Afrodita: Cuentos, recetas y otros afrodisiacos.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

By Isabel Allende. Illustrations by Robert Shekter. Recipes by Panchita. Llona. New York: HarperLibros, 1997. (Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, trans., Margaret Sayers Peden, HarperCollins, 1998)

Ever since Laura Esquivel published her spectacularly successful novel, Like Water for Chocolate, Latin American women writers have been putting out collections of literary writing combined with recipes. Well, it worked once ... Isabel Allende's contribution to this hybrid genre includes personal observations and stories, letters from friends, folklore, properties of different kinds of foods, tales from diverse cultures, historical observations--some of them fairly inaccurate, numerous recipes, and drawings that range from spectacular to adorable.

Although Afrodita is hardly a literary masterpiece, it is written with a mirth and animation that make it a joy to read. Like Esquivel, Allende starts from the premise that food and love are inextricably joined. Preparing and eating food is an erotic experience; providing a meal is an expression of affection, or even of passion; sharing a meal is an act of love. Diets are anti-amatory, a real turn-off. Allende regrets, she explains in her introduction, the delicious dishes she passed up due to vanity, just as she regrets the affairs she didn't have, either because conventional notions of virtue prevented her from doing so, or because she was just too busy.

Behind Allende's apparent hedonism, however, lies pain. As her occasional references to her daughter, Paula, make clear, when Allende began this book, she was grieving for her oldest child, who had died in California as the result of a misdiagnosis in a Madrid hospital not long before. For months, she says, she had seen everything in shades of grey. She began Afrodita when color was just beginning to come back into her world. The book is a...