Rarely has the title of a novel been more apt.
Anthony Capella’s The Food of Love is a modern retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac, this time set in Rome, Italy, and with food being the medium for expressing one’s feelings.
The Food Of Love is the vivacious and warmly comedic tale of Laura, an American art history student in Rome, and the two Italian friends – Bruno, a chef, and Tommaso, a waiter – who woo her.
I read this book with a constant smile on my lips. Everything you ever thought charming about Italy, everything that ever made you raise an eyebrow about Italians – it’s here, steeped in the sunshine of authenticity. Setting is not merely a background or a frame for more important things. In a sense, Rome is the story: the food lover’s Rome, that is, with a few culinary excursions elsewhere interspersed. At the same time, this is by no means a cookbook in novel form. It is simply romantic fiction at its freshest and most dizzyingly delicious.
The secondary characters round out the portrayal of Roman life and provide a sort of background choir that harmonizes with and slyly comments on the main story: Gennaro, for example, the barista in Bruno and Tommaso’s favourite bar in Trastevere, whose quest to “make a ristretto so thick you could spread it like jam” is lovingly chronicled in asides throughout the novel.
The story grew so real for me and I became so immersed in the lives of the characters that by the time I finished the book I felt as if I had gained a kilo or two. All those descriptions of love-inspired food preparation and mouth-watering dishes… I also felt I had just returned from one of the most rewarding trips of my life.
Sometimes fiction that has been happily rolling along suddenly screeches to a halt only to hit you with a depressing twist to prove its literary merit. I hardly dared believe this book would not have an ambivalent ending and steeled myself against one of those “better to have loved and lost” scenarios by authors enamoured of the bittersweetness of nostalgia. What a thrill to discover that the romantic tone of the book stayed true to itself throughout.
Romance fans should be aware that this is romantic fiction and so some conventions that are taboo in the former genre appear here. Again I refer you to Cyrano. But for those who enjoy casting their romantic nets wide, “The Food Of Love” is an unabashedly feel-good tale. A treat in every sense of the word.
Excerpt (Time Warner Books hardcover, 2004, pages 74-5):
“Bruno walked back into the sunshine, which was turning redder now that the sun was low in the sky, and wandered down the shoreline to where Gennaro’s old van was parked. He had lit the fire before going to buy the fish; a plume of glassy smoke crackled from the firepit. The others were still in the sea. He stood for a moment, gazing at Laura, her sleek figure outlined in a wetsuit as she clambered over the waves with her board. As he watched he saw her put an arm around Tommaso and pull him towards her for a kiss. Bruno flinched, and turned his attention back to the meal.
This is for Laura, he told himself. From me to her, even if she never knows it.
He spread a tarpaulin, found a stone to use as a chopping board and set to work. He had brought garlic, courgettes, fennel, and potatoes with him from Rome, and now he busied himself peeling and chopping. After a few moments his mind went blank and he drifted into the semi-automatic trance that cooking always seemed to induce in him, looking up only when the long shadows of the others fell across what he was doing.
‘Ah, Tommaso, you’re here. It’s nearly ready for you to start cooking,’ he said respectfully.
Laura squatted down next to Bruno to look at his haul. ‘It’s all so beautiful,’ she breathed, picking up a clam shell in which red shaded through to orange, like a sunset.
Bruno glanced at her hair; wet, tangled from the sea and crusted with salt. Her face, too, was daubed with apache-streaks of dried salt under each eye, and the cold of the water had raised the skin of her neck into little bumps where it was exposed above her wetsuit, like the tiny noodles on a sea-urchin. He closed his eyes and inhaled. Just for a moment, he could taste her – her skin rinsed with seawater, the salt in her hair…
‘You haven’t washed the squid properly, Bruno,’ Tommaso said, tossing the shapeless polyp into his lap.”
