, swears she has given up men in favour of friendship, gardening and cooking. At home in her little house outside St Tropez, she evokes the glories of the landscape through its bright tomatoes and pimentos, its fat garlic and fast-ripening grapes. She keeps her butter and her amber-coloured wine at the bottom of the well, plans picnics with chums: grilled chicken, aubergine fritters, stuffed scorpion fish, salad. She is kidding, naturally. All this talk of renouncing the love of men, of preferring calm sensuality, the pleasures of planting tangerine trees and identifying with her goddess-like mother, Sido, conceals the fact that Colette, outside her text, was enjoying blissful, romping sex with Maurice Goudeket, 15 years her junior, who would become her third husband.
Goudeket, in his memoir of his famous wife, backed up her fond pretence of being a simple child of nature, always ready with a recipe for vinegar, orange wine, quince-water, for cooking truffles or baking onions in the ashes. Not an intellectual, oh dear me no. Angela Carter, in an article in 1980, gets exasperated with Colette's earthy Burgundian pose. She recalls a description by Simone de Beauvoir, in the latter's memoirs, of a dinner party that de Beauvoir attended with Sartre, "at which Colette, already the frizzed and painted sacred cow of French letters, babbling away to les gars, as was her wont, about dogs, cats, knitting, le bon vin, les bons fromages, and so on, offered de Beauvoir only the meagre attention of an occasional, piercing stare". Well, de Beauvoir was like Keats, and did not write much about food. To be a French feminist in those days, you had to get out of the kitchen, that trap of spending most of your waking moments thinking up new ways to give your man pleasure at the table. Carter continues: "Possibly Colette . . . was no more than contemplating the question every thinking woman in the western world must have posed herself one time or other: why is a nice girl like Simone wasting her time sucking up to a boring old fart like J-P?" Carter, an ex-anorexic, is harsh towards Colette's stagey prancings. Perhaps all women in the west are ambivalent about appetite, bodily identity, pleasing or disliking the judging onlooker. Colette was certainly fat. Perhaps she ate too much as a way of comforting herself when necessary. Let he who is without sin cast the first dumpling.
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