Pablo Neruda is a famous poet who loves to write about gastronomy, or food. His work that we displayed here was chosen based on our visit to Alto Cinco - our most memorable foods and tastes are reflected in the specific works on this page.
Ode to Salt
This salt
in the salt cellar I once saw in the salt mines. I know you won't believe me but it sings salt sings, the skin of the salt mines sings with a mouth smothered by the earth. I shivered in those solitudes when I heard the voice of the salt in the desert. Near Antofagasta the nitrous pampa resounds: a broken voice, a mournful song. In its caves the salt moans, mountain of buried light, translucent cathedral, crystal of the sea, oblivion of the waves. And then on every table in the world, salt, we see your piquant powder sprinkling vital light upon our food. Preserver of the ancient holds of ships, discoverer on the high seas, earliest sailor of the unknown, shifting byways of the foam. Dust of the sea, in you the tongue receives a kiss from ocean night: taste imparts to every seasoned dish your ocean essence; the smallest, miniature wave from the saltcellar reveals to us more than domestic whiteness; in it, we taste finitude. |
Ode to an Onion
Onion,
luminous flask, your beauty formed petal by petal, crystal scales expanded you and in the secrecy of the dark earth your belly grew round with dew. Under the earth the miracle happened and when your clumsy green stem appeared, and your leaves were born like swords in the garden, the earth heaped up her power showing your naked transparency, and as the remote sea in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite duplicating the magnolia, so did the earth make you, onion clear as a planet and destined to shine, constant constellation, round rose of water, upon the table of the poor. You make us cry without hurting us. I have praised everything that exists, but to me, onion, you are more beautiful than a bird of dazzling feathers, heavenly globe, platinum goblet, unmoving dance of the snowy anemone and the fragrance of the earth lives in your crystalline nature. |
Ode to Tomatoes
The street
filled with tomatoes, midday, summer, light is halved like a tomato, its juice runs through the streets. In December, unabated, the tomato invades the kitchen, it enters at lunchtime, takes its ease on countertops, among glasses, butter dishes, blue saltcellars. It sheds its own light, benign majesty. Unfortunately, we must murder it: the knife sinks into living flesh, red viscera a cool sun, profound, inexhaustible, populates the salads of Chile, happily, it is wed to the clear onion, and to celebrate the union we pour oil, essential child of the olive, onto its halved hemispheres, pepper adds its fragrance, salt, its magnetism; it is the wedding of the day, parsley hoists its flag, potatoes bubble vigorously, the aroma of the roast knocks at the door, it's time! come on! and, on the table, at the midpoint of summer, the tomato, star of earth, recurrent and fertile star, displays its convolutions, its canals, its remarkable amplitude and abundance, no pit, no husk, no leaves or thorns, the tomato offers its gift of fiery color and cool completeness. |
Ode to Wine
Day-colored wine,
night-colored wine, wine with purple feet or wine with topaz blood, wine, starry child of earth, wine, smooth as a golden sword, soft as lascivious velvet, wine, spiral-seashelled and full of wonder, amorous, marine; never has one goblet contained you, one song, one man, you are choral, gregarious, at the least, you must be shared. At times you feed on mortal memories; your wave carries us from tomb to tomb, stonecutter of icy sepulchers, and we weep transitory tears; your glorious spring dress is different, blood rises through the shoots, wind incites the day, nothing is left of your immutable soul. Wine stirs the spring, happiness bursts through the earth like a plant, walls crumble, and rocky cliffs, chasms close, as song is born. A jug of wine, and thou beside me in the wilderness, sang the ancient poet. Let the wine pitcher add to the kiss of love its own. My darling, suddenly the line of your hip becomes the brimming curve of the wine goblet, your breast is the grape cluster, your nipples are the grapes, the gleam of spirits lights your hair, and your navel is a chaste seal stamped on the vessel of your belly, your love an inexhaustible cascade of wine, light that illuminates my senses, the earthly splendor of life. But you are more than love, the fiery kiss, the heat of fire, more than the wine of life; you are the community of man, translucency, chorus of discipline, abundance of flowers. I like on the table, when we're speaking, the light of a bottle of intelligent wine. Drink it, and remember in every drop of gold, in every topaz glass, in every purple ladle, that autumn labored to fill the vessel with wine; and in the ritual of his office, let the simple man remember to think of the soil and of his duty, to propagate the canticle of the wine. |
Ode to Fried Potatoes
The world's joy
is spluttering, sizzling in olive oil. Potatoes to be fried enter the skillet, snowy wings of a morning swan – and they leave half-braised in gold, gift of the crackling amber of olives. Garlic embellishes the potato with its earthy perfume, and the pepper is pollen that has traveled beyond the reefs, and so, freshly dressed in a marbled suit, plates are filled with the echoes of potatoey abundance: delicious simplicity of the earth. Video: Ode to WineVideo: Ode to the Tomato
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Ode to Bread
Bread,
you rise from flour, water and fire. Dense or light, flattened or round, you duplicate the mother's rounded womb, and earth's twice-yearly swelling. How simple you are, bread, and how profound! You line up on the baker's powdered trays like silverware or plates or pieces of paper and suddenly life washes over you, there's the joining of seed and fire, and you're growing, growing all at once like hips, mouths, breasts, mounds of earth, or people's lives. The temperature rises, you're overwhelmed by fullness, the roar of fertility, and suddenly your golden color is fixed. And when your little wombs were seeded, a brown scar laid its burn the length of your two halves' toasted juncture. Now, whole, you are mankind's energy, a miracle often admired, the will to live itself. O bread familiar to every mouth, we will not kneel before you: men do no implore unclear gods or obscure angels: we will make our own bread out of sea and soil, we will plant wheat on our earth and the planets, bread for every mouth, for every person, our daily bread. Because we plant its seed and grow it not for one man but for all, there will be enough: there will be bread for all the peoples of the earth. And we will also share with one another whatever has the shape and the flavor of bread: the earth itself, beauty and love-- all taste like bread and have its shape, the germination of wheat. Everything exists to be shared, to be freely given, to multiply. This is why, bread, if you flee from mankind's houses, if they hide you away or deny you, if the greedy man pimps for you or the rich man takes you over, if the wheat does not yearn for the furrow and the soil: then, bread, we will refuse to pray: bread we will refuse to beg. We will fight for you instead, side by side with the others, with everyone who knows hunger. We will go after you in every river and in the air. We will divide the entire earth among ourselves so that you may germinate, and the earth will go forward with us: water, fire, and mankind fighting at our side. Crowned with sheafs of wheat, we will win earth and bread for everyone. Then life itself will have the shape of bread, deep and simple, immeasurable and pure. Every living thing will have its share of soil and life, and the bread we eat each morning, everyone's daily bread, will be hallowed and sacred, because it will have been won by the longest and costliest of human struggles. This earthly Victory does not have wings: she wears bread on her shoulders instead. Courageously she soars, setting the world free, like a baker born aloft on the wind. |