Recipes

Recipes for food that can be served at book club meetings for Love in the Time of Cholera

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

At four o'clock, after drinking a large glass of lemonade with ice, he left to call on his patients. 

They had a friendship difficult to understand because of the difference in their ages, for they might have been grandfathèr and grandson, but they got along at work as well as they did in the taverns around the port, which were frequented by everyone out for the evening regardless of social class, from drunken beggars to young gentlemen in tuxedos who fled the gala parties at the Social Club to eat fried mullet and coconut rice.

Lotario Thugut was in the habit of going there after the last shift at the telegraph office, and dawn often found him drinking Jamaican punch and playing the accordion with the crews of madmen from the Antillean schooners.

... his courage revived when he invited him to have a glass of anisette.

  

The visitors slept wherever they happened to be at nightfall, and they ate whenever they happened to be hungry, for these were houses with open doors, where there was always a hammock hanging and a three-meat stew simmering on the stove in case guests arrived before the telegram announcing their arrival, as was always the case.

She got up very early, intrigued by the enigma of the dream, and she found her father drinking mountain coffee with brandy in the captain’s bar ...

The very night of their return, while they were having hot chocolate and crullers at the large kitchen table, her father delegated to her the authority to run the house, and he did so with as much formality as if it were a sacred rite.

She sampled an Alicante sausage that tasted of licorice, and she bought two for Saturday's breakfast, as well as some slices of cod and a jar of red currants in aguardiente.

She was awakened from the spell by a good-natured black woman with a colored cloth around her head who was round and handsome and offered her a triangle of pineapple speared on the tip of a butcher's knife.

Three more letters arrived with the last rains in October, the first of the accompanied by a little box of violet pastilles from Flavigny Abbey.  

He brought him for lunch.  He also brought a demijohn of homemade aguardiente and ingredients of the highest quality for an epic sancocho,  

the kind that was possible only with chickens from the patio, 

meat with tender bones, rubbish-heap pork, 

and greens and vegetables from the town along the river.

Florentino Ariza was heartbroken, and beginning on Ash Wednesday he would walk down 

Divine Shepherdess Street with a box of 

English chocolates for her.  

When she issued her first invitations to five o'clock tea, with little imperial cakes and candied flowers, in accordance with recent English fashion, Dona Blanca objected to serving remedies for sweating out a fever in her house instead of chocolate with aged cheese and rounded loaves of cassava bread.

                                                                                                

Alone with the feeling of always being in someone else's house came two even greater misfortunes.  One was the almost daily diet of eggplant in all its forms ...                                                                                             

She remembered the taste of the guavas, which had never been the same again, the warning thunder, which had been so intense that its sound was confused with the sound of rain, the topaz afternoons in San Juan del Cesar when she would go walking with her court of excited cousins and clench her teeth so that her heart would not leap out of her mouth as they approached the telegraph office.

He took her to the American Ice Cream Shop, filled at this hour with parents eating ice cream with their children under the long blades of the fans that hung from the smooth ceiling.  America Vicuña ordered an enormous glass filled with layers of ice cream, each a different color, her favorite dish and the one that was the most popular because it gave off an aura of magic.