A Recipe for Colette's Seduction

Of all things, it's for sardines

Hi everybody! Sorry this is coming now instead of Saturday. Substack needed to fix a glitch in my subscription list. This story is part of Colette’s Feast. You might want to go back and read that first.

Colette, about the time she wrote Break of Day. Credit: The Guardian

Of all the voluptuous delights the great French writer Colette reveled in during her long life, the pleasure of cooking was not among them. Yet food and drink always played an integral part in her stories, advancing the plot and deepening her probe into her character’s heart.

I would never have made either a good cook or a good wife—Colette, Break of Day

Choosing a recipe from the post Colette’s Feast proved hard. It was based on her semi-memoir, Break of Day, about seizing the powers inherited in becoming an old woman. Throughout, she tells of many dishes she enjoyed and served to her guests, but none are described in full. And another difficulty: The book takes place at her house in Provence during the languor of a long hot summer. This means her table is graced with only the ripe abundance from the surrounding farms and the sea—freshly picked green melons, tomatoes and greens, figs pulled from the tree overhanging her garden terrace, chicken slowly grilled over olive tree wood, oysters.

It would have been simple to give a recipe for the chicken but then Colette wrote that, by the time it was served, she couldn’t eat it. She recalled how early that morning she had watched it bob and weave among her flower beds. In the afternoon, its alarmed clucks as her cook captured it echoed through the room where she sat trying to write. Now it laid on the platter before her, defeathered, bled, its backbone cracked so that it would lay flat on the grill. Colette announced to her guests that she would become a vegetarian: By the evidence of her writings that followed Break of Day, her vow did not take hold.

Colette’s house, La treille muscate, with her table set under the wisteria. Credit: Manon 21

A plate of stuffed sardines presented to a young man after they had bathed naked in the sea together seemed to be the only dish left for me to reconstruct. If she was, indeed, a cook, her characteristic lush description of it would reveal its taste and scent. But, as she said, she was not a cook, nor a wife; only a lover. The most important part the sardines’ preparation was the role they would play in enticing the young man to come home with her.

This left me with the chore of searching for a suitable Provençal recipe, and I found none. Instead, I have settled on the one below from A Mediterranean Feast, written by Clifford A. Wright. The book is a lavish masterwork on how Mediterranean cooking developed through the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance and is thick with good stories and recipes. This one originated in Sicily, but I’m almost positive Colette would approve of how its rich flavors would increase her gratification of a sun-dappled day.

Fresh Sardines with Anchovy Butter and White Wine

1 3/4 to 2 pounds fresh sardines (12 to 18)

10 tablespoons (1 1/4 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature

Salted anchovy fillets, rinsed

Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1 cup dry white wine

Cut off the heads of the sardines and gut them while you separate the fillets down to the backbone under running water. Open each sardine with your thumbs, laying it flat in your hand or on a countertop, belly side up. Find the end of the backbone nearest the head. Carefully pull it up and toward you, making sure you don’t rip the flesh or separate the two fillets. This sounds much more difficult than it is. You should be able to get the hang of it after two or three fish, and once you do, you can whiz right through the two pounds.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter a baking pan with 2 tablespoons of the butter. Mash another 4 tablespoons of the butter together with the anchovies. Rinse the sardines and pat dry each one with paper towels. Lay the sardines open flat with the skin side down in the baking pan and spread a small amount of anchovy butter equally on all the fish. Find a matching-size sardine and lay it on top of the bottom sardine, skin side up. Press down carefully. Sliver the remaining 4 tablespoons of butter and sprinkle around on top of the sardines.

Sprinkle a little salt and pepper over the fish, pour in the wine, and cover loosely with a sheet of aluminum foil. Bake until all the butter is melted and bubbling, about 20 minutes, and serve.

Makes 4 servings.

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